At the NW corner is Bascom Hollow, a site showing river terraces of the Fall River. Not far to the SE are the till hills of Gill: drumlins deposited then bulldozed by the last glacier in a SW / NE orientation.

Further S, there’s a marker for dinosaur footprints made in the mud by a herd of reptiles out for a walk to the river to get a drink 200 million years ago. The mud dried and metamorphosed into shale, preserving this sojourn forever. To the W is the Lily Pond Barrier, a resistant sandstone outcrop surrounded by plunge pools. Still further W is the Turners Falls Dam, built to raise the water level in the Connecticut River so that its power could be captured during the vertical drop in the canal, generating power for the mills. Near the dam are our famous stream-formed armoured mudballs.

Proceeding S into Montague, see the huge delta laid down about 12,000 years ago as the river rushed south out of Vermont into the still waters of glacial Lake Hitchcock, changing its course from S to NW at Miller Falls. We call the delta the Montague Plains, the source of our drinking water and an area which has had a tough recent history, as Boston thought it would be a good spot to truck its trash to in the 1970’s while NE Utilities tried to build twin nuclear power plants on it, as well. We turned back both groups, because aquifers under the Plains are treasured local resources. Continue S, noticing two kettle lakes, Green Pond and Lake Pleasant, then the Sawmill River to the SW with its floodplain and many concretions.

Head N now to where the Millers River flows into the Connecticut and stand halfway across the French King Bridge: the Gill rocks on your left are sedimentary, dropped as an alluvial fan while those on the eastern, Erving side are metamorphic and much more resistant. Imagine the Eastern Border Fault, formed 210 million years ago when this land was located at 10ºN and nearly pulled apart from the rest of North America, making Gill oceanfront property!

Of interest in Erving is the Northfield Mountain Reservoir, built to generate electricity as water from its pumped storage thunders down the hill, turning turbines. A remote cliff nearby is where the Hermit of Erving entertained people inside his cave. 700 feet below, the Millers River flows W to the Connecticut amid Level 5 rapids which only the skilled and the brave attempt to tame.