660 H. L. ALLING GLACIAL LAKES OF CENTRAL ADIRONDACK^ 



Cataract Lake Park, southeast of Syracuse. 15 Here the rock is Grenville 

 schist and metamorphosed graphitic limestone, more or less tilted on 

 edge. This is eroded in quite a different manner from the Onondaga 

 limestone that caps the falls of the 169-foot Jamesville Cataract. Thus 

 it is not a sheer drop, but more of a steep cascade. At the base of the 

 now extinct falls the original rock plunge basin is filled with swampy 

 ground, and this, together with the trees and bushes that have grown up 

 on the cliff, hides the cataract so that it cannot be appreciated unless 

 tramped over. 



For the lack of time the entire length of the gulf has not been investi- 

 gated, and there is the possibility of more such interesting relics of glacial 

 times being found. At the eastern end of the gulf, on the boundary 

 between the townships of Jay and Chesterfield, the river course turns to 

 the southeast, making for a series of little ponds. Here again the topog- 

 raphy is in error. The second lake in the Chesterfield group, round in 

 shape, is printed with the 940, 920, and 900-foot contours below it. They 

 should be above it. This unnamed lake, lying in a perfect rock plunge 

 basin, marks the base of another Pleistocene cataract with a drop of 45 

 feet. Careful scrutiny of the map will reveal two little pin-points of blue 

 separated today by the 1,000-foot contour. They are now almost com- 

 pletely filled with vegetable debris, but were Pleistocene pot-holes in a 

 glacial outlet channel. These are, however, not in the main channel of 

 the Wilmington Lake outlet, but are in a higher level channel that had 

 only one rocky bank, the other being the ice itself. A series of one-bank 

 channels can be seen by climbing the steep slopes of Black Mountain. 

 The rocky sides are strongly water-worn and leave little doubt as to their 

 origin. What lake drainage is represented by these high channels is at 

 presen t unci eterm inecl . 



There are two other fine cataracts between the above-described lake and 

 Copperas Pond. These are not represented on the topographic map, nor 

 do they show so great a drop, but are equally as impressive in spite of 

 subsequent avalanches. We reach the climax in Copj)eras Pond itself, a 

 beautiful round sheet of water lying in an Alpine type of plunge basin at 

 the foot of a precipitous wall of rock 80 feet high. The pond appears to 

 be fairly deep, but has not been sounded. The shores of the lake are 

 composed entirely of rock — Grenville quartzose schist. The present little 

 trickle of an outlet flows over a majestic spillway worn smooth by icy 

 torrents. 



15 E. C. Quereau : Topography and history of the Jamesville Lake. Bull. Geol. Soc. 

 Am., vol. 9, pp. 173-1S2. 



H. L. Fail-child : N. Y. State Mus. Bull., No. 127, p. 32. 



