Mendon Ponds: Glaciers Left the Blueprint

Southeast of Rochester, Mendon Ponds Park reads like a textbook of Ice Age landforms. Eleven thousand years ago a retreating glacier left behind kames, which are conical gravel hills, long winding eskers, and bowl-shaped kettles that filled with water. One kettle, called the Devil's Bathtub, is a rare meromictic pond where the surface and bottom waters never mix, starving the depths of oxygen.

Monroe County acquired the first fourteen hundred acres in nineteen twenty-eight for one hundred eighty-five thousand dollars after a University of Rochester geology professor pressed local officials to protect what he recognized as a one-of-a-kind landscape. The park was designated a National Natural Landmark in nineteen sixty-seven. Today it covers more than twenty-five hundred acres and remains the largest park in Monroe County.