Marcellus Shale outcroppings look like this:
according to Wikipedia
according to a Pennsylvania Geological pamphlet.
There's all kinds of information online to lead you in its direction
There are even maps that tell you where every well has been drilled, or has been approved to be drilled
This was the worst news that I received from a map:
In Pennsylvania, the Marcellus is located between 4,000 - 7,000 feet underground. After several days of research, I found someone who knew of, and was willing to share, a location of an outcropping within a few hours of Philadelphia.
The information came in an email containing little other than map coordinates. Plugging them into Google and Bing's mapping sites brought me here:
The hill on the top right is the site
Both Bing and Google had street-views, so I explored the area, figuring out where I could park, and where the best place to find mud might be.
It was a great site. Lots of loose material. Very likely to have silt that had washed down to the base that would be easy to collect. It was right on a roadside which was likely public land. There was a river nearby which might have clay deposits.
How exciting was this???
I borrowed a car, packed up a shovel and half a dozen buckets, and headed off the next day.
THE OUTCROPPING
Here it is! Three hours west of Philly in Pennsylvania. Who would pass this juncture and look, care, or know what towering over them? This rock rarely surfaces, yet here it sits at an intersection of two major arteries.
I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. Tar black, dusted with rust and rubble, the brittle stone crumbles and slides down the face of the rock, completely covering it at the base.
There was a grain - a movement in the surface that shifted down and to the west.
Papery layers fleck off and oxidize, turning rusty orange, ocher, umber, and red.
It looks like both stone and metal
A continuous stream of trickling shards slid down the rock face - a constant sound in the background.
Close to this large boulder, there was
this pile of shards. An ex-boulder.
These two video offers a sense of the physical qualities of the stone
Here you can see stones that have imploded, leaving black mounds of shale shards
This is what I came for. The soil is very hard when it's dry. It was fortunate that there was a muddy area where I could dig material that nature had already refined into small particles.
