Sunday, April 26, 2020

Today's Hike.. Boulders In The Woods...




This one is over 7-8 feet tall. You can see the chunk that split off laying sideways in front of it.

This boulder is over 6 feet tall

Large boulder hidden behind the small tree on the left. It's about 5 feet tall. Lots of others along the trail

Rock out cropping which is all split up from freeze thaw cycles

Old field stone rock wall.


Glacial Erratic In New Hampshire <<<


Check out the Madison Boulder <<<




Madison Boulder is thought to be the largest glacial erratic - an erratic being a boulder of a certain type of rock that was transported by glacial ice and deposited on bedrock of different type of rock - in North America.
At 23 feet high, 37 feet front-to-back, and 85 feet left-to-right Madison Boulder is estimated to weigh almost 12 million pounds, roughly the weight of 36 blue whales. It was once part of a ledge of Conway Granite and was transported about two miles south to its current location where it now sits on a deposit of Concord Granite.






 Here you can see how, thousands of years ago, the glaciers performed their handiwork.









That boulder above is in FINLAND<<












12 comments:

  1. Those boulders and woods remind me of hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Pa., Md., and Va. years ago.Lots of erratics here in the Pacific Northwest, as well, from glaciers that melted only 12 - 14,000 years ago. Not everything erratic around here is a boulder, though. Lots of them in Seattle and Olympia, too.

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  2. Those boulder field maps are interesting. The things one learns on the web, priceless sometimes. TX

    Nemo

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  3. We've got those out west as well. The local Indians called a particularly big one "okotok". The one at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rock_(glacial_erratic) weighs 36,300,000 pounds. We call them okotoks generically, as in "Hey, looka all them okotoks lying in that field".

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  4. I'm calling photoshop on that last picture.

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  5. There is a collection of large boulders not too far away from me in Bigelow Hollow State Park called "The Cat Rocks". It was layers of strata that got up-ended vertically, and then house sized chunks broke off and rolled downhill and piled up like a child's blocks. It formed caves and tunnels between and around them that are easily entered and explored. The area was inhabited by bobcats and Eastern Mountain Lions back in the old days.

    This is not mine, but the guy took some great photos of the area. http://greenhornblueblazes.weebly.com/hike51.html

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  6. some of that looks like the land behind my house.

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    1. Allen, the first set of pictures are in Rockingham County.

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    2. well damn it could be behind my house then. east hampstead. we could be neighbahs! LOL

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    3. If you can hear the rock crusher and the shooting then yes :)

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    4. never heard a rock crusher, but every time someone goes shooting down there the cops come to my house first. pain in the ass. I don't mind people shooting down there..hell I only really use it during hunting season.

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  7. to find a true estimate of the power of glaciers, one should visit the areas of eastern Washington state and find there the various layers of lauose-a windborne dusting of material the consistency of kitchen flour-laid down by the winds on top of the layers of twelve and a half million year old basaltic lava. three million years ago, while glaciers were retreating, they left behind mounds of materials they had created by grinding up rock. winds picked up the fine materials and carried it from Canada to north west Oregon and Washington. some areas were over 250' thick from the Cascades to the Rockies. Post glacier flood waters moved the materials into the Willamette valley leaving scab lands and provides the finest grape and wheat and apple growing soil known to man.
    the the glaciers did turn those 12 million ton erratics into the finest dust and sands leaving us today with difficulty in appreciating the power of ice.

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