Uplands. Thirty-four more were added over the following 52 years (1737 -1789), until the Uplands were nearly as populous as the Central Valley and the Coast.' An amazing transformation took place. By the time the American Revolution began in 1776, the vast forests had been converted to a true new England, to "a world of fields and fences."' Scarcely a whimper remained of the howling wilderness.

The Hills with a Metamorphic Heart

The Uplands ocean of hills rises quite abruptly out of the Central Valley. The rises take place along what are sometimes called the Central Valley's Eastern Wall and Western Wall. The walls are especially pronounced in the Valley's northern end, where the Uplands loom over the lowlands below. A particularly good view of the Eastern Wall can be had from the public lookout tower on Soapstone Mountain, in Somers's Shenipsit State Forest. Even the superhighways have to battle their way up the Walls. The long, steep grades on Route 2 in Glastonbury between Exits 9 and 12, on Route 84 in Cheshire between Exits 26 and 28, and on Route 84 in Vernon between Exits 97 and 98 climb up either the Eastern Wall or the Western Wall. If one looks back from the tops of these grades, the Central Valley can be seen spreading out below. Ahead, the roads start rolling with the hills.

At the heart of the abrupt shift in landscape that takes place along the two Walls, geologists have found a radical change in Connecticut's bedrock foundation. Instead of the soft brownstone that underlies most of the Central Valley, the Uplands are dominated by hard, metamorphic bedrock. Metamorphic rocks are rocks that have been subjected to the intense heat and pressure of the Earth's interior and have changed their structure and appearance. It's like baking dough into bread. Any manner of rock can be metamorphosed: igneous, sedimentary, and even previously metamorphosed rocks. Metamorphism usually takes place far below the surface, sometimes as much as 25 mites. Later erosion of the overlying crust takes the metamorphosed rock out of the geologic oven and exposes it at the surface where we now see it.

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