INTERNET sites and field areas - 2007 East Carolina

As the geology field course unfolds, we will work on, visit, or pass close to units of the National Park System, National Forest lands, state parks, and other locations, features, and facilities of geologic, cultural, and historic interest. This article includes brief descriptions of web sites devoted to or concerning these areas. The areas of interest are listed in the same chronological order as they are visited/encountered during the field course.

The park web site is accessed via the Tennessee State Parks home page. Click on the park about 30 miles east of Nashville on I 40. The web site photos include one showing a limestone outcrop and alcove and a brief description of the area's natural history.

Interest in the site as a park developed when many rare species of plants were discovered. The flora is adapted to life on thin, relatively dry soils and limestone outcrops in the area. Runoff, intensified in areas of outcrop and thin soils, moves quickly to fissures and sinkholes and is conveyed into a subterranean drainage system produced by dissolution of the limestone bedrock. Small amounts of moisture retained in the soils and shallow bedrock are rapidly depleted by evapotranspiration. Flat-lying, Ordovician limestones near the apex of the Nashville dome comprise the local bedrock.

Wilson, C. W., Jr., 1980, Geology of Cedars of Lebanon State Park and Forest and vicinity in Wilson County, Tennessee; Tenn. Div. Geology, TDEC, Nashville, TN

Wilson, R. L., 1981, Guide to the geology along interstate highways in Tennessee; Rep. Of Invest. 39, Tenn. Div. Geology, TDEC, Nashville, TN

The site has no information about the natural history or geology. This park is located one-half mile south of Hinton, OK, about 6 miles south of the I-40 exit to US-281S and Hinton. The park comprises the flat valley floors and steep walls of a stream-cut canyon system deeply incised into fine-grained, red, Pennsylvanian-Permian sandstones; some are wind-deposited. The canyon walls are formed of these eolian sandstone deposits. Runoff from the relatively flat uplands and upstream drainage basin is funneled into the main trunk canyon, so the bottom lands are vulnerable to flash flooding. The local water table has about the same elevation as the canyon floor, and numerous springs and seeps are localized at the base of the bedrock cliffs. The moist and wet rock is weakened by frost action and by dissolution of the cementing minerals. Weathering and erosion of this weakened rock undermines the harder sandstone above, promoting slope retreat by joint-controlled topples, rock falls, and grain-by-grain disintegration. Thus near-vertical, slopes are maintained while the canyon is slowly being widened.

The moist, protected canyon floor hosts species of plants that do not grow on the flat, drier uplands. Many are thought to be relicts of colder, wetter, Pleistocene climatic conditions. The canyons were initially cut in wetter times when the canyon-bottom streams were much larger than those of today. In addition, the park contains small stands of rushes very closely related to calamities and other rushes that grew in profusion in the Pennsylvanian-age coal swamps and forests of North America and Europe.

The Bandelier ruins were constructed of blocks of rhyolitic welded tuff; small caves and probable storage rooms were excavated in the tuffs of the canyon walls. The tuffs are outflow sheets emplaced as part of the great Valles Caldera eruption of 1.1 ma ago. The tuff sheets exhibit various degrees of welding and are well exposed in the cliffs and steep walls of Frijoles Canyon. The nps.gov web site has little on the archeological ruins and nothing on the geology but is heavy on administrative history and, of course, on the massive, Cerro Grande fire of May, 2000. This fire was begun as an authorized, controlled burn. Presented with bone-dry fuels, very low relative humidity, and strong winds, it flared out of control, burned into peripheral areas of Los Alamos, and threatened some facilities of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The geology and other sections of the nps.gov site were under construction and thus unavailable as of 8/25/2001. A new topographic map is in place, but the other maps need updating because the preserve boundaries have recently been significantly enlarged.

The second and third sites noted above are hosted by the city of Alamosa, CO. The gsdgeology.htm site has brief, elementary sections on the dunes and mineralogy of the sand. A nice map shows how the prevailing, southwest summer winds transport sand to the dunes. This sand is derived from volcanic source rocks in the eastern San Juan volcanic field and is picked up from old river channel and floodplain deposits on the floor of the San Luis Valley. Only a brief, oblique reference is made to the coarse-grained quartz sand derived from Proterozoic crystalline rocks of the nearby Sangre de Cristo. The rare, but very important, cold, winter winds from the east and the well-known surging flow behavior of Medano Creek are not mentioned.

