Pennsylvania: Of Lenapes & Luminaries
April 22nd, 2008
By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
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Pennsylvanians go to the polls today mindful that they may well be voting for the next president of the United States. My inclination was to give the whole thing a rest for the day, but that would be elitist, so herewith an excerpt from a chapter on the early — as in really early — history of Northeastern Pennsylvania from my forthcoming book. That once beautiful but largely spoiled swath of real estate will be my vantage point for today’s events and tonight’s recriminations. — SHAUN MULLEN
The biggest lie told about the Pocono Mountains is that they are mountains. While that technically is true, they aren’t mountains in the sense that the Colorado Rockies are mountains. The Poconos are more like worn down nubs, the result of a geologic bump and grind that began 900 million years ago and continues to this day.
It was during the Precambrian Era that this dance began. Earth’s continents collided, creating an immense supercontinent and the first Appalachian mountain range. Almost as quickly – in geologic time, at least – the supercontinent split apart and the Appalachians washed into a primordial sea, the ancestor of the Atlantic Ocean. The continents reversed course and began moving back together about 500 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. As they crept closer, sediment from the first mountains was pushed back out of the sea, forming a second Appalachian range. The continents again collided, resulting in a second supercontinent that geologists call Pangaea. The new Appalachians were pushed westward as the dance continued, forming the parallel ridges that are so evident when you look at a map of the region.
About 200 million years ago, the beginning of the Jurassic Period, Pangaea began breaking up and the resulting continents drifted toward the present-day positions of North America, Europe and Africa. Then the Appalachians began to shrink yet again because of the erosive effects of wind and water, and most notably because of ice as the Earth went through a period of profound cooling. This ice, over a mile thick in some places, carved out valleys, lakes and rivers, as well as rounded off the modern-day Appalachians, which are known in Pennsylvania as the Alleghenys, to the north as the Adirondacks, Berkshires, Taconics, Greens, Whites, Longfellows and Notre Dames, and to the south as the Blue Ridges, Great Smokys and Cumberlands. The three-foot-wide, 2,173 mile long Appalachian Trail runs atop the ridgeline from northern Georgia to Maine’s Mt. Katahdin at the border with Canada. The trail passes within an hour’s drive of the East Coast’s most populous cities, making it accessible to millions of hikers each year; tens of thousands of those pass through Delaware Water Gap.
The mountains that border the eastern edge of the Poconos are as worn down as any in the Appalachians, with a uniformly flat (some would say boring) ridgeline broken in only one place by a spectacular mile-wide gap where layers of limestone, quartz and shale are laid bare and plunge 1,300 feet from the ridgeline at an almost precise 45-degree angle to a river before reappearing in mirror image on the other side.
The first humans didn’t arrive in the Poconos until the last glacier had receded and the transition from tundra to forest was well underway. It was the onset of the Holocene Period, the name given to the last 11,000 years of the Earth’s history. The Minsi, Shawnee and Paupack tribes, the first permanent settlers of any consequence, arrived 800 years ago, about the time the barons of the Runnymeade were demanding that King John sign the Magna Charta.
Please click here to read the rest of this excerpt at Kiko’s House.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 12:14 am and is filed under History. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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