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rare Adirondack flagstones
Friday, August 23 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning after I'd drunk my french press of Costco dark-roast coffee, Charlotte and I walked down to the dock. I brought the crowbar and, empowered by the sucess moving a large rock last evening, I used it to attach a similarly-large rectangular rock that wasn't doing much good in the bottom-most stone steps on the Mossy Rock Trail. Amazingly, again using little rocks as blocks and fulcra, I was able to wrestle the big rock into a more helpful position, where it now formed another very high step. To make this work, I had to add a couple smaller stones to provide a better transition to its uphill side and to create an interim step (so the big rock wouldn't be producing a single high step).
I made numerous forays into the woods near the cabin in all directions looking for native pieces of flat rock suitable for use as flag stones. As I've said, such pieces tend to be rare in the Adirondacks, though they aren't unheard of. Sometimes a rock will have a side that weathers into a plane, and that plane won't be far from a plane of delamination. This can yield pieces similar in shape (if not chemistry) to Catskill bluestone. Since the only non-lake-bottom place with a largest quantity of loose stone is the bottom of the Backwards Cliffs Gorge, I went there on several occasions today. But the rocks in there all tend to be blocky. They'd make for good stackable units for building a wall (another form of rock that is hard to find in the Adirondacks) but not for paving a walkway. So then I went a little below (that is, east of) the Backwards Cliffs looking for flat rocks and managed to find a couple good pieces, which I put aside in the Mossy Rock Trail to pick up on my way back to the cabin. First though, since I was so close, I decided to go down to the dock and look out across the water. I saw a small heard of deer over near Joel's picnic table. It looked like two adults and a fawn. They definitely saw both me and Charlotte but weren't concerned, knowing the lake made it impossible for us to quickly make our way over to them. Throckmorton was also present while we were there, and he even let out a wail. Later this evening at around sunset, he would make repeated wails while I was on another of my hunts near the Backwards Cliffs for flat stones.
But before that, I hunted for flat rocks in a totally different area: just south of the Lake Edward trail near the cabin. That's a region I had never really explored before, and while I was back there I discovered a "blind cove" whose blind top end stopped a little shy of Woodworth Lake Road. With the landscape blocking light from the south, it looked like the sort of place a small glacier might develop in. I managed to find a mediocre piece of flat rock while I was on that foray, though it wasn't actually from any of the new landscape I'd just been in.
A monarch butterfly on the goldenrod near the front door of the cabin. In the background you can see the out-of-focus woodpile. These goldenrods are about eight feet tall.
Click to enlarge.
A hornet flies in while the monarch tucks in and an out-of-focus wasp indulges.
Click to enlarge.
I took the kayak out briefly late this afternoon and snapped ths photo of our dock, a little left of the photo's center, from near the public dock on the lake's south shore. The most visble thing at our dock from this distance is a large shoreline boulder that is somewhat smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle. It's the largest boulder visible from the lake.
Click to enlarge.
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