All told, it is thought that several hundred trees have been found in the upper reaches of the Schoharie Creek. The rocks that they are found in tell that story. Below the trees are dark shales in which marine fossils are sometimes found. These trees must have lived near the shores of an ancient ocean which stretched westward from the Catskill region. The stumps are generally found planted in a red shale which was a red clay soil of long ago, much like those for which Georgia is famous.
Red clays are typical of warm and usually tropical climates.
The stumps themselves are buried in lighter colored, thinly laminated sandstones. These are river flood deposits. The sands were deposited from subsiding floodwaters of the rivers which once formed the great Catskill Delta of the late Devonian Period. The Gilboa Forest was thus a coastal forest on the shores of a tropical ocean which exists no more. All of this conjures up an image of an ancient river bank.