LEON and the CAT

We encountered this rock formation while geocaching in the back country of northeastern Licking County.  The cache container was a pill bottle wrapped in camouflaged tape and stuck in a crack near Sue's foot.   Like all traditional geocaches it contained a log we signed to prove our hunt's success.

Someone had painted a mouth and a couple of beady eyes on the rock which someone else evidently thought looked like a cat.  To me, it looked like the head of a giant catfish petrified for eternity.

Actually the stone is likely a slump block, as a geologist might explain.  A ridge of higher rocks behind my camera's angle of view could be the heavily eroded remnants of plate tectonics, the movements of the earth's crust over geologic times, wherein the collision of two continents along what we now know as our country's east coast, formed the Appalachian Mountains.

Those mountains originally rivaled the Rocky Mountains in size but the soft sandstone has eroded to the miniature remnant we see today.  Underlying rock eroded away more quickly than harder formations above which eventually caused a collapse in the formation leaving us with these "slump blocks" which tumbled and arranged themselves in peculiar locations.

So, to the casual observer we have a fanciful and imaginative stone.  If one's curiosity ranges above mere imagination, you could be enjoying something far more historically intensive than a smiling visage of a feline.

Still curious?  Pangea