In a World of Schist

Garnets Shine Bright

These, which are magnified by a zoom lense, were found on a schist boulder along a side trail in the Daniels area of the Patapsco Valley State Park.

Goodbye 2013

It was a very hard year.

Santa in the hood

                                                            The Santa portfolio here.

The MW Portfolio

                                                              More photos here.

Outside My Office

Little Patuxent River - Lake Elkhorn to Savage Mill

Hiked the Little Patuxent river from Lake Elkhorn to Savage Mill this afternoon with Chris. The blue heron was in Lake Elkhorn near the underpass to the trail head.

This doe was with two others. We watched them for ten minutes without spooking them as they browsed in the the trailside thickets. A few more photos can be seen here.

I had never heard of these rapids/falls just upstream from Savage Mill.They are pretty impressive.

At trail's end we climbed up the hill from the river beside this support building that once powered the looms of Savage Mill.

Tourmaline Schorl on Quartz

Frostburg, MD, Western Maryland RR Station and Turntable, WM 502

The Bleeding Heart Mining Company

Tooled Up and Ready to Rock

It shouldn't be long now until the bankruptcy filing. The company will sink like a stone into oblivion.

The Bleeding Heart Mine

Garnet - The Stone Cold Bleeding Heart of Schist

Sometimes schist happens when you aren't expecting it. I was hiking along the Baltimore County side Patapsco river yesterday. I saw outcropping ledge of stone high above the ruins of of the old mill town of Daniels, aka Alberton and Elysville. I climbed up to investigate what I thought might be a nice place of shelter or hibernation for wildlife. As I was getting ready to descend, at the end of the rock I noticed a different smaller stone formation that looked like schist and also looked like it was bleeding. At first I though maybe an animal had been eating berries or a bird had made a deposit on the stone.But closer inspection revealed small red-brown crystals imbedded in the white-gray schist. Where is your rock hammer when you need it? In the trunk of your car two miles away, of course! I wasn't looking for schist or garnets and certainly did not expect to stumble on any. But I did have my cameras. So I captured some slow moving specimens of rock on digital media. My geology guru, Ira, a professional geologist confirmed the garnet schist identification.

My brother Chris, like Old Sparky whispering in my ear suggested: "Quick, buy up the land. We'll mine it, declare bankruptcy....get a bailout and run off with the money! It's the new American capitalism." I'm thinking. It's not the mother load. It's a load of schist. But we could spread stock around like manure. Don't tempt me.

The first photo, above, is of a broken off vein of schist. The piece probably fell long ago, since it is securely planted in the ground and tree is growing next to it. It was likely once a section of a horizonat ledge seen in the third photo.It looks like it's bleeding. The photo below is cropped emlargement focused on one red section.

Below is a close up of an intact horizontal vein of schist showin a few garnet cystals if you look closely.

And finally below is a photo of a small section from the vein above, which I removed. It show a nice garnet gembedded in the schist.

More Mica

Picked up some more mica and muscovite mica on the same trail as previously documented, near the Dorsey tunnel.

Resisting the change of season

Some will not submit until snow falls and draws the curtain on autumn. This canoe is beached on Brice Run just before it passes under the Old Main Line and feds into the Patapsco River between Daniels and the Dorsey tunnel on the Baltimore County side. It was the only water craft I saw today during my hike.

Found some rocks today that looked blood stained. I think I know what it is. More on that after I check with my geologist.

Autumn Light

Westbound Out of the Mt. Airy Tunnel

CSX 7834 out of the western portal of the Mt. Airy tunnel, headed for the midwest with a trainload of cars.

Mt. Airy - Point of Convergence and Divergence in Central Maryland

Mt. Airy is a small town at the geographical heart of central Maryland. It is the only place in the state where four counties meet, Frederick, Carroll, Howard and Montgomery. It is west of Baltimore and north of Washington. The headwaters of the Patapsco and Patuxent rivers are there only .6 of a mile apart.
The four counties meet at Parr's Spring, the headwater of the Patapsco on the historic Four Counties Farm on Parr's Ridge. The Patapsco river divides Carroll and Baltimore counties on the north and east from Frederick, Howard and Anne Arundel counties on the south and west as well as Baltimore City on the northeast from Anne Arundel county to the southewest The Patuxent river divides Howard,  Anne Arundel and Calvert counties on the east from from Montgomery, Prince George's, Charles and St. Mary's counties on the west. The historic National Pike from Baltimore to Illinois passes along the southern boundary of Mt. Airy, as does the Old Main Line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, now owned and operated by CSX.

Liberty Dam and a Controlled Burn at Soldiers Delight

Went out with Chris today to the base of Liberty Dam and Soldiers Delight, neither of which he had visited before. Between the two hikes we stopped briefly at the shooting range of The Associated Gun Clubs of Baltimore on Marriottsville Road. There had been a controlled burn of one section of grassland at Soldiers Delight since I hiked there by myself last Sunday. A few hot spots were still smoldering as we walked beside the burn area.

Soldiers Delight - Eastern Loop Trails

This morning I hiked about three miles on the eastern side of Soldiers Delight along the Choate Mine, Red Run and Dolefield trails. The temperature  was in the 40s with a northwest wind about 15 mph, a little chilly but ok because I was on the move. Red Run was pretty.and the Dolefield was mostly forested.

