By Victor Greto
DELAWARE WATER GAP -South of Port Jervis, N.Y., the Delaware River takes a 90-degree turn, just before it defines the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
From there, it becomes the 70,000-acre Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, a formation of geological wonderment and sacred history.
“The Gap ties back to our creation stories,” says Jim Beer, a Lenape Indian, whose ancestors first settled the land more than a millennium ago. “It played a significant role in the creation of human beings in North America, where some of our people came up from out of the earth.”
The Gap is where the Lenape took their ultimate spiritual stand against the Europeans. “At the time of contact, the Gap was guarded and no one was allowed in,” Beer says. “When any people were coming through the area, they were escorted by our people through the area.”
For geologists, it’s a spot that reveals the geological history of the river at its most profound.
“There are rocks more than 400 million years old here,” says Ron Witte, a geologist at the New Jersey Geological Survey.
The creation of the river, like most geology, is a tale of erosion over millions of years. Those 400 million-year-old rocks are part of the ancient Appalachian range that formed east of the Gap when the continents of North America and Africa collided.
Over millions of years, much of this sedimentary rock, from gray sandstone to limestone to shale, was compacted and, by 290 million years ago, folded and uplifted by the collision into the mountain ridges that border the northern part of the river today.
But the Delaware River as we know it was not formed until between 30 million and 50 million years ago, says Greg Cavalo, a geologist with the Delaware River Basin Commission.
During those 20 million years, three separate rivers merged. One river began north of the Gap and flowed southwest; another, sometimes called the ancestral Delaware River, started north of Trenton and flowed east to the sea; another, the headwaters to a tributary of the ancestral Schuylkill River, started south of Trenton and flowed further south to the sea.
All three rivers merged over millions of years of erosion to form the Delaware River. When the rivers met, water began flowing down from the north through the Gap and on south toward Trenton and eventually to the sea at the bay.
It was the merging of these rivers and the movement of the rocks over millions of years that helped erode a two-mile-long, 1,200-foot “gap” through the Kittatinny mountains near Stroudsburg, Pa.
The beauty of the Gap has inspired individuals and civilizations. There are dozens of ancient Indian sites along the Gap, Witte says.
But because of what has since happened to the area – road-building and the general abuse of nature – Beer says some of his people have a hard time going there.
“There are elders who won’t go near there because it makes them sick physically and spiritually, or it makes them too sad,” he says. “It’s the way the roads run through there, and there is no place for our people there.”