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| GEOTRAVELS
A FEW SUGGESTIONS FOR GEOTRAVELS IN 2008:
Makoshika State Park - Montana: Makoshika State Park is located near Glendive, Montana (in eastern Montana), and is the largest state park in Montana, covering over 11,400 acres. The park consists of spectacular badlands that expose Cretaceous strata. Fossils of 10 different dinosaur species have been located within the park boundaries. Volunteers from the Milwaukee Public Museum excavated a triceratops skull and from the park during 1991.The skull is the main display at the new Makoshika Visitors' Center. The park contains two developed hiking trails. The first about three miles into the park, is the Cap Rock Nature Trail. The second hiking trail, about four miles from the park entrance, is called the Kinney Coulee Trail. The half-mile hike will take you 300 feet down to the floor of a coulee, through pines and across eroded shapes that stir the imagination. Links for Makoshika State Park: http://fwp.mt.gov/lands/site_283890.aspx http://www.midrivers.com/~chamber/mako.htm
Bear Mountain State Park - Hudson River Valley, New York:"Bear Mountain State Park is perhaps the premiere attraction in the Hudson Highlands region. Bear Mountain (elev. 1301 feet) is the highest of several mountains in this preserve on the western shore of the Hudson River. Bear Mountain is one of the most frequently visited park sites in the United States, with total numbers rivaling those of Yellowstone National Park. Like any park, however, once you get away from the overlooks and parking areas the crowds thin out drastically, and the shear size of the park provides elbow room for those willing to walk. The park is located at the terminus of the Palisades Interstate Parkway at the intersection of Route 9W and the Bear Mountain Toll Bridge. The bedrock throughout Bear Mountain State Park is the Storm King Granite (Late Proterozoic), a fairly uniform granite gneiss cut with occasional quartz-filled veins, migmitite, and pegmatite dikes. In the valleys and hillsides to the north and south of Bear Mountain are a number of iron mines which extracted magnetite ore from hornblendite gabbro veins. One sealed off mine on the military reservation north of the park reportedly reached a depth of about 6,000 feet. The ruins of old mining roads, prospect pits, mine dumps, building foundations, and furnace ruins occur throughout the area. Sites along trails in the Bear Mountain State Park include the Doodletown Mine and the Cornell Mine (Figure 29). Samples of magnetite ore can be easily located with a magnet. In some outcrops and in old mining dumps along trails it can be quite abundant. As a consequence, you can never really trust a compass in the Highlands region! The parking and picnic areas on top of Bear Mountain are host to numerous glacial erratics, most consisting of gneiss derived from local outcrops. Many are large chunks of red puddingstone (conglomerate) derived from the Skunnemunk Conglomerate Formation (Early Devonian) which crops out in the Green Pond Outlier, a northeast-trending syncline of Middle Paleozoic sedimentary formation in the heart of the Highlands Province. These easily recognizable boulders were carried to the top of Bear Mountain by glacial ice from outcrop areas 30 miles to the north. Cobbles of Skunnemunk Conglomerate can be found as far south as the beaches on the south shore of Long Island!" (text from US Geological Survey summary of Bear Mountain State Park found at the following link: http://3dparks.wr.usgs.gov/nyc/parks/loc9.htm
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Southwestern
Montana Stratigraphic Columns -
Stratigraphic
columns are available from Earthmaps for the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic
sections of southwestern Montana. The columns are more specific to the
Dillon-Butte areas, particularly for the Paleozoic stratigraphy. However,
both the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic columns depict equivalent stratigraphy for
the Livingston, Montana area.