You are browsing the archive for July 2014 - Mountain Beltway.
24 July 2014
Making tracks
I’ve had a great three weeks in the Canadian Rockies, but now I’m heading out. It’s been an honor and a privilege to teach in these fine mountains, among amazing rocks with talented colleagues and thoughtful students, and I’ve really enjoyed the past week of GigaPanning with my colleague Aaron Barth. Yesterday, Aaron and I saw these bear tracks in the mud next to a creek where we were GigaPanning. …
12 July 2014
Stromatolite from near Crypt Lake
Greetings from the field… here’s a scene I contemplated yesterday…
4 July 2014
Friday fold: Warspite Anticline
A final guest Friday fold from reader Howard Allen, who I’m pleased to be meeting up with in Banff late next week… Howard writes the following in describing this lovely scene: Warspite Anticline, Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, Alberta. Photo is a telephoto shot (hence the strong blue alpine haze–the colour cast is an accurate rendition of the original daylight Kodachrome slide), looking southwest at an angle to regional strike. The …
3 July 2014
Bell Canyon’s Permian submarine landslide
What are these Border to Beltway students up to?… Clearly, they are all immersed in their field notebooks, sketching away. This was in March, in west Texas. There must be something worth drawing at this road cut… A clue can be seen on the wall of rock behind them. There, you can find features such as this: And this: And this: Those are outsized clasts of gray limestone in fine-grained …
It’s a fungi-eat-fungi world out there
Spotted in the yard this morning: One fungus (yellow, cracked like a breadcrust) being consumed by another (whitish, hairy wisps). Close-up portraits…
2 July 2014
Fault breccia in the Helderberg Group, Corridor H
Here’s a breccia that Dan Doctor and I found in a tabular zone within the Helderberg Group (Devonian limestones) in one of the massive new roadcuts along Corridor H. link Is it a fault breccia or a sedimentary breccia? The breccia was bedding parallel, which suggests it could be just another bed, but it’s so darn coarse and angular (unlike the rest of the Helderberg) that we were skeptical. Indeed, …