Saturday morning we went out to do some hiking, we started at the Abelman's Gorge State Natural Area, near Rock Springs.
One area in the gorge is an abandoned quartzite quarry and there are some nice trails through the area...
What we were looking for were ripples preserved in the 1.6 billion-year-old quartzite. The sand grains (which became sandstone before being metamorphosed into quartzite) would have been deposited by water horizontally...
Except that these ripple marks are now standing near vertical...obviously, some intense pressure took place to shift or fold the quartzite into a vertical position...
While in the gorge, we also stopped at Van Hise Rock, which is listed as a National Historic Landmark --- how many rocks are on that list? The rock in the picture below is not Van Hise Rock...
Kieran loves to read signs in order to learn about things...he did here too...
The rock preserves a look at the folding event that occurred in the Baraboo region...
Though Luke was more interested in climbing on parts of it...
Kieran read every sign available...
It was a good hour spent outside...
From Rock Springs, we headed over to Devil's Lake State Park for some more hiking and geology...we learned very quickly that this is a park that we need to spend some time in during the summer months...
Devil's Lake is a moraine damned lake and supposedly very, very clear....there were two large swimming beaches the the kids noticed...
But we were there for some geology, in particular, a very large unconformity. The Baraboo quartzite is roughly 1.6 billion years old, the conglomerate and sandstone is Cambrian aged, meaning they're both roughly 500 million years old. Therefore, that point where the conglomerate is sitting on the quartzite represents more than 1 billion years of missing time!! Wow...
Here's another picture from another angle...can you see the contact between the quartzite and the conglomerate?
After seeing the unconformity, we decided to drive to another area and take a hike to see what's called 'balancing rock.' We learned that it involved hiking a trail up a talus pile...
And it was a long way up this talus pile...
It required breaks along the way...
Eventually we got to the 'balancing rock' but found out we really couldn't get close to it...it was still nearly 100 feet away...
We could've gone down the way we came, but we decided to continue with the trail (which would be almost 3 miles long by the end) and eventually got to the top of this quartzite hill we were climbing...
It was a long ways up...in the parking lot below, you might be able to make out the gray van (next to the white SUV), that's ours and where we started from...
Walking up a talus pile implies we would be walking down a trail through the talus pile...which we did later...
Just trying to give you a sense on how big this bluff was...Lex took most steps on her butt scooting...
But eventually we made it to level ground on the bottom and the trail back to the van (and waterslides)...but before we got too far, Kieran needed a 'break.' It happens...
It was a great break from the water park, but we were all ready to get back in the water....
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