Clay Hills

We took a little side trip to the Clay hills or Bad Lands as some people know them. The kids can run like crazy here and get dirty.

Badlands is a geologic term for an area of soft rock devoid of vegetation and soil cover that has become molded into a rolling landscape of rounded hills and gullies. Such areas are rare in Ontario. They exhibit the reddish hue of the Queenston Shale that forms them. It is the presence of iron oxide in the shale that accounts for the red colour. The narrow greenish bands that can be seen throughout the shale are due to the change of red iron oxide (iron III) to green iron oxide (iron II) brought on by the circulating groundwater. The relatively soft shale is essentially clay and easily eroded by water