The road rises over a promontory (14.1) formed by the resistant Deerfield lava sheet (see p. 26) and then descends to the river floodplain and meander-cut terraces (see p. 22), which cross to the east side of the highway and continue south beyond Sunderland (15.5). In Sunderland junction is made with the longer tour through Amherst (see p. 98), and the return to Greenfield may be made by that route (25.4). Trips from Springfield In the vicinity of Springfield the most interesting drives are to be found on the west side of the Connecticut River, for the comparatively flat land east of the river is thickly settled and heavily industrialized, and geological phenomena are effectively masked. The country to the west offers a display of features which may be traced to the activities of the river, to the former presence of glacial Lake Springfield, to the prolonged erosion of the Triassic bedrock, and to the resistance of the pre-Triassic rocks in the western highland. Almost any trip will include this entire suite of geological phenomena. The distances which are given in the following tours have been taken from the west side of the North End Bridge. _Springfield, Holyoke, Easthampton, and Westfield_ This route follows north on the floodplain along the river bank via Federal Highway 5, and the heavy retaining wall is designed to keep the river out. The sand promontory which comes to the left side of the road (0.6) is a remnant of the old lake—bottom deposits. Past the junction with the road through West Springfield (0.8), the highway utilizes the old lake beds, which form a terrace above the present floodplain; but ultimately (1.6) it drops again to the floodplain level, with its many abandoned channels, although it discreetly stays on one of the higher, and older, meander-cut terraces. A cut-off to Chicopee turns right (2.4), but Federal Highway 5 continues north across the meander terraces to the forks (4.6) which lead to the residential (left) and business (right) sections of Holyoke. Here the main highway climbs steeply from the floodplain to the top of the lake deposits. The view north shows the Holyoke Range rising above the roofs and chimneys of Holyoke. Lake deposits form a broad flat between the Triassic volcanic ridges which lie to the west and the trench cut by the Connecticut River.