The Hudson Valley in the Ice Age

Authors: Robert and Johanna Titus Mastodons in Greenville? There were—their bones have turned up there in the past and many still probably lie beneath ponds and swamps in that region. New York’s version of Los Angeles’s famous La Brea Tar Pits? Well, not tar, but muck, and today rich farmland in the Wallkill Valley has yielded the remains of many ice age mammals. Sand dunes in the city of Albany? Yes, frozen in time and now part of the Pine Bush Preserve, left where they were blown by prehistoric winds following the draining of Glacial Lake Albany. Olana, a gift of the Ice Age? Thousands of years before artist Frederic Church designed his famed landscape, Ice Age forces sculpted the site of his estate. A Niagara Falls in Philmont? Not as wide, and not as large a volume of water, but High Falls is slowly receding backward and will eventually disappear entirely—just like the real Niagara Falls. Vanderbilt Mansion and Springwood, FDR’s home in Hyde Park, at risk? The Ice Age still threate