By Andrew Amelinckx
Appeared in The Register-Star, October 14, 2007
Standing on Church Hill looking out across the rolling hills towards the Hudson river and Catskill Mountains in the distance, Geologist Robert Titus doesn't see a crisp and breezy October afternoon with a valley of trees changing colors and boats lazily drifting along in the water. Instead he sees a snow covered valley and the bare buff colored tops of the Catskill Mountains where massive snow drifts “like waves on the beach” roll up and down the peaks circa 135,210 B.C. Titus, a geology professor at Hartwick College in Oneonta, described what life was like and how the Hudson Valley was formed to a small crowd at the Olana State Historical Park in Greenport on Saturday. “We are looking through the minds eye, the human imagination,” he said in describing the several visions of time periods dating back to 380 million years in the past.
“As a geologist I live in three different worlds,” said Titus, 61 and with a graying beard and the gait of an outdoorsman. The first world of which he spoke was that of the landscape— “I see things differently than even a landscape painter,” he said, sweeping his arm in the direction of the mountains.
The second world is that of bedrock, an underground world of rock that holds the key to understanding “the deep past” he said. The third is that of the surface of geological formations, which reveals the workings of forces over the course of thousands of years — “the scars of the past.”
Titus, who is originally from New Jersey, has been teaching at Hartwick College since 1974 and has written two books on the geology of the Catskills — “The Catskills in the Ice Age” and “The Catskills: A Geological Guide,” and has a third book “coming out in a couple of weeks,” he said as he led a group of about 15 people through the grounds of Olana. Olana, the Persian Revival mansion of famed 19th Century landscape painter Frederic Church, was built in the 1870’s on land that Church had first visited in the 1840’s with his mentor, painter Thomas Cole, on a sketching expedition. According to Titus. “It was still agricultural at that time — a cornfield — when they sketched the magnificent views,” he said, looking south from the front porch of Olana.
Carrie Manchester, education director at Olana who set up the day’s event and came on the excursion, said Titus helped her realize that it “was not a coincidence that [Church and other artists and writers] found this place.” Titus has done this same geological walking tour, which he called “unplanned views,” several times. He calls the walk unplanned views in direct contrast to what Church, at Olana, as well as many other 18th and 19th Century Hudson Valley estate owners called “planned views,” which were incorporated as landscape architecture devices to highlight the vistas from their properties.
In one of the unplanned views Titus stood before a vista of the Hudson River, pointed north and spoke of the Illinoisan Ice Age that occurred between 170,000 and 120,000 years ago, when a glacier covered the entire valley, stretched as far south as Newark, NJ., and was 4,000 feet in elevation — taller than most of the Catskills’ peaks. The entire region was “in the cold domination of it’s icy grip,” said Titus dramatically. At one point in the walk Titus pointed out shert and sandstone that he said were quarried on the property to be used in the construction of Olana. He said that the shert, also known as flint, was, at one time, at the bottom of an ocean “tens of thousands of feet deep” 380,000 years ago. It was made of layers of compressed sediment — “ooze” he called it — formed by dead microbes at the oceans surface falling to the deep dark bottom. The sandstone most likely came from sand on the surface forced down by volcanic activity. “I didn’t like being at the bottom of that dark ocean,” said Dennis Murphy from Medusa, with a laugh. Murphy said he enjoyed the walk and gained a new perspective of the geology of the Catskills.
According to Titus, the mountains themselves were once a vast delta much like the Bay of Bengal in India. “A lush tropical landscape,” he said, with primitive plants and fish as well as a few creatures we still see around. “Centipedes are ambassadors of the Devonian Period,” he said. The Devonian Period, which stretched from 417 to 354 million years ago, was a “world without a soul” said Titus.
By the end of the walk many of the participants were slightly winded, perhaps by the physical exertion of winding through the paths at Olana, or perhaps by the whirlwind tour given by Titus through millions of years of geologic time.
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