Some areas were completely taken over by chest high briars. In those places you couldn't leave the trail even if you wanted. Lots of deer tracks, but didn't see a single animal other than birds.

More photos here.

Soldiers Delight is Delightful

A unique serpentine barrens landscape on a beautiful day, temperatures in the 50s. Soldiers Delight Natural Environmental Area, near Owings Mills in Baltimore County, is a place worthy of return visits.I hiked a 2.5 mile loop on the Serpentine Trail with vistas like the one below.

There is also an attractive Visitor Center, and today, after my initial hike, I went on an excellent guided informational group tour on the history of chromite mining at Soldiers Delight. The Choate mine is on the Choate Mine Trail. More photos from my hike can be seen here.

Muscovite - Animal? Vegetable? Mineral?

When I was a kid, like a lot of others, I collected rocks, mostly ones with fossils of sea shells. Half a century later I am looking at rocks again, driven by an interest in the geography and geology of the places where I hike. In an earlier post I documented my quest for garnet schist. Then in September, while hiking around the Dorsey tunnel on an eroded section of the trail, I came upon a few small rocks with a strange feature. They had what looked and felt like sheets of transparent plastic in them. I guessed they must be some kind of mica, but I had never seen anything like it before. Then last week my brother Chris, knowing of my renewed interest in rocks, handed me a small book, Rocks and Minerals, published in 1957 by Golden Press. There on page 97 was a perfectly drawn illustration almost identical to one of the rocks I had picked up. It was Muscovite, a type of mica as I had suspected. Here is a photo of my rocks, with a dime provided for scale and a knife blade to demonstrate the plastic sheet-like quality of the mineral.

The train has left the station

Woodbine to the Mt. Airy Tunnel

Today I hiked from Woodbine, actually the Morgan Road crossing on the approach to Woodbine, to the Mt. Airy tunnel, a seven mile walk. I saw two trains. At the start an eastbound train headed for Baltimore at the Woodbine tunnel. At the finish a westbound car carrier train headed into the Mt. Airy tunnel. The only living wildlife I saw were birds and the first and biggest of them was an injured turkey buzzard, which literally fell down the hillside on the approach to the Woodbine tunnel. I think we scared each other. The big bird appeared to have an injured wing, rendering it unable to fly, though it was able to walk.

The other wild animals I saw, at least a half dozen, were all road kill between the tracks, including the box turtle in my previous post today. Not a happy day for wildlife viewing. Also strange was that the Mt. Airy tunnel was the only tunnel I have encountered on the Old Main Line that does not have its name built into the masonry of the tunnel's portal. You can see more photos here.

What happens when you don't or can't walk away.....

On October 2nd I posted about a box turtle that came up against a rail, an obstacle he could not hurdle. He turned and walked away. During today's hike I encountered another box turtle, or what was left of him, between the rails. He could not have climbed a rail to get where he was. There are only four ways he could have gotten there: 1) crawled under a low spot where gravel was washed out between two ties, 2) was dropped by a small animal mamal predator, 3) was dropped by an avian predator, 4) was placed there by a cruel human, who would know he could never escape.

This shot shows the impossibility of the turtle's predicament.

Hiking in the clouds....and in the rain they carry

Today, after yesterday's ten mile warm up, I hiked fifteen miles in the rain from Frostburg to Cumberland along the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad right of way. It was wet but beautiful, and everyone on the trail except me was on a bike. The clouds came down to meet us.

And the view of the the Allegheny escarpment in the Cumberland Narrows, Maryland's Cumberland Gap, was quite impressive and made clear what early American settlers were up against in moving over the Allegheny mountains.

More photos here.

The Great Allegheny Passage

Actually the GAP is mostly above ground, but this is a shot inside the three quarters of a mile long Big Savage Tunnel through Big Savage Mountain only a short distance east of the eastern continental divide. This morning I hiked a ten mile stretch of the Passage from Deal, PA to Frostburg, MD with my brother Chris. It was the nicest hiking and biking trail I have ever walked because of vistas like this:

The trail is on an abandoned Western Maryland Railroad right of way which runs from Cumberland, MD to Pittsburgh. PA and connects with the C&O Canal tow path at Cumberland. More photos can be seen here.

Cumberland Connection

The Western Maryland Railroad station in  Cumberland, MD. This spot in The Queen City is where the C&O Canal, The B&O/CSX RR and the Great Allegheny Passage rail trail meet at the confluence of the Potomac River and Wills Creek, one of five gaps allowing passage over the Allegheny Mountain range, the other Cumberland Gap. It is also where during the French and Indian War British General Braddock, with his aide, Colonel George Washington,  marshaled his forces at Fort Cumberland before attacking the French at Fort Duqusne, now Pittsburgh. Braddock suffered fatal wounds when his force was ambushed en route to Fort Duquesne. George Washington assumed command. In 1794 President Washington again used Cumberland as a staging area before he marched into Pennsylvania as Commander in Chief of an American army to suppress The Whiskey Rebellion on the western frontier of the new nation. More photos here.

Heading West Soon

Sometimes you have to just walk away.....