Rock City Park, Olean

Rock City Park sits off Route 16 near Olean, in the Southern Tier of New York a few miles above the Pennsylvania line, and it is a forest of stone. Huge blocks of quartz conglomerate stand in rows split by deep crevices, so that the trail through its 23 acres runs like a street between buildings. It is billed as the largest collection of exposed quartz conglomerate on the planet.

The rock is the Olean Conglomerate, which also turns up elsewhere in the Southern Tier and in Pennsylvania and Ohio. It began as the floor of an ancient sea. Rivers brought quartz pebbles down from the mountains and dropped them into the sand and mud of the seabed, where over millions of years they cemented into a natural concrete. The rock has been dated to about 320 million years, while the quartz pebbles in it are around half a billion years old. When the Appalachians rose, the area was lifted and eventually eroded into the towering blocks and passages seen today. Much later the glaciers stopped just short of Olean, and their meltwater ran south.

People have climbed among the rocks for well over a century. In 1890 five local businessmen behind the Western New York and Pennsylvania Traction Company bought the land and turned it into a rock-strewn amusement park, and within a few years thousands of people a day were rolling in. Photographs from around 1900 show men in suits posing on the boulders and a natural bridge of leaning rocks with a path running underneath. The crowds thinned as movies and air travel pulled attention elsewhere, the park changed hands over the years, and in 2001 Cindy and Dale Smith bought it.

Today a visitor centre and gift shop stand at the entrance. From the bare rock behind it, with treetops rolling away for miles, a steel stairway drops down among the outcrops, where formations carry names like the Sentinel and the Old Man. The loop can be walked in under an hour, though most people take longer.