Peaceable Kingdom: A Downstream View of the Connecticut River from Mount Sugarloaf, South Deerfield, Massachusetts, USA

As the older photograpers among you will immediately recognize, I used one particular type of Kodak slide film for this photo. Sometimes it's okay to have the Ektachrome Blues. In this case, I love what the color bias does to the water, haze, and landscape in general.

This river gets my vote for one of the planet's most beautiful streams, and as a former New England resident I've obsessively explored, studied, and photographed it from its source in far-norhern New Hampshire's Fourth Connecticut Lake all the way to its mouth in Long Island Sound. In fact, it's one of the leading characters in myPlant Explorer's Guide to New England . Geologically, botanically, and historically, it's too great to be comprehended fully by any one person or any one generation.

What seems to be such a tranquil setting now, a broad floodplain with its neatly laid-out wrapper-leaf-tobacco farms and windbreaks, was the scene of immense eruptive and tectonic activity 200 Ma ago. At the boundary of the Triassic and Jurassic periods a major rift developed here as the supercontinent Pangaea began to break up.

The down-dropped rift zone, technically termed a half graben, became the repository of massive mafic lava flows and immature clastic rocks derived from sediments washed down from the surrounding highlands.

Mount Sugarloaf itself is an erosional remnant made of relatively soft arkose and conglomerate, while the great traprock ridges of Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke, visible in the distance, are composed of tougher stuff—basalt.

Taken in: United States / Massachusetts / Deerfield / South Deerfield (show map)

Taken on: August 2, 1991

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Camera: MAKER NAME 96660, ISO 50 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	MAKER NAME 96660
ISO:	50
Flash:	Auto, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Metering Mode:	Average
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Inpaint
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