Kittatinny Valley

The Kittatinny Valley is a section of the Great Appalachian Valley in Sussex and Warren County in northwestern New Jersey that is bounded on the west by Kittatinny Mountain, and in the east by the Highlands region. The valley is roughly 39 miles long and average breadth of 10 miles through the center of Sussex and Warren Counties.

The Kittatinny Valley is in northern New Jersey. The western side of the valley goes from the New York state line, east of High Point, and runs southwest along the base of the eastern slope of Kittatinny Mountains to the terminal moraine created by the Wisconsin Glacier just north of Columbia on the New Jersey border with Pennsylvania. This is slightly south of the Delaware Water Gap. The eastern side of the valley trends northeast along Highlands of the Jenny Jump Mountains, then along the base of Allamuchy Mountains to Andover where it follows the western edge of the Pimple Hills to the Hamburg Mountains. The eastern edge of the valley follows the western base of Hamburg Mountain to the New York State line.

The valley is about twenty one miles long and ten miles wide.

North of the New York state line is the Hudson Valley. South of the terminal moraine of the Wisconsin Glacier is the Lehigh Valley. The Hudson, the Lehigh, and the Kittatinny Valleys are all locally named sections of the Great Appalachian Valley.

Sediment was deposited at the bottom of deep seas. The Kittatinny Valley was created during the late Ordovician period and the Cambrian period. This is when the volcanic island chain collided with proto North America, around four hundred fifty million BC. This is known as the Taconic Orogeny. The rock from the islands went over top of the North American plate. The sediment under the seas was compressed and formed shale and was uplifted. Thus the Kittatinny Valley was born. Then a small continent collided with proto North America around four hundred million BC. This created folding and faulting which created the Kittatinny Mountain and the southern Appalachians. The valley is situated between the Silurian Shawangunk quartz conglomerate and the lower Cambrian Hardyston quartzite.

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