FOREST BEACH OF LAKE WARREN. 51 



Verona Mills, southwest of Bad Axe, southeast of Cass City, west of Clio, 

 and at Easton. 



The Forest beach, in common with the others of the Erie-Huron beaches, 

 has some very characteristic qualities when compared with the younger, 

 much stronger Algonquin and Nipissing beaches below. It is represented 

 almost entirely by gravelly or sandy wave-built ridges and more or less 

 wave-distributed, sandy, delta deposits. It scarcety ever takes the form 

 of a cut terrace, and hence seldom has anything like an old sea cliff be- 

 hind it. Spits are seldom found more than a few yards in length, the one 

 at Spring hill being quite exceptional. Only at the extreme end of the 

 thumb northeast of Bad Axe, where the slope was steep, and in a similar 

 situation along much of the moraine front from Gagetown southwest to 

 Vassar was there any appearance of wave-cutting. As Tarr has found for 

 these same beaches in western New York, the prevailing features are wave- 

 built and not wave-cut.* At man} 7 places the Forest beach is well formed 

 where it has not been fed by delta deposits, and it was hard at first to see 

 from what source the material was derived. On closer examination, how- 

 ever, it was found that it had been washed up from the old lake bottom just 

 below and in front of the ridges. There were some places where this belt 

 was a little natter than the general slope and a little more stony, showing 

 the abstraction of some of its finer surface parts. The sand and gravel 

 was evidently loosened and stirred up by the breaking of the waves on 

 the shallow bottom and the forward motion carried them up the slope 

 and added them to the beach ridge. 



The prevailing composition of the Forest beach is sand}^ gravel, gen- 

 erally of a yellowish-brown color to a depth of several feet, showing con- 

 siderable oxidation and decay. More or less gravel is almost always 

 present, but sand is generally a large constituent. The pebbles are usually 

 not large and are not thoroughly rounded. Scattered through the beach 

 almost everywhere are fragments of chert, very light in weight and porous 

 from the solution and loss of their calcareous parts. 



In the vicinity of Verona Mills, where the Forest beach passes around 

 the end of the thumb, the morainic hills are high and quite steep. Sev- 

 eral of their tops reach altitudes of about 860 to 865 feet above the sea, 

 or 85 or 90 feet above the Forest beach. Beyond these hills and below 

 the Forest beach the plain stretches away east and north and west, slop- 

 ing gradually down to the lake. The outer slopes of the highest parts 

 were pretty thoroughly examined, but no sign of a beach, nor any other 

 indication of static waters was found above the Forest beach. A week 



* " Geological History of the Chautauqua Grape Belt," by R. S. Tarr, Bull. 109, Cornell Uni. 

 Agri. Exp. Sta., January, 1896. 



