Panther Mountain is one of the Catskill High Peaks, located in the Town of Shandaken in Ulster County, New York. At approximately 3,720 feet (1,130 m) in elevation, it is the 18th highest in the range. A combination of factors has led some geologists to believe the mountain is on the site of an ancient meteorite impact crater. Its proximity to Slide Mountain, the highest Catskill peak, the relatively short distance required to climb the mountain from the south and the excellent views available from the mountain and nearby Giant Ledge have made Panther one of the most popular hikes in the range. Aspiring members of the Catskill Mountain 3500 Club must climb it twice, at least once during winter.
Name The origin of the name is unknown. Panthers may once have been seen in the area; but are not resident in the Catskills today.
Geography The mountain takes the shape of a longitudinal ridge in the center of the rough circle mostly formed by Esopus and Woodland creeks. Slide's north ridge begins right where the Panther/Giant Ledge ridge ends. Two named tributaries of Woodland, its Dougherty Branch and Panther Kill, rise on the mountain's western slopes. Three of the valleys around the edge of the mountain have earned separate names of their own. Going clockwise from the southwest, they are Little Peck Hollow, Hatchery Hollow and Fox Hollow. The ridge aside the Daugherty Branch is called Fork Ridge. The mountain rises gradually from the north, with many false summits. The drop to the south, to the col with Giant Ledge, is much sharper. The entire area has long been a part of New York's Forest Preserve. Today it is within the Slide Mountain Wilderness Area, part of the Catskill Park, managed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Natural history
Geology
The circular pattern made by the two creeks surrounding Panther Mountain suggest that it might have a different origin from other Catskill peaks. Most mountains' drainage basins show a more dendritic (tree-like) pattern rather than the rosette made by Esopus and Woodland creeks around the mountain. In the 1940s, geologist George Chadwick noticed this dome structure, and concluded that it might be the result of gas pushing up from below. The Dome Gas Company drilled a 6,000-foot (1,800 m) well into the structure. It produced roughly 50,000 cubic feet (1,400 m3) of natural gas a day, but since that was not profitable, the effort was abandoned. In the early 1970s, another geologist, Yngvar Isachsen of the New York State Geological Survey at the New York State Museum in Albany, wondered if the stream pattern indicated an impact crater buried beneath the surface. Since it was not his primary task at the Geological Survey, Isachsen did most of his research into the crater question in his own time. He found, when looking at the bed of Esopus Creek, that much of the exposed sandstone and shale showed an unusually closely spaced fracture pattern — every foot (30 cm) instead of every meter (3.3 ft), as is seen elsewhere in the Catskills. He reasoned that if a crater wall lay beneath, the debris from the impact and the sedimentary rock already in the area would have settled more compactly and been more prone to sagging and fracturing over time. It wasn't until his later years, in the early 1990s, that Isachsen was able to devote more time to the crater question. Since the walls of a newly formed impact crater are often unable to support themselves, landslides occur and build up a mound of rock and soil in the center. This results in a lower density of rock and thus slightly reduced gravitational pull, which can be measured. Isachsen took a gravimeter along on two hikes up the mountain and took regular readings. As he had expected, the gravity in the area was slightly lower than other mountains of comparable elevation in the Catskills, adding more weight to the crater theory. To prove his hypothesis, Isachsen needed to drill deep into the rock under the mountain and find direct mineral evidence of a meteorite strike, but this was beyond his resources. Then he discovered that drill cuttings from the earlier gas well were archived at the New York State Museum - Geological Survey. These cuttings were examined carefully, during which graduate students working for him found microscopic iron spherules — to him irrefutable evidence of an impact crater. However, questions from crater specialists at a conference in Budapest sent him back to look more closely at the cuttings. One attendee pointed out that he hadn't ruled out the possibility that the spherules had merely been deposited by a passing meteorite or comet. In October 1999, closer examination of tiny quartz crystals in the samples turned up shock lamellae, which could only have resulted from impact. A group of Canadian specialists confirmed the finding. The impact is estimated to have occurred 375 million years ago, during the Devonian period, when much of what is now the Catskills was either river delta or a shallow sea. The crater lies 2,640 feet (800 m) below the surface, is 6 miles (9.7 km) wide, and lies directly under the mountain. The meteorite that struck is believed to have been roughly one-half mile (1 km) wide, striking with a force equivalent to 11 trillion tons (9.9 trillion tonnes) of Trinitrotoluene. Isachsen believes it is possible that there may be significant hydrocarbon deposits, often associated with ancient buried impact craters, very deep beneath the mountain. In 2004, the European Space Agency's Mars Express probe found an analogous circular plateau in the Solis Planum region of the Thaumasia Planum area of Mars. While it has not yet eroded as Panther has, both are an example of inverted relief.
Forests Panther's forests are for the most part typical of the Catskills, with beech-birch-maple northern hardwood forests on its lower slopes giving way to boreal forests of balsam fir and red spruce above 3,500 feet (1,100 m) on the mountain. While the lower slopes were logged in the 19th century, particularly for Eastern hemlock bark and its tannin, the upper mountain remains in first growth. According to Catskill forest historian Michael Kudish, there is a rare virgin spruce grove near the summit. There are also two open areas visible from the summit on a knob known as Beech Flat, one of about 2 acres (0.81 ha) at 2,740 feet (840 m) and another of 5–7 acres (2.0–2.8 ha) at 2,848 feet (868 m), are totally natural, resulting from the absence of soil in those areas.
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