The National Park Service Geology site (parks/grsa/index.htm#geology) has a brief discussion and map concerning the sand and the dunes. This site has information on geologic studies, research, and interpretive projects currently underway in lands managed by the National Park Service.

Trimble, S., 1993, Great Sand Dunes; The Shape of the Wind; Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, Box 2173, Globe, AZ 85502

This is an excellent site with substantive discussions of the cinder cone, lava flows, rock types, and eruptive history. The site also has a good highway access map and a geologic map showing the cone and its associated lava flows.

To find the park, click on the Northeast Region, nmparks/ web page. Sugarite Canyon was a coal-mining community from the late nineteenth century until 1941, when the last of the larger mines was closed. The park now features fishing, hiking, and other outdoor activities. An interpretative trail has been built to allow visitors to stroll back through the mining history of the valley. The web site has a nice photo of the columnar-jointed, Pliocene-age basalt flows that cap the high mesas in the park area. The lavas overly softer, Paleocene to Late Cretaceous sedimentary strata of the Raton Basin, including coals. A geologic highlight of the park is the iridium-enriched, K-T boundary clay layer, accessible after a modest climb just above the Sugarite No. 3. adit.

McLemore, V. T., 1990, Sugarite Canyon; Geology of New Mexico Parks Series, New Mexico Geology, May Issue

This is an interesting, well-done web site brimming with information about the natural history, geology, and early Pueblo Indians who built the Chaco ruins from roughly 800 to 1000 A. D.

The park lies just west of the center of the San Juan Basin. Resistant, thick sandstones and thin, soft shales of the late Cretaceous Mesaverde Group are exposed at the site. Sandstone cliffs are mainly equivalent to the Cliff House sandstone on Mesa Verde; this is the transgressive beach sandstone deposited during a temporary expansion of the late Cretaceous seaway. The Cliff House overlies continental swamp and fluvial strata, including coals, of the Menefee Formation. The Menefee, in turn, overlies the Point Lookout sandstone, the thick, regressive beach sandstone deposited as the Mancos sea retreated to the east and swampy, low-lying terrestrial landscapes took hold in western Colorado and New Mexico.

Piles of giant sandstone-block talus and steep sandstone cliffs near the Chaco ruins are caused by undercutting of the weak Menefee strata and failure of the overlying Cliff House sandstones along widely-spaced, extended vertical joints. The demise of Threatening Rock, a sandstone mass that had been long ago detached and separated from the main cliff, is well documented in the web site Geology section.

Mytton. J. W. and Schneider, G. B., 1987, Interpretive geology of the Chaco Area, northwestern New Mexico; U. S. Geological Survey, Misc. Inv. Series Map I-1777

The nps.gov site has informative pages on the cultural history of the park and a link to geology at mvnp/smvf/p9.htm. The second listed site is a summary of the book entitled Guide to the Geology of Mesa Verde National Park by Griffitts (1990).

The sedimentary rocks exposed in and around the park, listed below, are well described and illustrated on the web site. These units are all late Cretaceous in age.

However, the remnant patches of the Dove Creek loess and their importance to mesa-top agriculture are not mentioned. Also ignored or sidestepped is the obvious geologic problem posed by the dry stream beds or small-volume rivulets now occupying the wide, deep, stream-cut canyons on the mesa. These cry out for an explanation involving much higher precipitation and stream flow in the past when the canyons were deeply incised under a different climatic regime.

Griffitts, M. O., 1990, Guide to the geology of Mesa Verde National Park; Mesa Verde Museum Assoc. Inc., Mesa Verde N. P., CO

Creede is a typical, late 19^th century, western mining boom town. As the shallow veins were mined out and ore values decreased with depth, mining declined in importance and eventually ceased. After years of isolation and obscurity, a new economy based on tourism and outdoor recreation has put Creede and many other old mining camps back on the map.

The web site is heavily commercial, but contains some interesting historical coverage; local and regional geology are not mentioned. The site does contain a map showing the field course's route from South Fork to Creede and over the central San Juan Mountains from Creede to Lake City.

