Wrapped in the folds of the imperial air,
And crowned with the gold of morn or evening rare,
O, far blue hills."
As it is gradually approached, the Gap and its enclosing ridge attain enormous proportions, dwarfing the smaller hills, among which the narrow, placid river flows below; and it is realized how tame are all the other ridges through which the Delaware has passed compared with this towering Blue Ridge, having the low-lying Blockade Mountain just behind, and partly closing the Gap. Soon we reach the foot of the range, and, bending with the river suddenly to the left, enter the Gap. Scarcely have we entered when the river, which has been swinging to the left, bends around again gradually to the right, and in a moment we are through the gorge, the river then circling around the Blockade Mountain, which has been so named because it seems always stupidly in the way.
The Indians called the Water Gap "Pohoqualin," meaning "the river between the mountains." The Delaware flows through it with a width of eight hundred feet and at an elevation of about three hundred feet above tide. It is twenty-nine miles northeast of the Lehigh Gap where the Lehigh River passes the Blue Ridge, and there are five other gaps between them, of which the "Wind Gap," heretofore referred to, is the chief. For many years this Wind Gap provided the only route to reach the country north of the Kittatinny. About two and a half miles southwest of the Delaware is "Tat's Gap," named in memory of Moses Fonda Tatamy, an old time Indian interpreter in this region, and familiarly called "Tat's" for short. The greatest of all these passes, however, is the Water Gap, where the Blue Ridge, rent asunder, has two noble peaks guarding the portals, towering sixteen hundred feet high, and named in honor of the Indians—Mount Minsi in Pennsylvania, after the tribes of the Minisink, and Mount Tammany in New Jersey, for the great chief of the Lenni Lenapes.
"Crags, knolls and mounds, in dire confusion hurled,
The fragmentary elements of an earlier world."
The Water Gap is a popular summer resort, there being numerous hotels and boarding-houses in eligible locations all about it, and the romantic scenery has been opened up by roads and paths leading to all the points of view. It is on such a stupendous scale, and exhibits the geological changes wrought during countless ages so well, that it always attracts the greatest interest. To the northward spread the fertile valleys of the Minisink; and the Delaware, which below the Gap flows to the southeast, passing through all the ridges, comes from the northeast above the Gap, and flows along the base of the Kittatinny for miles, as if seeking the outlet which it at length finds in this remarkable pass.
THE MINISINK.
From the elevated points of outlook at the Water Gap the observer can gaze northward over the fertile and attractive hunting-grounds of the Minsis, the land of the Minisink stretching far up the Delaware, and from the Kittatinny over to the base of the Pocono Mountain. This is the region of the "buried valleys," remarkable trough-like valleys, made during an ancient geological period, and partially filled up by the débris from the great glacier. From the Hudson River in New York, southwest to the Lehigh, and just beyond the Kittatinny range, two long valleys, with an intervening ridge, stretch across the country. The Delaware River, from Port Jervis to Bushkill, flows down the northwestern of these valleys, then doubles back on itself, and breaks through the intervening ridge at the remarkable Walpack Bend into the other valley, and follows it down to the Water Gap. The northwestern valley begins at Rondout on the Hudson, crosses New York State to Port Jervis, where the Delaware, coming from the northwest, turns to the southeast into it, occupying it for thirty miles to Bushkill, and then the valley continues past Stroudsburg, just above the Water Gap, to the Lehigh River at Weissport, below Mauch Chunk. The other valley is parallel to it at the base of the Kittatinny. These valleys, underlaid by the shales as bed-rocks, have been filled up with drift by the glacier from one hundred to seven hundred feet in depth, and they constitute the famous region of the Minisink.