2oldhippies love fresh bread, the smell of fresh laundry from the clothes line, and as you might guess if you’ve been reading the blog, fresh road cuts.

We are old enough to remember when the interstate highway system was built. One of us cannot remember the new roadcuts created then back in Tennesee, but in Montana where I grew up, the road had to blow through (literally, with a lot of dynamite) a canyon of the Missouri River between Great Falls and Helena. (near the stretch of the Missouri River that Lewis and Clark named “Gates of the Mountains.”) Those fresh road cuts were so awesome, so beautiful, and so revealing that my brother, who had just selected geophysics as his university major and was quickly turning into a rockhead, made us all take a field trip on the new highway just to pull over and look at the fresh road cuts. I’ve loved them ever since, and my reaction is pretty much the one with the snapped head and the word “Squirrel!” only I say “Roadcut!”

Here in Vermont, the Interstate construction did much the same service, opening up the inside of the earth for closer inspection, and Vermont is very interesting, geologically speaking. Periodically, our beloved rockheads at the Agency of Transportation decide to widen the cuts, clean up after rock slides and such, and we are treated to fresh roadcuts (thus increasing my driving time between Burlington to Montpelier, rather the decreasing it, I might add.)

Our original 2014 adventure travel plan — US 2 West, then down the Rockies through Wyoming to Boulder/Denver, included following the Interstate route through Wyoming that got another roadcut fiend, John McPhee, all excited, and which he wrote about in detail in Rising from the Plains, a great read about the geologic history of the Northern Rockies. We were all set to marvel at those road cuts. It was the geologic wonders of New Brunswick and the Bay of Fundy that gave us our alternative destination once our plans had to change, but we didn’t know that the relatively new Fundy Trail Parkway was waiting for us with dozens of fresh “Roadcuts!” Wow. As everywhere along this coastline, bending, folding, piling on, intrusion, uplifts, hundreds of millions of years of “all hell breaking loose” on display. And in case you can’t get here soon enough to see them in their fresh state, before mosses, lichens, mineral leaching and other aging processes dull them, we are pleased to offer you our views.

Behold the Road Cut!