My man Walcott contributed a lot of images to the USGS stockpile during his travels. Today, I’ll feature one from Bishop, California, from 1894: Got it from here. Rock hammer on the left for scale. The caption reads: Plicated layers of thin bedded chert in limestone etched by erosion, Lower Cambrian (?). Hill two miles … Read more
That’s from the side of route 287, somewhere between Fort Collins, Colorado, and the Wyoming border. Though I took this shot >6 weeks ago on my outward-bound trip, today I find myself back in Fort Collins on the eastward leg of my summer road jaunt. And you know what one does in Fort Collins. Happy … Read more
Callan embarks on an exhausting climb of a major summit in the Wyoming Bighorn mountains, a peak named in tribute of one of his geological heroes. Come join the trek to the top of Darton Peak!
Here’s one of the first things as you drive north from Chief Mountain in Glacier National Park, and cross the border into Alberta: The mountain in the middle is Crandell Mountain, and it looms to the north above the village of Waterton Lakes, but the lovely folds it displays are best viewed from a more … Read more
To follow up on my March post on the French Thrust, here’s a gigapan of the outcrop. [gigapan id=”83267″] Sun River Canyon, Montana, of course: the Sevier fold-and-thrust belt.
Folded quartzofeldspathic vein in amphibolite, Wyoming Terrane basement complex, Montana.
Dave Lageson of Montana State University and I ran into each on our respective field trips sometime last year outside of the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana, and he told me that I had to go check out the Swift Dam area, a little ways northwest of the town of Depuyer. So, a … Read more
That’s my Rockies co-instructor Pete Berquist, in the regulation uniform of an orange down vest, holding a subtly-folded slab of sandstone (it’s a very slight “S”), rescued from amid the shaley wastes of the Blackleaf Formation, the Cretaceous aged sedimentary rocks beneath the Lewis Thrust on the Blackfoot Reservation, just east of Glacier National Park. … Read more
Following up on Friday’s fold, I wanted to share a few other images from our hike last week in Cascade Canyon of Grand Teton National Park. Lots of cool exposures of Archean basement rock there. Folds in gneissic banding: Big, angular mafic blocks in a felsic soup: Swarm of granite dikes on a mountainside: Asymmetric … Read more
Spotted this in Cascade Canyon, in the Tetons of Wyoming, last weekend: Nice asymmetric antiforms and synforms in the gneissic layering of the Archean basement rocks exposed there. Also, we saw a bull moose. More on that later on, when I get more time.