The Wheeler Geologic Area is a remote unit of the Rio Grande National Forest about 15 miles east-northeast of Creede, CO. Elevations are 11,000 to 12,000+ feet and the location is accessible only by four-wheel drive vehicle, horseback, or on foot. The web sites mostly provide information on history and outdoor recreational activities. Photos show an unvegetated landscape of geometrically complex outcrops and rock forms that evolved through differential weathering of ashflow tuff bedrock. Weakened vertical zones correspond to widely-spaced, original, columnar joints. Horizontal patterns of differential weathering and erosion result from different degrees of post-emplacement compaction, welding, and devtrification-crystallization.

The tuff sheets mapped in the Wheeler Geologic Area are mainly the Nelson Mountain Tuff, erupted from the Cochetopa Park caldera, and the Rat Creek Tuff erupted from the San Luis caldera.

Varnes, D. J. and Savage, W. Z., editors, 1996, The Slumgullion Earth Flow: A Large-Scale Natural Laboratory; U.S. Geol. Survey Bull. 2130

The site contains a comprehensive summary of geologic, mineralogic, geophysical, kinematic, and geotechnical studies devoted to the Slumgullion Earthflow.

Rocks in the headscarp area include, from top down, basaltic andesite lava flows (Hinsdale Formation), ashflow tuffs, and andesites and rhyolites associated with early stratovolcano building in the San Juan volcanic field. The older units are cut by shallow intrusive rocks and volcanic breccia pipes. Rock below the Hinsdale are strongly altered and decomposed. The altered rocks contain abundant smectite clay, alunite, jarosite, gypsum, pyrite, and abundant secondary, fined-grained varieties of quartz. Strongly acid waters generated by pyrite oxidation have been unleashed on rocks previously badly weakened and decomposed by strong, hydrothermal and solfataric alteration. Numerous fractures, faults, and breccia masses cut the highly altered rocks and further weaken them.

Deposits from earlier mass wasting events date from 1300 to 1700 years ago, based on C-14 ages of wood fragments buried in the debris. About 700 years ago, a major debris flow reached the Lake Fork valley floor and built a natural dam, impounding the river and forming Lake San Cristobal. The dam was overtopped on its far west side, but the natural outlet channel has remained intact. The western side was cut to bedrock and the remaining, non-bedrock portion of the channel is lined with natural, boulder-size rip-rap left behind as the finer-grained particles in the earthflow debris were eroded away.

A Virtual Field Trip of the Slumgullion Earthflow, Hinsdale County, Colorado

This site shows a photo of the earthflow with specific "hot" locations. The viewer can click on these and view larger-scale, detailed photos/panoramas illustrating important features of the earthflow and headscarp area as shown at each hot location.

Visitors without access to sophisticated software may be limited in how well they can work through this site.

The sangres.com sites have nice photos and a brief discussion of the Slumgullion earthflow and damming of the Lake Fork to form Lake San Cristobal. The main flow came down about 700 years ago. A younger flow evident at higher elevations originated in the same headscarp area about 300-350 years ago. This upper earthflow is still slowly moving.

This site has an excellent photo of the earthflow and headwall scarp. A topographic map insert shows the complete course of the earthflow, from the head scarp to Lake San Cristobal.

Curecanti National Recreation Area and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Colorado

The first three sites are National Park Service sites for Curecanti NRA (cure) and Black Canyon NP (blca). The last two are maintained by Great Outdoor Recreation Pages (gorp). Curecanti includes Blue Mesa Reservoir and the surrounding lands; the East Elk group campground is about 1 mile west of the Curecanti Visitor Center.

A geologist did the web sites or was deeply involved in their creation. They are well done but very simple. Except for the Triassic Entrada Formation, which is only exposed in roadcuts just below Blue Mesa Dam, the other rock types, listed below, are well-exposed along Highways US 50 and CO 149, and in the hills and canyons near the reservoir.

These are outflow sheets from the giant Oligocene calderas of the central and western San Juan volcanic centers. They include hard, ledge-forming, crystallized welded tuff, local glassy, obsidian, basal vitrophyres, and softer, less consolidated weakly welded units. These rocks generally have light colors.

These rocks form dark-colored, massive and pinnacled outcrops at intermediate elevations along the north canyon slopes of the Gunnison River. They were derived from the West Elk Volcanic center about 15 miles or so to the north. They thicken rapidly toward the north, but original thinner, distal deposits south of the Gunnison River have been mostly removed by erosion.

These units will already be well known to field campers from earlier projects in New Mexico. They are preserved locally where the basement rocks have been dropped down by Laramide faulting. Dinosaur fossils have been found in the Morrison in Red Creek Canyon, a northern tributary to Blue Mesa Reservoir that enters a few miles above the dam.

