Collecting Rocks in the Appalachian Mountains (Part 4)

Charles and I had three full days left before having to return our beloved Chevy Cobalt to the rental car agency at the Baltimore Airport, but we still had a lot of ground to cover. We were mostly done with collecting samples for him, so the days were mostly mine. Tensions were still riding high as we moved into the Susquehanna River Basin in Pennsylvania, but luckily my sampling sites would not be too far from the road and we could literally park, walk to the rock, chisel off some pieces of it, and get back into the car. I think it also helped that Charles had collected most of the samples he wanted to get, so he was no longer worried about missing any of his sampling sites.

We started driving around Tuscarora State forest, just east of State College, PA. Our first site was on a great little trail (Rim Trail) which led us down into a cool, damp hemlock forest. Not knowing what type of rocks we'd find, we took anything that could possibly turn out good results for my research. Our next stops in the Forest were the Round Top Trail, just up the road from the Rim Trail, and the Pine Ridge Trail, an open forest setting in a valley between low-lying hills.. If you live in Pennsylvania and ever need a place to go commune with nature and get away from things, the state forests are amazing! Many of the roads are washboard dirt roads so traffic is never too heavy meaning you probably won't run into too many other hikers. Unfortunately, I do not have any scenic photos of these places worth sharing...

This region of the Appalachian Mountains is known as the Valley and Ridge Province and gets its namesake from bands of narrow ridgelines running parallel to narrow wooded valleys and wider farmland valleys. The area would make for a perfect Sunday afternoon drive! This part of Pennsylvania is also well known as being Amish country and Quaker-central, so things can kind of get religious. This worried me just a little as we were driving over one of the ridges and I saw some perfect rocks from which I could sample. The only problem is that the location was called Prayer Rocks and a little shrine was situated near them where people could come and offer prayers and thoughts to God. I took the rocks anyway, but we got out of there quickly in case what we were doing was considered sacrilege.

Looking east over the PA farmlands from Prayer Rock

Sample site at Prayer Rock, PA

Rothrock State Forest proved to be less fruitful and as evening set in our stomachs started gurgling. We drove into State College, where we met up with one of our former classmates, Shay, and her husband. We parked at their apartment and they took us downtown. Zeno's Pub was the place to be and for something like $3 each, we got a basket heaping with the best BBQ pulled-pork sandwich, a pile of delicious french fries, and a pint of beer. To make things better, in the corner was a fantastic live Bluegrass band. After downing a few beers, we headed to the Meyer Dairy Store where you get homemade ice cream, shakes, and sundaes. And since you're in Pennsylvania, you know the milk is probably coming from right out back. Not only was the ice cream some of the creamiest and best-tasting ever, but the ice-cream-to-cost ratio has to to be the highest anywhere!

Shay's apartment was small and stuffed with bicycles, so Charles and I camped outside of town. The next morning we moved up onto the Appalachian Plateau, a relatively flat, featureless landscape where we collected some rocks from the hidden locations of Turtle Rocks and Panther Rocks in Moshannon State forest. The rocks we found here were pretty boring themselves, but the way that they stuck out from the rest of the flat land makes them the most dominant and imposing things around! In fact, we parked the car looking for Panther Rocks and almost missed them in the underbrush. Turns out, we were walking on top of them and their bases were actually a good twenty feet below us! Very cool place to get out and explore for a little bit.

Turtle Rocks in Moshannon State Forest, PA

Panther Rocks in Moshannon State Forest

Panther Rocks

Trillium at Panther Rocks

The day was not over and we made the long drive over to Duncannon, PA, where we collected some samples from a section of the Appalachian Trail. We had seen numerous millipedes on our hikes, but in Duncannon, the bugs were everywhere! I don't know why they were drawn to the openness of the trail; they would probably live longer if they stayed in the brush off on the side!

Duncannon, PA and the Susquehanna River as seen from the Appalachian Trail

The day pressed on and we moved down to the Michaux State Forest and after whacking some rock off of an outcrop in someone's backyard, we quickly hiked the Pole Steeple Trail and got some rocks from there, too.

