The segment of the abandoned pre-Pleistocene Teays Valley between Scary and Huntington, W. Va. stands 130-240 feet above the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, and its bedrock floor slopes westward at about 0.6 foot per mile. The bedrock floor is overlain by highly weathered gravel in which a soil profile developed; only resistant siliceous materials remain. As much as 100 feet of locally derived sediments overlies the basal gravel. Sand was deposited at each end of the valley but in the east-central part it grades laterally into a laminated silty clay that was deposited during a period of ponding, probably in Kansan time. These deposits are deeply eroded. Probably during Illinoian time, ponding at a lower level resulted in deposition of a younger silty clay in the western part of the valley. This silty clay is weathered to a depth of about 14 feet. During a brief ponding in Wisconsin time, a widely scattered veneer of ice-rafted unweathered pebbles of igneous and metamorphic rocks was deposited. This veneer represents the youngest Pleistocene deposits in the valley and it occurs as much as 110 feet above the present Ohio River. Depositional, weathering, erosional, and topographic evidence argues that the Teays Valley in West Virginia was abandoned in late Tertiary or early Pleistocene time by normal stream-capture processes and that prolonged weathering followed. © 1963, The Geological Society of America, Inc.
