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Thursday 18 August 2011

Gorgeous Gorges

Watkins Glen, New York

You have to take some of this geological stuff with a  small grain of salt.


The numerous deep and narrow gorges that empty into the biggest Finger Lakes (Senaca and Cayuga) are said to have been entirely formed within the last 10,000 years after the end of the last ice age.


The floods have moved a lot of rock into the big lakes. You can see big tree trunks jammed into the many narrow gorges. The Civilian Conservation Corps opened trails of 2 to 4 miles though many of the most dramatic gorges during the first depression.


We hiked though the Watkins Glen gorge yesterday with my cousin Everett and his wife Midge. Everett and I are part of a small band...the brotherhood of Certified Public Accountants... more trusted than attorneys or priests...sort of an honorable band of financial Samurais...What's that you say? Enron? Ronin trash...the exception that proves the rule...


There are definitely huge salt deposits a mile beneath the big lakes...they say that a sea existed here 300 million years ago...for sure they have cheap salt to throw on the roads when it gets icy...


In the evening we go to visit cousin Danny and his wife Doris for a great steak dinner and veggies from Danny's garden.


Everett tells me that they tracked down 100% of his 1961 Ithaca High School graduation class. 95 of them were dead which tells me a lot about actuarial losses of people, like me, born in 1943...I continue to be a smug survivor...


The gorges keep working on the rock which fractures a little in the icy winter...





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