Driving West - Ringing Rocks

It was now time to start the 2nd part of the journey - which was the drive to Chicago. To be honest I hadn't fully decided which direction to go from Long Island. I was contemplating with two options: Either to drive to the Niagara Falls or start driving directly west towards Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. After pondering awhile I decided to drive west since I really wanted to see the falls but I wasn't 100% sure how things would work out with the rental car and border crossing to Canada. And I didn't drive all the way up there and see only the US side of the falls. So I decided to leave it to another time.

I got a tip from Jess on the previous night about something called the "ringing rocks" and as it happened they were located conveniently on my path. So I decided to go and take a look.


Wikipedia describes the Ringing Rocks as: Ringing Rocks are rocks that have the property of resonating like a bell when struck. Ringing rocks are also known as sonorous rocks or lithophonic rocks, as used in idiophonic musical instruments called lithophones. In 1965, geologist Richard Faas of Lafayette College took a few of the rocks back to his lab for testing. He found that when the rocks were struck they created a series of tones at frequencies lower than the human ear can hear. An audible sound is only produced because these tones interact with each other. Although Faas's experiments explained the nature of the tones, they did not identify the specific physical mechanism in the rock which made them. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_rocks

There is another way of seeing the phenomena. These sites can be found from several places in the world and quite often they have somewhat of a spiritual substance to them. They are claimed to be "dead zones" where remarkably few things are living - no insects vegetation and it it said that the animals avoid the place and even birds don't fly over them. 

Which ever way you want to see it it was a great place to visit. I've never heard rocks ringing on that manner. I didn't have a hammer with me (which most people seemed to have) but using another smaller rock worked as fine to make them ring.

After the Ringing Rocks I continued driving west through some small roads and finally to main highways which took me all the way to Pittsburgh, where I stayed for the first night driving west. Another Motel night!