THE CATSKILLS GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Franklin Drain

We find ourselves, over and over in our columns, taking you to places that you have already been, perhaps many times. And then we point to something and ask the same questions: what is that?; why is that there?  Let’s do that again, today.  We would like it if, sometime soon, you drove east from Middleburgh on Rte. 145. In a mile or so you begin to go uphill and then you pass through a gap in the mountains, that’s Franklin Gap. See our first photo, taken from the top of Vroman’s Nose. That’s the gap out there, barely visible in the dead center, far distance. We point and ask what is that?; why is it there? 

There’s a good story out there but first let’s look down. That’s the bottom of the Schoharie Creek Valley below. What do you see? If you have been among our many long-time readers, then we are hoping that you see and then say the word – “flat.” Yep, the bottom of Schoharie Creek is broad and, more importantly, flat - from one side to the other. And we are also hoping that this image triggers the words “lake bottom.”  And, double yep, we are looking at the bottom of something that is called Lake Schoharie, or, better still, Glacial Lake Schoharie.     

When the two of us look down and travel off into the Ice Age past.  It’s all tundra out there. It’s cold, gray and cloudy. There is almost no real vegetation, anywhere. We stand there for years and then decades. Geologists can be very patient people. Finally, a glacier appears in the valley off to the far left. It slowly advances southward down the valley. The ice swells up and rises towards us and then passes over us. All becomes dark - actually black - for centuries. We stand there – patiently. 

Then something catches our attention and we look up.  A little bit of dim light has appeared above us, and we see that the climate has warmed and the ice is melting away and thinning. The glacier is disappearing – retreating off to the north, and the valley should be opening up behind it. But it is not; it has been filled with water; we call it, logically enough, meltwater. The water has to go somewhere, after all it has to flow into the Atlantic. There is a small break in the eastern wall of rock and meltwater starts to flow down through it. The currents are fast, powerful and erosive. They quickly begin cutting a gap. It soon deepens and widens to accommodate all that water. Millennia later, geologists will climb Vroman’s Nose, look east and see all of this in their mind’s eyes. They will call this the “Franklin Drain.” Now you can do the same.

That’s not the end. Vast quantities of raging, foaming, thundering waters pound down Catskill Creek, along where Rte. 145 is today. It carves that substantial canyon; it creates that creek. 

How many times have you driven this way? Will that drive ever be the same?

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page ‘The Catskill geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”