Rocks at Pole Steeple in Michaux State Forest

Pole Steeple, Michaux State Forest

Pole Steeple

As we headed into Gettysburg for dinner at the Plaza Restaurant and Lounge, I looked down at the gas meter and noticed we were below empty and miles outside of town! We hadn't filled up in a while and needed to get to town, but every single gas station we passed was closed (must have been a Sunday?). We ended up slowly chugging up hills so as not to waste any gas and putting the car in neutral on the way down and coasted as far as we could get before putting the Cobalt back in gear. As the last droplets of gasoline were burned off, we rolled into a gas station minutes before it closed and filled up. I have never, in my life, been so worried that I would run out of gas! Gettysburg is a great historic town and I visited there twice before on family vacations when I was younger. As we drove into town, we passed some of the monuments and memorials in the National Military Park and though I desperately wanted to visit again, I even more desperately wanted to eat.

We had one more full day in the field and as we drove to my final sampling site we took a few detours along the way for Charles to retrieve a few last samples in Maryland. One of his sites was in the rolling hills between Emmitsburg and Taneytown, Maryland. Once again, I was amazed at the rolling, forested hills, dissected by small rivers. The road we were on just wound between these hills, past little family cottages, following various rivers. I really can't get over how nice this part of the country is. It seems to be so unexplored but so settled and peaceful. Definitely a place I could see city people wanting a country home. Some of Charles's other sites were in more open farmlands and since he didn't really need much help from me here, I made friends with the locals.

This idiot cow had its head soo far under the barbed wire just to get a little piece of dandelion...

Finally, we made it to Rocks State Park in Maryland - a seemingly perfect place in the lower Susquehanna River basin for us to end our sampling mission. It was at this site they filmed parts of the movie, "Tuck Everlasting," but I never saw that film so I didn't recognize anything.

Rocks State Park, Maryland

Rocks State Park

Our flight left the next morning so we drove from the state park to the nearest car wash where we cleaned out our little Cobalt as best we could and booked a room at a hotel just outside the airport. The next morning we first stopped at FedEx and made our third shipment of rocks and bags of sand back to Vermont. Each time we sent samples back, the staff at the FedEx centers always got a kick over the fact we wanted to mail five-gallon paint buckets and small coolers filled with sand and rock and duct-taped over and over and over. So with our last shipment sent, we brought the car over to the rental agency, and bussed over to the airport.

Traveling for work can be stressful at times, especially doing field work in a small group, but when all was said and done, Charles and I had a great time in the field and came back with some good stories and memories of terrible sampling sites. Oh! And as it turns out, over the course of two weeks, we kept to our budget! In fact, we came back with $4.75 in change! The Appalachian Mountains are beautiful and a pristine wilderness, a hard thing to come by in the eastern United States. No matter where you are on the East Coast, you're never far from them, and sometimes you just need a break from life, and there is not a better place to wander and explore than these mountains!

Collecting Rocks in the Appalachian Mountains (Part 3)

Most of the time when I travel, I am with friends or family, or people I get along with really well. Traveling for work is a different story as there is a goal to complete and it must be done on time and budget. I noticed that tensions were mounting while we hiked to sampling sites near Wolf Notch in the George Washington National Forest after camping out during a torrential rain storm. They got even worse at Lost River State Park in West Virginia (a beautiful park!). The peak of this heightened tension happened climax at one of the most beautiful sites we visited: Seneca Rocks, West Virginia.

Seneca Rocks is right in the middle of the Monongahela National Forest and is a giant slab of hard quartz sandstone jutting up from the otherwise rounded hillside. It is a climbers mecca, though it has its own storied history of disastrous climbing attempts. We got to Seneca Rocks in the late afternoon and decided to collect a few samples from the top of the sandstone ridge.

At the base of the trail going up to Seneca Rocks, WV

At the top of the ridge, collecting samples.

I try not to be a snob when I'm outdoors enjoying the natural world, but sometimes I see other people on the trail who just ruin the experience for me, and I wish they had just stayed at home. On the way up the trail, we passed a family of four, who I could not for the life of me figure out what their motivation for being there was at all! The mother was chain smoking and cussing up a storm, telling her severely overweight husband to keep their two kids under control. He was sweating up a storm and to refresh himself, he stopped and cracked open a cold Mountain Dew, which quickly got his kids' attention and they got their own cans, guzzled them down, and bounced around the trail, screaming more loudly than before, thus making the mother mutter even more profanities under her breath. Needless to say, we passed this family quickly in order to enjoy even just a few minutes of silence at the top to enjoy the view of the surrounding valleys. I feel conflicted when thinking about these types of encounters. When I see people smoking on a hiking trail, "hydrating" with Mountain Dew, and kids playing WWE while stomping on delicate vegetation I can never decide whether I should be glad that they are taking a break from their otherwise sedentary lifestyle or angry that they are not really appreciating their surroundings. I usually give them the benefit of the doubt and am glad, but these people had no sense of how to behave on the trail and I was just absolutely angry with them, especially when I picked up a few pieces of candy bar wrappers on my way back down the trail...

