Fungus and a Very Old Rock

Today is the last post I’ll make about the walk we took on Sunday exploring the Hawksbill Cabin’s backyard, as well as that of our neighbors, Sally and Dan. The beaver dam and that old foundation were pretty interesting, but there were several other finds to make for an exciting day of discovery:  an abandoned fox or coyote den, some Turkey Tail fungus, and a rock from the Shenandoah region’s “basement comoplex.”

The first of these three items we found was the little den. Sally and Dan’s dog Latte was very curious and wanted to go in to investigate, but we called him off. We thought it was abandoned, but in this area, when a home is emptied, somebody else will just move in, and that could just be a timber rattler or copperhead in this area as easily as it could be anything else.

As we moved along towards the hollow and the beaver dam, we stepped across a felled log that was encrusted with Turkey Tail fungus – that’s the photo at the top of the post. This is very common, no doubt readers will have seen it before. What I learned about Trametes Versicolor, the formal name of this fungus, is that not only is it edible (if you decide to eat some, be sure to do your own research first...I have no idea how you need to prepare it, etc.), it also has cancer treatment potential as a boosting agent for other therapies.

There is a wide variation in the colors the fungus will produce. It is the natural food product for moth larvae and maggots - again, a word to the wise if you decide to eat some of this stuff in the wild...be prepared!)  Wikipedia has a short article showing some older samples that are encrusted with wide green bands of algae, which leads me to assume the ones were found weren’t very old.

The next find was in some scattered rocks around the old foundation on one of the HC back lots. Sally, whom readers may recognize from ranger programs at Big Meadows and Skyland, scanned the rocks lying around the excavation, identifying limestone and granites. But when she spotted this particular rock, she noted the striations and told me that the rock could be from the basement comoplex in the Shenandoah region.

If it is, it started out as common granite, but over the course of eons it was changed, under pressure, so that the crystals formed stripes. What kind of pressure? If you are familiar with the geology of this region, the theory is that the Blue Ridge and the Appalachians behind it were formed during continental collisions (in this case, the Congo region of Africa colliding with North America), so this was pretty extreme pressure.

This theory is partly based on what scientist are observing today in the Horn of Africa region, part of Ethiopia, where the continent of Africa is literally tearing itself apart.

Back to the Shenandoah region.  This granite layer was previously known as the Pedlar Formation, and has been dated as approximately one billion years old. Granite on Old Rag and elsewhere in the region is younger than this stuff, and of course, we have all the sedimentary rocks from the old ocean floor that was here over the ages. There is a good article on the basement comoplex on Wikipedia for those who want to do some following up, and scientists at NVCC and JMU have also written extensively (and enthusiatically) about it.

When we started exploring the excavation back there the other day, we knew we’d be looking at old stuff. Speaking for myself, I never expected to find a billion year old rock – that’s nearly one quarter the age of the planet itself!