AU SABLE CHASM tells the story of the Ages.  Here in enduring rock are the records of that dim past when in the eternity of “the Beginning” the unstable earth reeled and staggered with the pulsations of its heart of fire.

Here may be found the ripple marks of waves that washed the ancient beach, and the pittings of raindrops that fell when the rock was in its plastic state.  Here are signs of the hardening shell and the shrinking where the thin crust wrinkled and bubbled up to mountain heights, then breaking like crackle-glass, left deep gorges and ragged peaks.

Then the mighty leveling glaciers followed to grind and polish and fill, and the floods came down out of the mountains of the South loaded with sharp flint and rasping quartz to clear the gorges and gnaw their way deep into the new rock, until, in the fullness of time, stood revealed the “Walled Banks of the Au Sable.”  The story is all there, plain to those who can read its writings. 

To the scientist it is interesting as illustrating rock fracture and erosion; to lovers of the strange and beautiful, a place of wonder.   

-Seneca Ray Stoddard, 1907

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Click here to explore the History of Ausable Chasm.