The town of Seneca Rocks from the top of Seneca Rocks

North Branch of the Potomac River meandering past Seneca Rocks

Charles and I found a nice wide open campsite just south of Seneca Rocks for the night and the next morning we collected a few samples for him and continued north just a little bit to collect some more rocks from the opposite end of the mountain ridge from Seneca Rocks. Chimney Rocks became one of my favorite sampling sites we visited. The large square pillars of stone rose up from the landscape above the treeline providing spectacular views. It really was the perfect day for hiking. It was not hot, but we were comfortable in shorts and tees. It was on this hike that Charles and I had it out about what was bothering us about the trip thus far. I felt bad because I remember thinking that I had never been in a more picturesque location with more perfect weather for what we were doing and all he could think about was the budget. I knew there was nothing I could do except let him vent his frustrations, and while he hiked back to the car in what I thought at the time to be a record descent-time from the mountain, I took my time, enjoying the warm breeze, chirping birds, and kept my eyes out for other signs of wildlife.

Chimney Rocks, West Virginia

 

Sampling rocks hundreds of feet above the valley at Chimney Rocks

Definitely some of my more scenic sampling sites!

The budget pretenses my classmate, Charles, and I thought we were under created a scenario for a few days in the middle of our field season where we did not really talk to each other. For me, I didn't see our budget as being an issue. So we carried on to the western pan handle of Maryland.

Maryland is a state of extremes and the pan handle could not be any more different than the peaceful woodlands south of DC. The small towns along the Potomac River were industry towns based around mining and logging. What was even more different was crossing back over into West Virginia for a few of Charles samples. Though the Maryland towns seemed to be run down and sooty, at least they were inhabited. The minute you cross back into West Virginia, the towns were empty, windows were boarded up, and plants of all sorts were growing out of empty windows and door frames. Nowhere was this more evident than the towns of Westernport, MD and Keyser, WV. It seemed like most of the industry jobs were in West Virginia but the employees were mostly living in Maryland. So while Westernport had fast food restaurants and stores, Keyser had been abandoned. Though left behind to decay through years of uselessness, I imagine an artistic photographer, antique collector, or an urban explorer would have a field day. There was a sort of spell cast on some of these architecturally stunning buildings with ornate wood trim, stone foundations, and brickwork that made me want to stay - or at least wish that a group of affluent city folk would see what I saw and fix up the storefronts, creating a little Appalachian tourist town. It definitely has the potential; all it needs is the care and will.

Soon, we were done collecting samples from the Potomac River Basin. Charles had gotten all that he needed and I could not find any more suitable rock outcrops to chip bits off from. We camped out one more night in Maryland before heading up to Pennsylvania where I had a handful more sites from which I wanted to collect samples.

Collecting Rocks in the Appalachian Mountains (Part 1)

Presently, I am sitting in front of my computer waiting for some data processing to finish in ArcGIS (a geospatial mapping software package) and going over edits to a paper manuscript I am getting ready to submit for publication. The paper is essentially Part II of my Masters Thesis which I finished this past January at the University of Vermont. My project was fairly simple in scope: determine the erosion rate for bedrock outcrops in the central Appalachian Mountains. Turns out they are slowly eroding away at only a few millimeters per thousand years, so don't worry - the ground will not just drop out from under your feet!

We use various chemical procedures to extract a form of the element, beryllium, from rocks and since the rocks we needed were in the Appalachian Mountains, someone had to go get them. This someone happened to be me!

Two summers ago (2009), my classmate, Charles, and I spent two weeks traipsing around the central Appalachians hiking up mountains and collecting rocks from the uppermost parts of rock outcrops. Charles was doing field work in that region as well, so we also spent time collecting sand from streams and rivers for his research.

We touched down at BWI with our advisor, got our rental car (a nice little Chevy Colbalt) and were off! The first place we went was to Harpers Ferry National Historical Park at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. We hiked up to a small segment of the Appalachian Trail and got our first few samples (NOTE: I have documented permission from the NPS staff at Harpers Ferry to collect samples. In this and any other State and National Park, the removal of any material is prohibited and in many cases a federal offense!). My advisor showed me what kind of rock outcrops I wanted to sample, how some were better than others, and how to get the sample.

