Saturday, December 10, 2011

A tortured inner canyon

I accept the blame that my Grand Canyon trip was in early October and we are currently observing early December.

I think what impressed me the most about the Grand Canyon was the tortured rocks in the inner canyon. I am used to being around 1.7 billion year old gneiss and schist while floating the upper stretches of the Colorado River. The Vishnu schist and Zoroaster granite exceeded my prior experiences greatly.


Putting my hand on the Great Unconformity. An amazing amount of missing earth history under my hand.
An old river runner told me that most river guide books will identify any crystalline rock as schist so I wanted to visit the bottom of the Grand Canyon to see what was there. Take a look at the folding!
An intrusive Zoroaster vein. There are so many times I wish I had normal color vision to see these outcrops as others can. It is pretty vivid with my red/green problems.
The dark inner gorge

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