Here’s a cute little feller that we spotted in the Green River Basin of Wyoming last week, whilst checking out the Green River Formation oil shales at the White Mountain escarpment, as well as adjacent Boar’s Tusk volcanic neck and distant Killpecker Dunes. Though sometimes called “horny toads” (I myself am fond of this name), … 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!
Regularly-spaced erosional rills on tailings/road fill at a uranium mining operation in central Wyoming.
On the way to visit the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, in a road-bottom outcrop of the Bighorn Dolomite (Ordovician), Callan finds a lovely receptaculid fossil (colloquially known as a “sunflower coral,” though it’s not a coral at all).
This week is “Wyoming Energy Resources field trip” week! Day Start End Destination August 1st Sheridan, WY Lander, WY Gas Hills Uranium District August 2nd Lander, WY Lander, WY Green River Basin Oil Shale and South Pass/ Atlantic City Mining District August 3rd Lander, WY Newcastle, WY Smith Ranch-Highland Uranium ISR Mine and Mill near … Read more
To follow up to my Cascade Canyon post, here’s a gigapan of the scene:
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.
The other day, driving south through Yellowstone on our way to the Tetons, I stopped to give my students the obligatory look over Yellowstone Lake’s West Thumb, looking east towards the snowcapped Absaroka Range in the distance. But in addition to a lovely view and a few birds, we found something really cool… Those are … Read more
While out in the field with Butch Dooley last week, making major discoveries like I do, I was very impressed with the landscape-scale west Bighorn monocline, which takes formerly horizontal Madison limestone and skews it to a westward dip where the mountains end and the intermontane basin begins. It’s totally sweet. Check it out in photo form and gigapan, too.
West of Shell, Wyoming, on route 14, there is a lovely exposure showing the tilted stratigraphic contact between the lower Tensleep Formation (purple; Pennsylvanian period) underneath Goose Egg Formation (orange/tan; Permian to Triassic in age). The contact dips to the west because it has been deformed during Laramide mountain-building (uplift of the Bighorn block, and … Read more
Visiting Butch Dooley and crew on a dinosaur dig in the Jurassic Morrison Formation on Wednesday morning, I did a lot of wandering around the area, dubbed the Two Sisters site. I noticed something in the sandstone at the top of one hillock, and thought it looked like a sauropod footprint: (The depression is filled … Read more
A boulder outside the door of the Geological Museum in Laramie, Wyoming. Purty, parasitic, passive folds… Happy Friday. My field course starts tomorrow here in Bozeman. I’ll soon have a lot less time for blogging. Brace yourself.
The other day, Chris Rowan of Highly Allochthonous posted some pictures (and video!) of the Teton Range in Wyoming, a normal fault-bounded block of rock that has rotated along a north-south axis, with the west side dropping down and the east side rising up relative to the floor of Jackson Hole. This is classic “Basin … Read more
In January, a large landslide occurred in the Hunza Valley of Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, near the village of Attabad. Like the Madison River landslide in Montana (1959), or the Gros Ventre landslide in Wyoming (1925), a river was dammed by the slide debris, and the impounded waters began to rise. At Gros Ventre, the landslide-dammed … Read more