Ringing Rocks, PA – A Boulder Field Where You Can Make “Rock Music”!

We’ve been studying Earth Science and this trip to Ringing Rocks fit in perfectly!! Ringing Rocks State Park in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania is a seven acre boulder field… a paradise of climbing for my kids!! What is especially neat is that if you take a rock or hammer and tap on the boulders, they ring! Different rocks make different tones, so we were all enthralled with making “rock music”!!

Approximately 200 million years ago stretching of the Earth’s crust allowed basaltic magma to travel up from the upper mantle and inject as sills into a series of shale formations of the Newark Basin. These sills extend the length of the Appalachian mountains, but only a narrow band of outcrops in southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey develop ringing rock boulder fields. The probable reason is that these areas were at the southern edge of the Pleistocene glaciers, and would have been subject to extreme periglacial conditions, according to Wikipedia.

Just to give you a quick idea of what it’s like I’ve shared this rather shaky video clip. It doesn’t capture the musical tone as well as I’d’ve liked, but it at least gives you a flavor. The kids sure had fun!!

We also walked down (and to the right) to the waterfall I remembered visiting as a girl. There wasn’t much water flowing, but the ice sure was interesting!