Sam's Point, New York

A hike to the ice caves

Near Ellenville, New York is what we Westerners would call a “mesa,” made of quartz conglomerate. It’s a high, flat area that was left alone by glaciers that carved out the rest of the area. There’s an old road that goes up one side of the mesa, crosses it, and ends at the far edge of it where there are ice caves in amongst the blocks of 430 million-year-old rock that have shifted over the eons. It’s all a state park now, and they’ve closed the road. You have to walk up the road and across the flat top to visit the ice caves. This is what New Yorkers call “hiking.”

So my son and I took the hike. Going up the side of the cliff, I remembered that I had forgotten… something, I don’t remember what, back at the Jeep. He volunteered to walk back to the Jeep and get it. I sat down and waited.

I became aware of a pair of the most evil-looking bugs I’d ever seen, flying around near me. They were black and had very long tails - inches long! - that looked like stingers and I shuddered to think how bad their sting must be. They were mating, and landing on a tree trunk, and I shot up the last of the film in the camera taking photos of them.

And promptly lost that roll of film. I took one shot on the next roll of a very strange ritual.

Female Giant Ichneumon (Megarhyssa atrata) laying her eggs

It took a lot of searching on the Internet over the next year to find out what I’d shot. These are Giant Ichneumon wasps, and those evil-looking stingers are actually long, thin tubes through which they deposit their eggs deep into a hole in a tree, in which another wasp, the Pigeon Horntail, has already drilled and laid her eggs therein.

When they both hatch, the Ichneumon caterpillar eats the Pigeon Horntail caterpillar. That is their only source of food.

Nature is brutal.

I never found that other roll of film, so this is the only shot I have. At least it’s a good one.

We arrived at the ice caves and explored them. Here’s a shot I took of the trail down to them, partway down the other side of the “mesa.”

It’s quite a trail, going down between the blocks of stone that have fractured and shifted over the eons. It is cool in there, and the walls are wet and slimy.

But most of Sam’s Point is just flat and boring. There is no timber there, no snowcapped volcanoes to look at, and to an Oregon boy it just wasn’t much. To me the best part of the whole trip is the waterfall just outside of Ellenville that you drive past on your way up to Sam’s Point.

Unnamed waterfall at Ellenville, New York.

This comes down through a feature called the “North Gully” from the “mesa” above. I cannot find, on any map, a name for this waterfall.