Dunderberg Mountain, New York, USA
(c) 2006 Andrew Alden, licensed to About.com (fair use policy)
Dunderberg Mountain lies across the Hudson River from Peekskill. Dunderberg is an old Dutch name meaning thunder mountain, and indeed the summer thunderstorms of the Hudson Highlands magnify their booms off the stern rock faces of these ancient eminences. The mountain chain is a welt of Precambrian gneiss and granite first folded in the Grenville orogeny starting 800 million years ago, and again in the Taconic orogeny in the Ordovician (500-450 million years ago). These mountain-building events marked the beginning and the end of the Iapetus Ocean, which opened and closed where today's Atlantic Ocean lies.
In 1890, an entrepreneur set out to build an inclined railway to Dunderberg's top, where riders could view the Hudson Highlands and, on a good day, Manhattan. A 15-mile downhill train ride would begin from there on a winding track all over the mountain. He put in about a million dollars of work, then quit. Now Dunderberg Mountain is in Bear Mountain State Park, and the half-finished railbeds are covered with forest.
