The Quiet Half

A large overlook with a bulletin board. That's the whole entry for Swift Run Overlook in the old guide to this road, and it's fair enough. The show here is the rock. If you want a climb instead, the Hightop lot is half a mile on, on your left, with nine hundred and thirty-five feet of it. Swift Run Gap, Highway thirty-three, is a couple of miles on. It's the road down to Elkton, seven miles away, and a way off the mountain if the weather turns. Through the middle of this park, the rock under you is lava. In this half, the lava stops and a sea begins. Every rock formation in the park but one shows up in the road cuts along this end of the Drive, and the one that doesn't is up on the skyline. The ground here sank, and an ocean came in. You can read it in the layers like a tide. Right on top of the lava, rivers laid down coarse gravel and sand. Above that come several thousand feet of fine silt and sand, the mud of lagoons slowly drowning. On top of that, pure white sand, the beach, which hardened into the white quartzite you'll see in cliffs and boulder fields at this end of the park. That ocean is called Iapetus, after the mythical father of Atlantis, and it grew and vanished long before the Atlantic ever formed. The rock it left is over five hundred million years old, which makes it the youngest rock in the park. Life was just getting started. These rocks are older than most complex life on Earth, so there's almost nothing in them. The park names one observable fossil. Skolithos, long straight tubes in the white quartzite, the preserved burrows of a worm. The tubes weather out on the ledges along the Calvary Rocks trail, around mile ninety. The oldest animal you can actually find here is a hole.