Glacier-Carved Gorges Print this page

Many of Schuyler's picturesque hills are rock bound. The ice ages and subsequent centuries of weathering have contributed to the formation of numerous ravines and stone-bed streams, most of them rife with waterfalls and potholes formerly used as swimming spots.

Glaciers had a strong influence on the topography of the Finger Lakes region and the many gorges and lakes that exist here are just a few examples.

Four hundred million years ago, the most advanced creatures on the earth were jawed fish.  Ancient oceans held these vertebrates as the world entered a geological age known today as the Devonian.  Although changes were not doubt occuring on land, the Devonian is most noted for changes that happened in the ocean. 

The Finger Lakes region sat beneath shallow seas during the Devonian.  The gorge at Watkins Glen's history began on this Devonian sea floor, where the rock was first laid down as silt.  Floods on land carried sediments out to sea, where they were deposited in layer after layer on the bottom.  Who knows what unusual fish might have swam over that sea floor, but their fossils are rarely preserved in rocks nearby.  Instead, trilobites, crinoids, horn coral and clam like brachiopods dominate local fossils.

With time the Devonian sediments were gradually compressed into rock by subsequent strata deposited on top.  At the time of the dinosaurs, the rocks were probably beneath dry land but covered by many layers of later deposits.  Even the distant impact of an asteroid several miles around would have sent little more than a shudder through the rocks.
As modern mammals developed on the land, the Watkins Glen rocks were slowly working their way toward the surface. Mountain building forces from beneath had steadily pressed the land upward, leaving cracks and fault lines in the rock as monuments to the huge upheaval.  Strata up above had steadily been eroding away. 

For the past few hundred thousand years, essentially the same rocks have rested near the surface at the gorge, though the gorge itself is probably a little more than ten thousand years old.  During this recent time, leading up to the gorge's formation, some of the most unusual of the gorges history have occured.
Around one hundred thousand years ago, the summer climate in the northern hemisphere began to get cooler.  Farther north the winter snow would fall and fail to melt some summers.  When this happened, local temperatures fell as the white snow reflected more warming sunlight back to space.  Before long a cycle of cooling had taken hold.  From a center in Labrador where the first snows accumulated, glaciers advanced to the south.  Fed by moisture evaporated from warm ocean currents, the Labrador glaciers continued to expand.  By nineteen thousand years ago at the height of the ice age, the glaciers extended south fully to Pennsylvania.  Watkins Glen and the entire Finger Lakes region were covered with up to a mile of ice.  Winter snow accumulating farther north forced the ice itself to flow, dragging rocks and debris for hundreds of miles.  This glacial scouring carved "v" shaped river valleys into the wide "u" shaped valleys which now hold the Finger Lakes.

As the glaciers began their final retreat approximately twelve thousand years ago the Finger Lakes region was becoming uncovered again.  It is interesting to consider that the first people to see the gorge may have been a band of hunters trailing some of the last Wooly Mammoths near the glacier's edge.  At the time the gorge would have been little more than a shallow gully down the hillside.  Because the gorge shows no signs of accumulated glacial debris it is thought to have formed entirely since the last ice age.  Erosion of the modern gorge was probably just beginning with a roaring flood of glacial meltwater.   

Today, two gorges are open to the public. Watkins Glen State Park has been a visitor attraction since 1864, and in 2006 celebrated 100 years of being a State Park. Havana Glen, just south of Montour Falls of NYS Route 14, is owned by the Town of Montour . Both glens offer hiking open to the public in season.