One of Cornell’s richest features is its history. So much has happened in the past century and a half that it is easy to forget events before that. Though the university wasn’t founded until 1865, the land it sits on has been changing for hundreds of millions of years. On the hike of the Cascadilla Gorge, Todd Bittner, our tour guide, told us how sediment layers formed in the gorge over time during the Devonian period. You can see vertically stacked layers in the gorge’s walls, each holding its own piece of history in the form of different fossils and remnants.

Even changes within the past hundred years can be seen. Mr. Bittner held up a picture from around 1900 of the waterfall that rushes under College Avenue and asked us to point out the differences between it and what we were looking at. One of the differences that stuck out to me was the addition of a sidewalk on the bridge that College Avenue passes. Back in the day when only horses and buggies traversed the dirt roads, a sidewalk wasn’t really necessary. The sidewalk is just one example of changes that have been made over time to improve the gorge and the areas around it. In 2008, Mr. Bittner and others were tasked with greatly increasing the durability and safety of the gorge and the walkways placed through it. Gathering about 2.8 million dollars from the university, they added natural looking reinforcements to the walkways to prevent them from being so easily damaged by floodwater. Walking through Cascadilla gorge, it’s easy to forget the work, both natural and manmade, that has been put into making it such a charming place.