Outcrops along US 50 upstream from the CO 149 bridge show abundant light-colored, coarse- to fine-grained granites surrounding and cross-cutting darker-colored blocks of amphibolite and minor schist. To varying degrees, the older amphibolites have reacted with the younger granites, resulting in biotite-rich rocks in the transition zones. Recognizing the many different granites in these outcrops and deciphering their relative ages will test the observational and reasoning powers of the most experienced petrologist. Remember, this is an NPS site; no hammers allowed!!

At Black Canyon NP, the Gunnison River has cut a narrow, very deep, steep-walled canyon into the Proterozoic basement rocks. Numerous light-colored granite and pegmatite dikes are seen to cut the older rocks that form the dark canyon walls.

This site includes the Gunnison, Grand Mesa, and Uncompaghre National Forests in Colorado. National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management web sites offer an enormous content of information concerning land management initiatives and policies, wilderness lands, and recreational activities available on agency lands Maps of individual national forests can now be purchased online.

This web site has brief description of the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry in the Uncompaghre National Forest, southwest of Delta, CO.

The Sternberg Museum of Natural History is affiliated with Hays State University, Hays, KS. From 1914 to 1999, the museum was housed on the main campus. In 1999, after a vigorous, successful fund-raising campaign, a modern, much larger, facility was opened at a new location with much easier access from I-70. The museum was named for the Sternberg family, internationally known and highly respected as fossil hunters. The Sternberg is a full-fledged natural history museum, but is probably best known for its exquisitely-detailed fossil specimens of fishes and marine and flying reptiles preserved in the chalky, Cretaceous limestones of western and central Kansas.

Charles Sternberg, the founder of the fossil-collecting dynasty, was a surgeon/medical officer in the U. S. Army. After surviving the Civil War and compiling an enviable record of treating the sick and wounded before and after escaping from a Confederate prison camp, Charles was assigned to Fort Harker, an isolated outpost on the prairie lands of west-central Kansas. There his childhood interests in fossil hunting and paleontology were given new leases on life, and he began what was to become a family fossil-hunting occupation and business that spanned two generations and lasted for more than a hundred years.

The fhsu.edu site has a complete listing of museum staff, exhibits, and educational and research activities. The oceansofkansas.com site has brief descriptions and excellent photos of fossil specimens and lifelike reconstructions of marine reptiles, flying reptiles, and fishes that once lived in or above the shallow, Cretaceous seaway that covered most or all of modern-day Kansas.

Rogers, K., 1991, The Sternberg Fossil Hunters; A Dinosaur Dynasty: Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, MT

American history is sprinkled with ugly little events that we would like to forget or never hear about in the first place. Sand Creek and Ludlow are two such cases.

The Sand Creek site (borowsky3html) is midway between US highways 287 and 385 and about 19 miles south-southwest of Cheyenne Wells, CO. The massacre was led by John Chivington, a fanatical abolitionist, Methodist minister, and soldier. His actions at Sand Creek were aided and in large part organized by John Evans, governor of Colorado, a respected Denver physician, and also dedicated to the abolition of slavery. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Evans and Chivington evidently transferred their hatred from white slave owners to the Cheyenne and Arapaho. The victims were Chief Black Kettle and his peaceful, partly disarmed band of Northern Cheyenne and a few Arapaho.

In recent years, pressure from Native American groups and other interested parties has led to rediscovery of the actual location of the massacre and to plans for honoring it as a national monument or national historic site.

The Ludlow town site and memorial marker is about three miles west of the mile-27 exit on I-25, about 16 miles north of Trinidad, CO. The memorial marks the site of a tent-community erected by striking coal miners and their families who had been evicted from company-owned housing. The Ludlow Massacre was the culmination of the mine owners', strong-armed tactics to break the strike against Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, a Rockefeller-owned company, and to prevent the strikers from joining with the United Mine Workers of America. This was strike-busting in its most vicious form. The brutal murder of Louis Tikas, a young Greek American union organizer, and the immolation of women and children in the Ludlow tent camp nearly sparked a civil war in the Colorado coal fields.

