there is no way to picture it, but for 180 degrees of my view i can see more than 100 miles
may 22
day 13
20 miles
total 327
the day started great
little traffic
100 mile views from the top of the mountain.
then the rain started
it would be with me the rest of the day .
back to back “short “ days have me feeling physically pretty good.
my worst injuries still came during my rest stops.
the hip i banged into a bedpost the first night was not sore for the first time.
and my bad toe that i stubbed into a sofa leg a few days ago is back to its normal level of discomfort.
but the cold seeped through to my bones and i have not gotten warm yet.
struggling to get my shoes dry
and figure out what to do with all these wet clothes.
crewman anatoly found an injured turkey
and we had to pause for a rescue.
tomorrow i will get back to serious business, aiming for 30.
the geology of the journey has been so much fun.
starting in newport with all the glacial dump where the last ice sheet reached the ocean, mixed with bedrock.
i think aquidneck island is basically a pile of debris left at the end of the glaciers.
across massachusetts it was madly tilted beds of rock, knocked akimbo by continental collisions.
granites and shales,
limestones, sandstones,
and even what looked to my untrained eye to be lava beds all jumbled together by aeons of tectonic madness.
in western massachusetts, the berkshires were great wrinkles and folds of granite that i imagined being shoved up by the immense forces created by the mayhem along the coast.
it was after i crossed the last gigantic wrinkle of the taconic
a monstrous straight line wall of rock where lateral forces had created a single crack and shoved it a thousand feet in the air as the sides pressed together.
following a long descent to the hudson river at albany
where i saw my first horizontal rock layers
( i thought they happened by chance)
i climbed gradually to the first major climb of the catskills
going up this i realized i was in an unexpected geological feature.
it was all horizontal limestone
just like middle tennessee.
from the top i could look back 50 miles across the hudson river valley to the long line of the taconic mountain.
it still extended out of sight
both north and south.
since then i have been traveling across the eroded remnants of a massive plains that have risen from what once was sea floor.
millions of years of erosion have left wide and deep valleys with the rivers that carved them at the bottom separated by high mountains in between.
thus the treat of standing at the top of one and looking across to the dim line of the one i will reach at the end of a long day.
maybe the coolest thing to see along the way are the oddly smooth hunks of granite found lying here and there where they clearly do not belong.
gifts of the glaciers that carried them down from canada.
i have to wonder just how long these mountains will last
and what will be the story of the land that comes next?
laz