Pink Pebbles

 

One thing I do on my daily dog walks is hunt for pink pebbles.  

The walk is not complete unless I find at least one!

 

The abundance of these pretty rosy quartz pebbles 

inspired my sister to take up a rock tumbling hobby!

Behind the house is a small valley with a stream running through it.  

 On the other side of the valley is an old gravel pit.  

Southern Maryland is geologically coastal plain, like much of the east coast.  The land here is made up of unconsolidated deposits of sand, silt, and gravel from the last 60 or so millions years. In some places, like Calvert Cliffs, one can find cool fossils and sharks' teeth, but here the mix is small to medium pebbles, mostly quartz.

The sad thing is that there has been a huge increase in the mining of these aggregate deposits, filling the narrow country roads with a seemingly endless parade of dump trucks.  

Apparently, there are few constraints on the companies harvesting the gravel and little legislation stipulating relandscaping and restoring the areas once they are mined out.

The gravel pit behind our valley was closed about ten years ago.  

Here's photos from 2014:

Here's what that area looks like today:

What was farmland and forest, is a wide swath of weeds, being recolonized very slowly.

Using my medium-sized dog for scale, you can imagine the huge quantity of material removed.  The top of the hill on the left was the former surface level.

This is happening all over Southern Maryland.