Yes... we started at the bottom of that.
I'm not sure if the rocks look like tents or if they look like gnomes in hats.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Tent Rocks
I finally got some of the pictures off my phone. These are from a field trip to Tent Rocks which is part of the Bandelier volcanic outflow... area... thing.
The path goes in there...
... and through here...
... and between this...
... and under that...
... and up some really steep parts to the very top...
Yes... we started at the bottom of that.
I'm not sure if the rocks look like tents or if they look like gnomes in hats.
Whoo hooo!
Yes... we started at the bottom of that.
I'm not sure if the rocks look like tents or if they look like gnomes in hats.
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11 comments:
Nice pics Synova. I take it that's you in the last one.
Poetry in rock formation. I especially like the lines in the first pic, and the form in the path in the "and under that".
Nice. did you have to crawl "under that"? Yikes.
The space under the rock is big enough that I could get under it just by ducking low and walking. If I brought my mom up there that would be as far as we could go. Up to that point the path is completely flat and smooth.
The scale is really impossible to see from the pictures. There is actually a person in the first picture, in the shadow. I think it's probably a guy just under 6 feet tall.
It is not rock exactly, but volcanic tuff, or ash, deposits from when the Jemez volcano went up about 4 million years ago, iirc.
Quite a big event; the caldera, or crater, is about 15 miles across.
I think I remember reading that camels as far east as the Dakotas were buried and killed in ash.
Well, it's rock now, because it all cemented together.
... actually looks a bit like cement.
I think that the most recent volcanic activity there was 40,000 years ago and the volcano is still considered active.
The really big material explosions and deposits are old, though. I'm supposed to write up a geological timeline that needs to be turned in tomorrow, so I probably ought to do that. If I hadn't put it off I'd have those numbers on the top of my head.
http://seethesouthwest.com/2402/valles-caldera-new-mexicos-supervolcano/
You are more right than I, but a long time ago there was a "Hysterical Marker" along NM 4 someplace, that I am fairly sure said 4 miilion years ago.
Ha! We're both wrong.
Looks like Tent Rocks mostly exposes the Peralta Tuff which is 6.5 to 7 million years old. So it's way older than the Jemez eruptions.
http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/tour/federal/monuments/tentrocks/home.html
This field trip was from two years ago for our EPS 101 class and the "Smith" cited there is the person who led us through it.
We just went up to Valles Caldera a week or so ago and looked at the layers of the lower and upper bandelier tuff and those are only one to one and a half million years old.
A friend and I stumbled onto the Tent Rocks by accident a few years ago. She and I found it late in the day and had to hustle through all those amazing formations to beat the closing time when the Indian ranger said he'd be shutting the gate and we'd be spending the night there.
Lovely smile. Thanks for the pics.
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