Trifter

There are names like Muddy Creek, South Mountain and Falling Rock that just seem to crop up here and there.  I have seen the name rocky ridge assigned to at least a half dozen places in Pennsylvania.  But the official Rocky Ridge is a beautiful County Park in York PA.  It is less than two miles from a major mall in the area and about four from the center of the city. 

Over the last two years I have spent a few hours there and have taken more than a few pictures.  I’ll share some of them here.  I wish I had taken some pictures of the picnic areas and the pavilions to show you a view of the whole park.  I’ll try to get some the next time I am there and replace this statement with a couple of them.  Let me assure you they are there and they are nice.

The park is somewhere between 900 and 1000 feet elevation in an area that the flat portions are between 450 and 550 feet.  This is the high country.  A Ham Radio has it’s clubhouse about a half mile from the park on the ridge and commercial radio antennas spot the area. Remember this as you look at the pictures of some of the rocks

One of the trails from the parking lot to the overlook goes past this impressive rock formation.  Most of the rock here has white quartz pellets that are mostly smaller than a ping pong ball and oval in shape. You can see them in the end of the rock above the pink hand.  It is likely that the hard quartz (harder than glass and softer than diamonds) was fractured from large rocks then deposited in a stream bed where they were weathered smooth and slowly deposited in a basin of some sort.  Silt was deposited with them and after time they were covered with enough silt that the silt was fused to rock by the pressure. This rock was at time under a very heavy layer of covering silt and rock.  Interesting in this picture is the small layer of shale (with the handprint) that is UNDER this layer.  That is a silt layer that was under it that was from very small grains of material.

And somehow this layer was uplifted by earthquakes and the covering layer was removed by erosion.  This area was geologically active.

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Here a closer shot of the rock shows the quartz pebbles in perspective.  The one in the background shows it clean of dirt. 

Here a close-up shows the pebbles.

Here the rocks are seemingly arranged but this is probably only from the fracturing and erosion.  It is hard to believe that these were moved by man without heavy equipment.   This kind of rock outcrop is not unusual in PA.

This picture was taken from the top of the rock outcrop noted above looking east.  The steam is from the two TMI Unit 1 cooling towers.  The two Unit 2 towers stand to the left of them.  The thinner stack between the cooling towers is a coal burning power plant – Bruner Island – and the fatter one is an incinerator stack.  Both of these are in operation.   The TMI Unit 2 reactor containment building can be located by going down the left side of the incinerator stack – it is the concrete building that can partially be seen.  The Unit 1 Reactor containment is near the other cooling towers and is not visible here.  What is hard to understand at first is the perspective.  The Incinerator is about two miles from the camera, Bruner about 7 miles and TMI about 9 miles.  The Susquehanna River is between the Incinerator and TMI/Bruner.  The Pennsylvania landscape is shown well – both close in and into Lancaster County – past TMI.  The individual white birch trees that can be seen on the bottom of the picture are over sixty feet tall.

This is another picture of the rock outcrop near the overlook.  Moss covers some of it along with the smattering of bird dung.

More of the same with the snow cover. 

From the overlook you can see hawks.  Her we see one fly near the power lines that cross the ridge near the lookout. 

These creatures are majestic.  The object in the bottom of the picture is an insulator that supports a power line with probably a half a million volts.

Sometimes you get shots of the hawk and then at times they are blocked by the structures.

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Here again he is framed by the massive insulators of the power line.

And between the wires.

Close up you see is beak and the lighter color under his wings.

These birds are powerful but they also use the currents of air to soar.

Note the spread of his feathers n his right wing.

It almost reminds you of the B-2 or maybe the B-2 design looked at nature.

Sometimes I wish I could soar so effortlessly.

Here he soars seemingly over a countryside of homes – but they are several miles away. 

I caught the under belly of the bird here. 

And the upper side of his wings.  Note the pattern in the feathers.

Look at the next few pictures – it is like watching an air show. 

He is nearly obscured by the power pole and yet he is totally recognizable.

This is an unusual shot, he looks almost like the stealth bomber in flight with his direction of flight obscured.

But there he is over the land he seems to own because he flies over it.

And at times you get a chance to see them roost on the highest points.  They are so interesting.  Note something in the background – the two bowed objects starting at the top right of the picture comprise one of the twin conductors of the power line.   They span from the right insulator of this tower to the right insulator of the next.  If you look at the near left tower leg you will see the center pair.

Here three of them roost on the tower.

This shows the birds and the next two towers.

So ends the views of Rocky Ridge.