THE DEVIL'S PUNCH BOWL, CASCADE CREEK, AND THE ERIE RAILROAD: TOPOGRAPHIC EVOLUTION OF LANDSCAPE FEATURES DEVELOPED BY PLEISTOCENE GLACIATION AND MODIFIED BY RAILROAD ENGINEERING NEAR LANESBORO, SUSQUEHANNA COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

The Devil's Punchbowl is a pond in a 60 ft-deep amphitheatre that is carved in Upper Devonian Lock Haven sandstone and shale by the recession of Cascade Creek falls and dammed by a railroad embankment across the mouth of the bedrock gorge. The “cascade” was caused by Wisconsinan-age glacial deposits that blocked the original course of the creek and diverted it westward to the Susquehanna River. As the glacier retreated northeastward, it paused and deposited a 150 ft-thick mass of material 1.5 mi upstream of the original Cascade Creek-Susquehanna River confluence and just east of a saddle in the ridge separating the two streams. Meltwater flowed down the side of the Susquehanna valley in a 100 ft-high waterfall. As the ice receded up Cascade Creek valley, the falls started receding headward across the saddle. After 3 mi of up-valley ice retreat, the Susquehanna-Delaware River divide at Gulf Summit, NY, was reached where a second 100 ft-high waterfall formed. During 6 more mi of ice retreat a proglacial lake fronted the ice and spilled down the creek. All this meltwater drainage caused knickpoint recession of the first falls about 1000 ft to the head of the Punchbowl. Another few 100 ft of headward erosion will destroy the falls as it cuts into the glacial deposits in the Cascade Creek valley.

In 1848 the Erie Railroad laid tracks down the Cascade Creek valley from Gulf Summit to Lanesboro, crossing Cascade Creek on a high wooden-arch bridge and Starrucca Creek, 2 mi to the south, on a great stone viaduct. The former was situated a short distance downstream of the falls. “Fears of its unreliability” caused the Erie to later bury the bridge and gorge in a large fill (1857-1860). The creek infiltrated through the fill and “in spate” flowed through a tunnel cut in the bedrock just to the right of the falls, which now was often inundated by water backing up in the upper gorge. A new man-made bedrock falls took its place on the north side of the gorge at the mouth of the tunnel. In August 1875 a flood washed out the fill and swept the buried bridge-timbers away. A much more massive fill was emplaced over the next three months—and this new embankment, aided by the old rock tunnel, has held for more than a century. Today's Devil's Punch Bowl is the sediment-clogged lake impounded behind this high fill, the former falls still being mostly drowned on its north side.