570 Million Years Old

I walked what is likely to be our new property today.  

We’re buying a lovely 26-year old solid brick house on 3 acres next to a very large expanse of permanently protected woods that used to be a Girl Scout camp. 

Thanks to the old Girl Scout Camp and the solid geology underneath this high knoll, we’ve got a very long length of wide manicured paths, and a very nice destination to get to — a small pond about a half mile away, straight out the back door.  

The new house, and the three acres I own, is at the top of a tall ridge that is covered with oak and beech, with not too much undergrowth beneath. I saw three pileated woodpeckers, a redheaded woodpecker, and several late warblers, and I was not even looking.  

Streams flow in the valley left and right of the ridge. 

This is going to be a wildlife mecca, though only a small slice is actually my own.  Hopefully, the owner of the forest conservation property next door will let me walk my dogs there.

The mountains are visible and very close. This is the mountain side of the Fall Line, with flat land starting about 20 miles south, and true mountains about 8 miles north. Camp David is just 17 miles away, and only 25 acres smaller than this tract of protected land.

The ridge that our new house sits on is made of 570-million year old Catoctin Greenstone (pictured) which is the hard igneous stone that can be found at the top of many of the highest peaks in the northern Blue Ridge Mountains, especially along the cliffs that dot the border of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.  

Greenstone was originally black basalt, but over time, and with heat and pressure, it has been invaded by other minerals such as chlorite and epidote which has colored the hard stone and turned it shades of grey and dark green

What’s amazing about this property is that we’re just 8 minutes to Starbucks, Five Guys, Lowes, Wegmans, Petsmart, Walmart, CVS, UPS, and the rest of what I only half-jokingly call the “survival set”.  

The good news is that between the new place and all that “necessary” development is a lot of farm and forest in conservation protection.  Rising ridges and running creeks have made conservation tax incentives particularly attractive in this little section of the County.

Sometimes god and government line up to protect a good thing.  I think this is one of those times.