Mount Moosalamoo and Lake Dunmore
LocationThis panorama is taken from Burnt Ridge (950 feet) looking southeast and includes the entire length of the Mount Moosalamoo massif and most of Lake Dunmore. LandscapeThis long mountainside is part of the Green Mountain Escarpment marking the eastern edge of the Champlain Valley and the start of the Green Mountains. Like most of the escarpment, this section is underlain by steeply tilted beds of resistant Cheshire quartzite. As retreating glacial ice pinned rivers of meltwater against this mountainside 13,600 years ago, river terraces formed. As the ice mass retreated, the terraces were abandoned and are still dramatic topographical features (third snapshot). These rocky, gravelly terraces support distinct forest communities, and have influenced the histories of industry and recreation. GigaPanThis panorama is made from 649 images taken on July 10, 2009. It covers a field of view of 172 degrees, and includes 1.8 billion pixels (1825 MP). |
What to look for
History (logging)In 1813 the Vermont Glass Factory bought 2000 acres of land around the north end of Lake Dunmore, and a century of industrial logging began. The land supplied the ca. 2000 cords of firewood needed every year to operate the multiple furnaces and kilns. Before and after the Civil War, charcoal for the local iron industry was made from hardwoods on the kame terraces below Moosalamoo (third snapshot), still known as "Coal Kiln Flats." From 1864 to 1917, a sawmill on Sucker Brook (to the left of the fourth snapshot) cut as much as 600,000 board feet of lumber per year. In 1919 the A. Johnson Lumber company bought the mountainside and built a sawmill at the north end of the lake. By 1926 about 1.5 million board feet of lumber had been harvested, including the last old growth stands in Salisbury. Today, the mountainside is owned by the Keewaydin Foundation and the US Forest Service. It would be encouraging to learn that small examples of the important community types of this heavily used forest had been permanently set aside from logging. |