title: Chickies Formation
text: # Chickies Formation
  
  The Cambrian Chickies Formation is a mapped bedrock unit in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. It is named for Chickies Rock, north of Columbia, Pennsylvania along the Susquehanna River.
  
  ## Description
  
  The Chickies Formation is described as a light-gray to white, hard, massive quartzite and quartz schist with thin interbedded dark slate at the top. Included at the base is the Hellam Conglomerate Member. It is a rare metamorphic rock that has fossils; Skolithos is found throughout the formation.
  
  ## Depositional age
  
  Relative age dating places the Chickies in the Lower Cambrian Period, deposited between 542 and 520 million years ago (±2 million years).
  
  ## Economic geology
  
  The Chickies is quarried as a building stone and for aggregate. The stone used to build the restrooms at Valley Forge National Historical Park is Chickies quartzite.
  
  * Specimen of Chickies Banded Slate. Shows older folded schistosity parallel to bedding cut by younger cleavage inclined to bedding.
  * Specimen of mica schist from upper beds of Chickies Quartzite. Shows stretched epigenetic tourmaline.
  * Cobble bed in Hellam Conglomerate Member
  