The web articles by Mara Lou Hawse (i5ive.com & suite101.com) give the essential elements of the massacre and of events leading to it. A quote before a Congressional Committee twenty-three years later still showed the same medieval view of human rights that had led to the 1914 Ludlow strife and killings. "You can't mine coal without machine guns". Richard B. Mellon, testimony before Congress, quoted in Time, June 14, 1937.

The lyrics of a song by Woody Guthrie (fortunecity.com), give a more compassionate, less autocratic view of early twentieth-century management-labor chaos in the southern Colorado coal fields.

Papanikolas, Zeese, 1991, Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre; Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE

The park comprises the shoreline and nearby lands around Wilson Lake, a manmade reservoir on the Saline River, about 8 miles north of the Sylvan Grove Exit from I-70. The surrounding area is part of the Smoky Hills region of north-central Kansas. Bedrock formations are flat-lying; they include the Dakota Sandstone and younger, marine, Cretaceous units. An upper unit in the Greenhorn Limestone is called the fencepost limestone; it was widely quarried and cut for fenceposts in a land where trees are very scarce and highly valued. The Dakota Sandstone is more resistant to weathering and erosion than the overlying interbedded shales and limestones, and larger streams, such as the Saline River, have locally cut narrow, steep-walled valleys into the Dakota. The dam is sited in one such valley. The Dakota Trail, in the Hell Creek unit of the park, is named after the sandstone formation. The trail features numerous outcrops and descriptive information on the trees, shrubs, and grasses. The park is a favorite spot for water sports, boating, fishing, waterfowl hunting, and birdwatching.

Other geologic localities in the region include Rock City and Mushroom Rock. At Rock City, residual, meter-size rounded, ellipsoidal masses of calcite-cemented Dakota have weathered out from softer, faster-weathering, less-well-cemented sandstone. At Mushroom Rock, the residual, harder, ellipsoidal sandstone masses are perched atop thinner pedestals of softer sandstone.

The usace.army site has a brief discussion of the Dakota and other Cretaceous strata in the area and a good map of the lands and camp sites surrounding Wilson Lake.

CONTACT ADDRESSES

Bandelier National Monument

HCR 1, Box 1, Suite 15

Los Alamos, NM 87544

505 672-0343

BAND_Superintendent@nps.gov

Gunnison National Forest

Gunnison Ranger District

216 N. Colorado, Gunnison, CO 81230

970 641-0471

r2 gmug visitor information@fs.fed.us

Capulin Volcano National Monument, NM

Box 40, Capulin, NM 88414; 505 278-2201

cavo_superintendent@nps.gov

Mesa Verde National Park

Box 8, Mesa Verde National Park, CO 81330-0008; 970 529-4465

meve_general_information@nps.gov

Cedars of Lebanon State Park, TN

328 Cedar Forest Road

Lebanon, TN 37087-7678

615 443-2769

environment@www.state.tn.us

Red Rock Canyon State Park, OK

P.O. Box 502

Hinton, OK 73047

405 542-6344

redrockcanyon@hintonet.net

Chaco Culture National Historical Park

Box 220

Nageezi, NM 87037

505 786-7014

Rio Grande National ForestDivide Ranger Station

13308 West US Highway 160

Box 40, Del Norte, CO 81132

719-657-3321

mailroom_r2_rio_grande@fs.fed.us

Creede/Mineral County Chamber ofCommerce

Creede, CO 81130

1 800 327-2102; creede@amigo.net

Sternberg Museum of Natural History

600 Park Street

Hays, KS 67601-4099

913 628-4286

gsgl@fhsu.fhsu.edu

Curecanti National Recreation Area

102 Elk Creek

Box 1040 West Hwy 50

Gunnison, CO 81230

Sugarite State Park, NM

HCR 63, Box 386

Raton, NM 87740

505-445-5607

sugarite@raton.com

Great Sand Dunes National Monument & Preserve

11500 Highway 150

Mosca, CO 81146-9798

719 378-2312

grsa_interpretation@nps.gov

Wilson Lake State Park, KS

RR 1, Box 181

Sylvan Grove, KS 67481

785 658-2465

WilsonSP@wp.state.ks.us

Web Sites; Travel and Project Locations

CONTACT ADDRESSES

Last Update: 12 January 2007

Cliff House sandstone	transgressive beach sandstone; youngest
Menefee Formation	fluvial sandstone, black shale, and coals; non-marine; coastal swampy conditions
Point Lookout sandstone	regressive beach sandstone
Mancos Shale	very thick gray to black marine shale; oldest