Harpers Ferry is a quaint little town with a storied history seeped in trade, bloody battles, and industry. Many American Civil War battles were fought here and some of the trenches dug out by the soldiers and battlements are still visible.

Civil War battlements on the Maryland Heights side of the Potomac at Harpers Ferry NHP.

Civil War battlements preserved on the Loudoun Heights side of the Potomac at Harpers Ferry NHP.

Civil War battle trenches preserved on the Loudoun Heights side of the Potomac at Harpers Ferry NHP

Our advisor was only with us for a few days and so the next day we moved further north to Maryland. It was mid-May and Spring had come to the central Appalachians. Fortunately for us that meant the hiking would be beautiful! Unfortunately for me it meant learning the hard way that I have allergies... The first hike of that day was in Cunningham Falls State Park and it was a long, sunny walk through a dogwood forest. The trees had just begun to bloom and except for my constant sneezing, it was perfect.

Dogwoods in bloom in Cunningham Falls State Park, MD

More pollen-producing sneeze machines

The nice thing about this time of year was that the wildlife was also just starting to come alive. In Cunningham Falls SP, we came across many animals we would frequently run into during the two weeks following. But only here at our sampling site did we see a snake, sunning itself in the hollow of a tree!

Red spotted newt (it's about 2 inches long!)

These millipedes were everywhere, all over the hiking trails

The only snake we saw!

With four new samples collected, we went up to Catoctin Mountain Park, a unit of the National Park Service in Maryland. I had never really heard much about Catoctin before, other than Camp David - the Presidential Retreat - is nearby. I was pretty astounded with the size and grandeur of this small little Appalachian Park and though we only had a little bit of time there, I plan on going back and exploring more of it!

Rock formations in Catoctin Mountain Park

My classmate exploring the rocks at Catoctin

My advisor had to get to his folks' house that evening in Baltimare, so Charles and I drove him back to the city and then we parked downtown and got a delicious seafood dinner at Eat Bertha's Mussels in Baltimore's back-bay. I was still in my picky-eating phase, so I stuck with fish 'n' chips while Charles opted to go for the restaurant's namesake - mussels. Charles and I spent the next few days collecting rocks again at Harpers Ferry NHP as well as in South Mountain State Park in Maryland.

Taking notes at a sampling site at Ravens Rock in South Mtn. SP

Then it was Charles's turn. We had an agreement that while I was collecting samples, I would navigate to the next sample site and he would drive and then our roles would be reversed when he was collecting samples. So the next few days I spent driving around the greater Washington DC area. While most of his sampling sites were out in the countryside, a good few of them were in suburban neighborhoods where we had to suspiciously cross private property to gain access to a creek to collect the sediment. Another good few of them were very near government properties like...Andrews Air Force Base or the Department of Agriculture's Research Facilities.

I'll be honest: I was nervous. We would leave our rental car at the end of some cul-de-sac, put on our muck boots, and go tromping through forested plots of land where I could all but help think about the number of dead bodies that may or may not have been dumped after unfortunate mob encounters or something fantastical like that. I became increasingly aware of Big Brother's presence everywhere around Washington DC. This feeling was most heightened around Andrews AFB (where Air Force 1 lives) and I could actually see the thin barbed-wire boundary just strung between trees with little tags that read, "WARNING: Government Property! Do not cross!" But this boundary was not always marked and my worst fear was that we would unknowingly step onto government property, be detained, and have to explain ourselves to intimidating officials, who wouldn't buy our "we're-grad-students-doing-research" story, and ship us down to Guantanamo Bay where we would be water-boarded and forced to bunk up with real terrorists. Luckily, my worst fears were unfounded and sampling in DC was complete without a hitch.

We left the DC area for the sandy flat-lands south of the City on the peninsula between the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. I could tell from driving around that this area was very seldom traveled by tourists but I was amazed at how beautiful the landscape was - and we were just a few hours from the city! It was mostly flat and sandy with towering shady pine trees. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought I was up in the woods near my family's cabin in northern Michigan!

Another day was spent crossing back over to the Alexandria side of Washington DC where we collected more stream sediment and tried collecting some more rock samples for my research, but nature thwarted us again, and in fear of being gassed out, we drove on.

Stupid gypsy moths...ruining my research!