The flow of time in the Connecticut valley : $b geological imprintsBain, George W. (George William)
Science
The flow of time in the Connecticut valley : $b geological imprints
Bain, George W. (George William)
Geology -- Connecticut River Valley
North of the dinosaur tracks, road, railroad and river run parallel.
Lateral roads are few, but there is a gateway (40.2) into the Mount Tom
Reservation. The Granby tuff, which has outcropped persistently on the
west side of the road, rises to a high bluff and then passes eastward
beneath the river (40.6). The underlying second lava replaces it in the
road cuts and is especially conspicuous along the railroad (40.9). The
next dark gray bluff west of the road (41.4 to 41.6) is part of the
Holyoke flow which caps the Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke ranges (see pp.
26-27). Soon it, too, crosses the river to Titan’s Pier (pp. 60-61), and
old residents say that a ledge of it outcropped in the river bed at low
water before the Holyoke dam raised the water level. Directly ahead,
southward-dipping beds of conglomerate outcrop on either side of the
road (41.0); these beds underlie the lava forming the gentle southern
slopes of the ranges, and their position beneath the trap can be seen
plainly on the steep northern slopes.
The road through the Mount Tom Reservation rejoins the highway (42.2)
just south of the outlet from the Oxbow Lake (42.3), the upper end of
which also loops ’round and abuts against the highway (42.7). (See
p. 3.) Annual floods inundate most of this section, and even the
banked-up road and railroad periodically go under the swirling waters of
the swollen river. A sign (43.5) announces that the roadway was 13.5
feet below water at the height of the 1936 flood, but it is hoped that
the new dike at the southern limit of Northampton will hereafter turn
the floods away from the lower sections of the city. Federal Highway 5
bears right (44.0), and the road ahead continues into the Berkshire
Trail. Of passing interest is the fact that a well drilled near this
junction penetrated 3,700 feet of Triassic arkose without reaching the
crystalline rock floor. The road crosses the unused bed of Mill River
(44.2) and comes once again to the Court House corner in Northampton
(44.6).
_Belchertown, Amherst, and Northampton_
In our first tour we noted that a road (Route 9) turns right to Amherst
at the south end of the Daniel Shays Highway (21.1), and if we will
return to this junction, it will be worth our while to make the Amherst
run. Just beyond the intersection the highway traverses the level gravel
plain of a nice margin lake (see p. 7) before it descends (22.0) toward
the Lake Hadley plain. Erratic boulders and stone fences are abundant on
the slope, and the bedrock is part of the pre-Triassic complex. One very
interesting pegmatite contains inclusions of contorted schist (23.2).
The road soon leaves the rocky slopes for the gravel plain of Lake
Hadley, but only a short distance northward and westward lie the
Belchertown Ponds, which seem to occupy a large and deep kettle hole
area (see pp. 7-8).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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