Welcome to Frazier Quarry The Stone Experts

Limestone & Karst Terrain The Valley’s abundant limestone is evidence that the area was once under ocean water, long before the tectonic plates collided. Limestone forms in warm, shallow seas when generations of tiny sea creatures die and accumulate on the ocean floor, later to compress into solid rock. Karst Because of its limestone base, the Shenandoah Valley is karst, a terrain type with distinctive landforms and water resources. Slightly acidic water wore through the bedrock over many millions of years, leaving caves, caverns, and sinkholes. Streams and springs disappear and reappear over time. Aquifers Water that filters through the rocks collects in underground reservoirs, or aquifers. Aquifers are underground rock layers filled with groundwater in the spaces between fractured limestone, silt, gravel, and sand. Aquifers closer to the surface, used for irrigation and drinking water, are re-charged by rainwater. They are very useful but also extremely vulnerable to contamination. Caves & Caverns The water that dissolves limestone and other soluble rocks in the Shenandoah Valley leaves behind caves and caverns. In some caves and caverns, the deposits of dissolved minerals left by dripping water make the features of stalactites, stalagmites, and columns. Luray Caverns, a National Natural Landmark in the Valley, is ornately decorated with cascades, columns, stalactites, stalagmites and pools. Other Rocks & Minerals Many rocks and minerals occupy the Shenandoah Valley besides limestone. Other sedimentary rocks in the region are sandstone, shale, and coal. There are igneous rocks like granite, gabbro, and basalt, and metamorphic rocks like slate, gneiss, and quartzite. Manganese, iron ores, zinc, lead, sulfur, gypsum, and pyrite are relatively common Shenandoah Valley minerals. The Valley yields small amounts of oil and natural gas. Also present is red clay, an oceanic sediment with iron oxide, along with fossils of sea creatures like brachiopods and trilobites.

Mountain & Valley Building About half a billion years ago, the rocks that now make up the Shenandoah Valley solidified from ancient tidal flat sediments into vast, horizontal layers of limestone, shale, sandstone, and dolomite.

Geology of the Shenandoah Valley Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historical Park blockquote {border-left: 5px solid #fff;} Wall made from limestone removed from the roadbed during construction of Valley Turnpike NPS Photo by Ann & Rob Simpson Underground and surface forces, acting over many millions of years, created the Shenandoah Valley and its surrounding hills and ridges. These long, slow processes continue today as the Valley region gradually weathers, erodes, levels, and deposits soil.

It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysteri-ous nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.

Fair ..

New York City doesn’t love you. Why would think you’re in a relationship with New York? It’s not a boyfriend or a parent. New York will never give you its approval because New York City is too busy being New York City to care about you.