Ausable Chasm: The Grand Canyon of the Adirondacks
Near Burlington, New York
Just west of Lake Champlain, the Ausable River has spent ten thousand years cutting a gorge through five-hundred-million-year-old Cambrian sandstone, dropping one hundred fifty feet into a canyon two miles long. The walls preserve ripple marks from ancient tidal flats and rare fossilized jellyfish from the mid-Cambrian era. An Irish settler named William Gilliland paddled past in seventeen sixty-five and wrote in his journal that the walls appeared like a regular built wall, somewhat ruinated, as if by earthquake. By the late eighteen hundreds the chasm had become one of the Adirondacks' premier tourist attractions, advertised as the Grand Canyon of the Adirondacks, and a nail works at the base of the ninety-one-foot Rainbow Falls produced two tons of horseshoe nails a day from the waterfall's power.
