If It's Wednesday This Must Be Vermont
Wednesday July 23, 2008
I had ambitious plans for today, the heart of my trip. But yesterday involved so much driving and so little time "on site," I decided to give Vermont the bulk of my day. Even then, I could only schedule five or six places to stop from the Roadside Guide. And two of those were missing, by which I mean the book described them, but I couldn't find them. That's just as well because what I saw took plenty of time, and there was at least one impromptu stop.
Anyway, they say (or they should, since I'm not sure they do) that you aren't having a good enough time in the field if you don't bark a shin, pull a few muscles and step in something you didn't mean to. Also if you don't find a righteous roadstand. Check, check, check and check. And then you need to talk about it over dinner. That's coming up in a bit.
Vermont was very cloudy today, with intermittent rain. That's no problem, but I felt that even though I was getting to know it in one sense, Vermont was not ready to unveil itself to me in full today. But Vermont is still beautiful.
Comments
As a former Vermont geologist, I want to know - where did you go? If I were to choose five or six places to visit in Vermont, they would be… hmmm. 1) The Champlain Thrust north of Burlington, though it requires permission from the Episcopal Church or a boat. 2) The Ordovician reef from Isle La Motte. 3) Rolf Stanley’s “I-beam” outcrop, some small-scale duplexed thrusts in limestone, in a roadcut on the way to the Isle La Motte quarries. 4) The fold in the Taconics that Ron took a gigapan image. 5) One of the “verde antique marble” (= serpentinite) quarries, to represent the oceanic material that ran over Vermont during the Taconian orogeny. And 6) probably the big roadcut of Gassetts Schist, because it’s a sparkly rock, and if you’re in metamorphic rocks, you need some sparkle.
Would love to see pictures when you get the time.
Kim, I didn’t see any of those things, just some roadcuts and stuff. Probably the coolest for a geologist was the serpentinite exposure near East Dover. But I saw so much you can’t photograph, like the lay of the land, how it changes as the bedrock changes. Two things made me say “wow” as I drove, the right turn on Route 4 east of Killington as the road enters a narrow U-shaped valley, and seeing Quechee Gorge as I crossed the bridge near White River Junction.