After leaving the path for a view to the east of the Marlboro mountains, we turned uphill, rejoining Miriam’s friends at the bare rock outcrop that gives the place its name, “Giant’s Ledges” (not to be confused with Giant Ledge in the Catskills, near Slide Mountain). We were greeted there by the cries of two red-shouldered hawks, who wheeled over our heads and took turns diving at each other in an aerial ballet that I thought must be either about breeding (though nesting for hawks is well underway by now) or territory, or both. While the hawks soared above us, 50-foot chasms gaped in the bedrock at our feet, and a massive, but oddly balanced, group of glacial erratics poised on the outcrop like a piece of rock sculpture. This assemblage enhanced the mythic quality of the place, as though it had been inhabited by a race of giants, like those who battled Zeus in Greek mythology, piling gigantic stones up as they tried to reach Olympus. The fractured and glacially-polished outcrop evoked titanic forces within the earth’s crust and the grinding of the continental ice sheet, and its deep fissures spoke of millennia of freeze and thaw that had wedged the stones apart. But the pitch pine, mountain laurel and blueberry barrens colonizing the expanse of rock showed how tenacious life must be to persist here, and how fragile its foothold in a place like this.
We are graced with many fine preserves in our region, with good, easy to follow trails, and I am grateful for all of them. But I’m also grateful for unmarked and unmapped retreats, hinterlands where one has to find, or make, one’s own way through the woods, and where there is room for further exploration. Such places are scarce, and getting scarcer, in our well-traveled part of the world, and I can only hope that the signs and trail blazes that will inevitably come to this one do not rob it of all of its mystery and magic, or of its essential wildness. I saw no humans at Giant’s Ledges on my last visit there, but wondered whether the unseen eyes of a bobcat might be watching me from a hidden den among the rocks as I made my way down them.
Richard Parisio is a lifelong naturalist, educator and writer. He currently leads field trips for school classes at Mohonk Preserve, teaches courses about John Burroughs and conducts tours of Slabsides and the John Burroughs Sanctuary for groups and individuals by request. Rich is New York State coordinator for River of Words, a national poetry and art program on the theme of watersheds, and teaches River of Words programs for school classes, grades K-12, by request. Contact Rich ([email protected]) with questions, comments, or suggestions for Nature at Your Doorstep.
