(I teach an Earth Science class for college art students. This weekend we are taking a required Saturday morning field trip. I know that many of them would rather stay home in bed. I wrote this last night to hand out in class on Thursday, the day we review and prepare for the trip.)

(Photo: susquehannaheritage.org)

“Why are we going to Chiques Rock?”

That’s what you’re asking.

“Why get up on a murky Saturday morning, just to see some chick rock in the river? Or whatever... Why give up precious hours of sleep on a weekend morning when they are best used? Why cut Friday night short?”

Chiques Rock is arguably the premier scenic-geologic feature in south-central Pennsylvania. It’s a resistant quartzite ridge standing high above a grand bend in the Susquehanna River. It was known to French trappers like Peter Bezallion and Peter LaTort by the 1600’s. It was the crossing point for settlers heading over the mountains for the Ohio River and the road to California, and it has been a traditional crossing point for animals and native Indians for 10,000 years. A prosperous iron town once sat at it’s base but the town was eventually worn out and defeated by floods and fires. The ridge still causes and oversees the historic floods of the river town Marietta.

A short walk south and you can look down upon the remains of the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge – destroyed by residents in 1863 to prevent the Confederate Army from advancing on Harrisburg and Lancaster. It marks the northern-most advance of the Rebel Army during the entire Civil War.

But the best part is the geology. From atop Chiques Rock, if you look carefully and if things are clear, you can see for nearly half a billion years. You can watch worms wiggling in the warm muds of a long-extinct ocean. You can see that ocean being slammed shut by colliding continents and raising up a mountain range over 25,000 feet tall… higher than the modern Himalayas! You can watch those mountains erode completely, and then be shoved up again, and again.

Most pleasantly, you can sit quietly in the wind and ponder how the river could have cut through a mighty ridge of hard rock like a buzz saw.

The answer will surprise you.

At Chiques Rock you’ll see the step-by-step (with many steps missing) processes that have taken place on and within this little postage-stamp-sized piece of the planet. You’ll watch oceans and mountains come and go, the land rise and fall. Sediments from the mountains will gather, become deformed, melt into crystalline mountains and then erode away again.

But if you look long enough, and carefully enough, that movie that I talked about may start to run in your head. If it does, then maybe you’ll begin to see how the Earth moves its bits and chunks back and forth like chess pieces.

If you do, you’ll begin to understand the vast geologic prehistory of Pennsylvania. And once you begin to understand Pennsylvania, you’ll begin to understand the Appalachian Mountain Range from Alabama to Scotland. And once you glimpse the formational history of the Appalachians, you begin to appreciate planetary tectonics.

And once you do that, the geologic world is your oyster.

Then maybe for one short semester, or one thoughtful day, or even one shining moment, you’ll get it. You’ll be making your own movie. You may even feel the Earth move. Literally. How cool would that be?

And to think that it all began at Chiques Rock – on a rainy Saturday morning… when you could have stayed in bed.

Dress for the weather. The rocks look better wet.