THE HUDSON VALLEY IN THE ICE AGE: A Geological History & Tour

With the Hudson Valley in the Ice Age: A Geological History & Tour, join Professors Robert and Johanna Titus on a tour of the Hudson River Valley and see this familiar region with new eyes—the eyes of geologists who see a half-mile-thick sheet of ice grinding its way down the valley and overtopping even the highest mountains. With the Tituses as your guides, “see” an ancient Manhattan high and dry with the Atlantic shoreline 100 miles to the southeast, North/South Lake State Park as a giant and frigid “waterslide park,” and the immense expanse of Glacial Lake Albany stretching the entire length of the Hudson Valley with its deltas that would become the sites of some of America's most famous estates. Finally, witness the cataclysmic flood that cascaded through the valley at the end of the Ice Age as a great ice dam broke and a gigantic wall of water swept down the valley. Writing primarily for a general audience, the Tituses take the reader through the Catskills, the Shawangunks, the Taconics, along the banks of the Hudson River, to Bash Bish Falls and Lake Taghkanic—to all those unique and beautiful places that make the Hudson Valley “the landscape that defined America”—and demonstrate that all this beauty we see every day rose phoenix-like from the devastation caused by the slow, inexorable advance of a grinding, half-mile-thick bulldozer of ice and the raging flood that followed its retreat. The result of these devastating events is the landscape that inspired the Hudson River School painters and America's pioneer landscape architects—gifts of the Ice Age, and the familiar landscape we enjoy today.