Imagine that you’re a fish. But you’re not like any fish that you’ve ever seen before. Imagine you are a really weird fish from a very long time ago. You might have fluorescent ping pong eyeballs, or a dozen fins, or the ability to turn yourself inside out. You’re a weird old fish. You are living in an ancient saltwater lagoon, filled with all kinds of plants and creatures as strange as you are. You spend your days swimming about, trying not to get eaten by other fish. If you’re lucky, you have lots of fish friends, you meet your fishmate, make lots of fish kids and live a long and happy fishy life.
But at some point, your time is up. When that final day comes, if nothing eats you, your body sinks to the bottom and just lies there with decaying plants and the remnants of thousands of lives, sitting on the sandy bottom. As the years pass, more stuff piles up on top of you, until everything is thick and pressed tightly together. Some of the water gets squeezed out and you become an ooze in a thick layer of sludge.
And then, you begin to sink. The ground below you is moving down because of everything piling up on top of you, so down and down and down you go, as the ancient seabed plunges deep into the Earth, with more stuff constantly piling on top of it, until millions of years have passed, and you are buried miles underground. You’re down there under heat and pressure that you can’t believe. Eventually, you and everything from your ancient swamp is barely recognizable. Congratulations, you have been squashed into hot putty.
But there’s more to come. The Earth keeps moving and your putty is now being squeezed from the side. The pressure is so intense that it gets twisted and mangled into all sorts of odd shapes and patterns. And then it gets squeezed from below, and your burial process is reversed. You start rising, and all that putty slowly cools and starts to harden. Everything from the ancient swamp – you, your mate, the kids, the plants, the sand – fuses together into some of the hardest rock imaginable. And, inch by inch, it makes its way back toward the surface.
Millions of years later, something really strange starts happening. Far deeper in the earth than you ever went, a hot spot has developed. There’s lots more putty down there, it starts pushing up from below, but it can’t get up to the surface. So it keeps pressing against everything above it, making it all swell up like a giant boil, bigger than the state of Texas. Everything keeps rising and swelling, rising and swelling until – maybe five million years ago – a huge dome of twisted and mangled, super-hardened putty-rock finally erupts through the surface. You are now part of something weird and unique, a mountain range that is both ancient and active, primordial but powerful, and unlike anything else on the planet. Scientists call it ‘new mountains from old rocks.’
The boil keeps swelling and the rock dome keeps rising until eventually, it has soared a mile into the sky. It gets pounded by rain in the summer and buried by snow in the winter. And as each year passes, the winters keep getting colder and longer, until one year it gets so cold that the snow never melts at all. From that point on, the snow keeps piling up and getting crushed by its own weight until the mile-high super-hard mountain dome is covered by a mile-thick layer of super-sharp ice.
Yep, you just entered the Ice Age. There’s a huge glacier over your head, and it covers half the continent. The earth groans beneath millions of tons of ice. And now – bad news – the glacier starts to move, headed southwards, ripping and grinding everything in its path. Year after year, the surface is torn apart in slow motion. And if that wasn’t bad enough, after a while, the world starts warming up again, and the glacier shifts into reverse. Back to the north it goes, tearing through everything a second time.
As it is coming and going, the glacier grinds over the rising rock dome. Oh boy, it’s the battle of the titans, Ice Monster versus Mighty Mountains, and it’s a doozy. The glacier gouges long gashes through the mountains but can’t completely tear them down. The dome stands its ground, but it takes one hell of a ripping. Over time, the world keeps warming and the glacier keeps melting, until finally, in the end, the mountains win, all the ice melts, and the water flows out and fills up all those broken places, creating a crazy mosaic of lakes and streams and rivers all over the place.
And what has become of you, Mr. Fish? Well, that’s maybe the strangest part of all. You were in a piece of rock that got broken off by that glacier. And that glacier took you for a ride. You may have been shoved to the south, you may have been dragged back to the north. You may have been buried again, but eventually you were scraped back up. You were hauled all over the place until the glacier finally got bored with you and dropped you wherever it felt like it.
Today, wherever folks go in these mountains, they find strange things that have no business being where they are. There are odd rock deposits – some as small as bowling balls, some bigger than houses – sitting in bizarre places where they really shouldn’t be. They might be resting by the shore of a lake, or clogging up the heart of a valley, or teetering dangerously over the side of a cliff.
Geologists call them ‘erratics,’ because they are found, alone, in strange, unexpected places.
And in one of those erratics, in that rock that has no business being where it is, perhaps there lies the remains of a fish that died in a shallow salt swamp over a billion years ago. He got squeezed to goo, fell to the center of the earth, melted into putty, turned to stone, rose to the surface, was scraped up, got rag-dolled all over the place, and finally just got plunked down.
Maybe in a really odd place. Maybe way up on the summit of a mountain. Smack-dab in the middle of that massive super-hard dome.
He’s up there, about a mile in the sky.
It’s possible. And you gotta admit, it’s a hell of a way to get to the top of a mountain in upstate New York.