Old, Old River

My question for the Ottauquechee has been, "What is it like for you?"  I have been trying to wrap my mind around the antiquity of the river.   The glacier which receded past this watershed about 13,000 years ago shaped many details of its current course, the Quechee gorge being the most spectacular feature of that era.

Thirteen thousand years is a long time for humans, some of whom may have even seen the melting ice flowing through a landscape nearly bare of vegetation after the hard glacial scouring.  The river itself predated the glaciers, and its origin in time fades into a far deeper past.  According to the sources I have read, the underlying rock which became the Green Mountains found their way here from 400 million to 450 million years ago.  The tall rounded hills we now see were once far underground.  The power of erosion works through water, reducing the heights by fractions of an inch each year,  The rain falling finds the softer places, faults and more soluble veins of rock, and there streams form.  An Ottauquechee carved its way down the eastern slope of what is now Killington mountain.  Millions of years ago, the river scored the landscape with freshets, floods and the perpetual motion of gravity-driven mineral-rich water.  It continues today, in bright sun, after yet another sate of rain and burst of silt.