One year ago today, Lily and I had a fantastic wedding week in Montana. To celebrate the year we’ve been together since then, today I’ve got a gazillion photos to share – reliving the week for those who were there, and sharing it with those who weren’t able to make it… Our first group hike: … Read more
After our “pre-honeymoon” sojourn to the Canadian Rockies last summer, Lily and I returned to the U.S. via Porthill, and then drove over to a place I’ve been wanting to visit for a long time: Yaak, Montana. Yaak (or “the Yaak“) is way up in the Kootenai National Forest, in way-way-way-northwesternmost Montana. We camped out … Read more
I’m cleaning out my backlog of old photos. Here’s some small living things that I’ve taken pictures of in the relatively recent past… Let’s start with two butterflies in the Gallatin Range, Montana: Returning to Virginia, here’s a fuzzy little white moth: A crane fly is next… (M.A.G.I.C. has been churning out lots of crane … Read more
One of Callan’s former advisers, Dave Lageson of Montana State University, heads to the summit of the world’s tallest mountain with his graduate student, the accomplished mountaineer Conrad Anker.
The Friday fold is a gorgeously deformed “duplex structure” in Mesozoic limestones of southwestern Montana.
As a follow up to last week’s post about halite casts in a hand sample I collected in western Montana’s Belt Supergroup, here’s another example. Unlike those (larger) examples of halite-shaped mud cubes, this sample shows (smaller) examples of the empty space left behind by the dissolved salt crystals: Image is scanned, and the penny … Read more
Callan’s answer to the riddle of the mystery outcrop is revealed. Spoiler: the glacier did it.
Here’s one you can click through to make much bigger: That’s a pretty cool outcrop that shows something amazing. Anyone want to take a stab at interpreting it?
I collect a lot of samples when I roam the west on my summer georoadtrips. Yesterday when I got back to my office at NOVA, I unloaded about 200 pounds of rocks from my Prius. These samples are all destined to serve as teaching aides for NOVA and GMU students in lab exercises and/or hallway … Read more
To follow up on my March post on the French Thrust, here’s a gigapan of the outcrop. Sun River Canyon, Montana, of course: the Sevier fold-and-thrust belt.
Folded quartzofeldspathic vein in amphibolite, Wyoming Terrane basement complex, Montana.
Here is a trio of concentrically-zoned chert nodules in Mississippian Castle Reef Dolostone, exposed at Sun River Canyon, Montana, just downstream from the roadside outcrop of the French Thrust: If you look closely at the lowermost of the three chert nodules, you’ll see it’s been split and offset by a small fault. Here are close-up … Read more
All my Rockies students would agree. Just sayin’.
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
Stylolites (pressure solution seams) in limestone of Mississippian age, exposed on the side of a rounded boulder in Hyalite Canyon, Gallatin Range, Montana. These stylolites, like most, are bedding-parallel, and thus most likely formed due to the weight of the overlying rock. Calcite, the dominant mineral, goes into solution under pressure, and insoluble material, like … Read more
Cretaceous sandstone layers, exposed on the Blackfeet Reservation (Montana route 49), east of Glacier National Park, Montana. Apparently these two are the opposite halves of the same jointed block.
This year, for the first time ever, I took students to map at Block Mountain, a classic field camp mapping site near Dillon, Montana. Here’s a quick look (enlarge it by a gazillion-fold by clicking through) of some columnar jointing in the Eocene Block Mountain basalt flow, a paleo-drainage turned mountain through the miracle of … Read more
Our field class visited the Museum of the Rockies yesterday. Here’s the full team!
I just drew up a little checklist for the different formations my Rockies students will be seeing next starting next week out in Montana: The original black and white images (two columns on two pages) come from Self-Guided Field Trips Near Bozeman (1982), by Stephan G. Custer, Donald L. Smith, Molly Walker, and 1982’s crop … Read more