A couple days ago we drove out to Taughannock Falls and spent the afternoon walking along the river side trail that leads to this "great fall in the woods." The river bed here is made of gray limestone left behind from an ancient sea that once submerged a good portion of the eastern U.S. and the shale walls that form much of the surrounding gorge are hardened layers of silt that were once deposited above the lime mud. Here I caught a picture of the slightly veiled sun reflected in a solution pool on the river bed.
These features formed through chemical weathering of the limestone. Rain is naturally a little acidic and puddles left behind after a storm gradually dissolved the limestone till the whole area was dotted with undulating little hollows.
(the above explanations are paraphrases of trailside informational signs we stopped to read along the way)
And here's the falls...
(for a sense of scale, there's a man sitting near the lower right of the photo)
And here's the falls...
(for a sense of scale, there's a man sitting near the lower right of the photo)
Most of you have seen it before as I've photographed and written about it several times over the years, but it never ceases to amaze me how different it can look depending on lighting, season, and camera angle. Of course one of my favorite features is the oddly geometric shale cutout to the right of the falls. I've watched this feature in particular change a good deal since I first saw it back in 2008...
And here it is in 2012...
I guess this distinctive formation might eventually erode away entirely. Maybe I'll have to come back in a few years to see how things progress...
I think revisiting this place seems most sensible. It is a place I'd like to visit, for sure.
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