Opus 40

BY ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS

This is the tourism issue, and, if you want to do a little Catskills touring then, we have a very good geology destination for you: Opus 40 on George Sickle Road in Saugerties, very near Woodstock.

Have you ever heard of Opus? Maybe not. It has a split personality. Opus came into existence as a run-of-the-mill bluestone quarry, like many others throughout the Catskills. Later, it was transformed into a work of art. It’s now a very peculiar sculpture, created long ago by a professional sculptor named Harvey Fite.

Fite was an art professor at Bard College, practicing his art on the side. He bought an old, abandoned bluestone quarry, intending to set up a studio in it and have a home there. But it became something different.

The Catskill Geologists

We have explored many such abandoned quarries and they are ugly, all of them. But Harvey set about making this one into art. He collected countless blocks of bluestone and piled them up into his sculptures. See our first photo. Look at all the carefully stacked stones in the foreground. That’s a single column of rock high above. Today, as a preserve, it is an increasingly popular place to visit. People wander about and admire the art.

Bluestone Beauty

But we visited as geologists, and found a lot of special, fascinating things. Bluestone, almost all of it, records petrified river channels. The quarry was once part of a great river delta, called the Catskill Delta. That was during the Devonian time period, perhaps 385 million years ago.

We explored the stone walls of the quarry, finding cross-sections of ancient rivers that flowed through the area almost 400 million years ago. See our second photo. The darker rock above defines the cross-section of a river channel. The currents of that river did some very ancient sculpting, creating ripple marks in the now-petrified river sands. See our third photo. We wandered, and everywhere we looked, saw more and more geology. This sculpture happens to be one of the best outcroppings of Devonian rock anywhere in the Catskills. Like Harvey Fite, we began to see the quarry as something altogether different.

We are putting together a guide to the geology at Opus; it just might be available when you get there. Don’t miss the art, but be sure to see the science. +