On to Idaho! - Summer 2016

Parts 4 & 5, a nice break at the office. I can only day dream about our trip to Wyoming and Montana, 38 days till we leave and 40 days before I step into the first river. Can't wait until Part 6. jd
 
billharr said:
Ski you are still setting the standard to which all blogs are judged*







*except Milt's, his art takes his trip reports to another level.
Click to expand...
Bill, thanks for the very kind comment. There are so many well done trip reports by members here, this site is a source of great talent. Every one has their own style and flavor. The differences make them that much more enjoyable. But all of them reflect a love of the outdoors, history, culture, and natural places. We are a lucky group. Bill, you should know, the Lady regularly asks, "Has that Bill fellow been traveling? Where's he been?" "Back to our Midwestern home world!" was my recent answer. .

Milt is in a league all his own. His stories are magic.
 
Oh my, you're in my country! Such a beautiful place. It's been about 15 years since we've been in there... I need a trip!!

Wonderful story about you two meeting!

Thanks for sharing!
 
Thanks for letting me tag along. I especially liked the stop at Sunny Gulch as that was my first camp in the Sawtooths at around age 14. Stanley and the Sawtooths have become a life long love affair. It brought a tear to my eye with the memory of it all. Looking forward to the final installment!
 
In readily Google-able form, a number of professional papers are available on the geology of the Wallowas. It's a very interesting area and has some similarities to some Piedmont and Blue Ridge geology here in the East in that the Wallowas are one of several "terranes" which plastered on to the North American craton after traveling to it (eastward travel in the case of the Wallowa Terrane) on a different tectonic plate. As one might expect, the accreted terrane is highly deformed (folded and faulted) and as such it provides the cool contrasting (color wise) contact between limestone/marble and clastics (shale, sandstone, and conglomerate) visible in your view of the Matterhorn. And the glacial geology is totally off the hook!

Thanks for the excellent pics and video!

Foy
 
Thanks for all the photos, 3pin. The last time I was in the Wallawas was a winter ski-camping trip in 1975 or so. Thanks for the reminder!

Here's a shot of Matterhorn from that trip:
w04es.jpg
 
Doug Stewart said:
Thanks for all the photos, 3pin. The last time I was in the Wallawas was a winter ski-camping trip in 1975 or so. Thanks for the reminder!

Here's a shot of Matterhorn from that trip:
attachicon.gif
w04es.jpg
Click to expand...
Wonderful Stew! Happy to help with memories! :)
 
"The complex geology of the Wallowas" is an apt phrase, one of my geology profs devised a scoring system for how complex an areas geology is and the Wallowas were near the top of his list. Now he may have been a bit prejudiced since we were in Walla^2 but beautiful mountains anyways.
 
And a late lunch break whilst "traveling at my desk" gives me opportunity to be among the first to see the final installment. A great finish, Sir and Ma'am.

You found an outcrop of volcanic rock with a porphyritic texture, and a very nice example of such, at that. It's not uncommon for extrusive igneous rocks (volcanics) to have porphyritic texture, just as some intrusive igneous rocks (such as granites) have it. Porphyritic texture in extrusive rocks of the basic chemical composition range (basaltic to andesitic) is often a matrix of very fine-grained crystals of black/dark pyoxene with much larger lath-shaped crystals of plagioclase feldspar. While we usually think of extruded lava as cooling quickly and always being fine-grained as a result, the reality is that some volcanic flows are so thick/deep that parts of them cool much more slowly than other parts do, with the resulting development of larger crystals.

Here in the East, the extensive bodies of Triassic sedimentary rock distributed in small grabens and half-grabens up and down the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Georgia are rift basins related to the final breakup of the supercontinent which was the beginning of the formation of the distribution of continents we see today. The crustal thinning which "tore open" these basins, allowing terrestrial sediments to flow into them as they subsided, developing extensive alluvial fans along the border faults, was in many places accompanied by extrusion of basaltic igneous rock and the emplacement of shallow basaltic sills forced in between beds of sediments. Given the similar environments deep within a thick extruded flow and within a shallow sill, the cooling and crystallization processes can produce similar textures. Most of the Triassic igneous rock south of northern Virginia are sills within the Triassic basins and great swarms of dikes cutting the sediments and the much older gneisses and schists. The dikes are most often diabase, so named because of the very fine grained, often aphanitic, matrix of pyroxene with small lath-shaped crystals of plagioclase. Such dikes are often 50' to +200' wide and are very resistant to erosion. The dikes can be mapped across tens of miles of deeply weathered gneisses and schists by the distinct orange-red soils littered with small to large boulders of fresh diabase left by spheroidal weathering. The diabase dikes were feeder dikes for the sills emplaced in the Triassic sedimentary basins as well as feeders for the extruded Triassic lavas, of which the Palisades along the Hudson River in New York are probably the most commonly known example.

Foy
 
A truly fine report of a fine summer vacation. Thanks for taking us along. It did reinforce my opinion that fly fishermen (of which I used to be one) are a special breed. :)
 
Foy, again thanks so much for your additional information on the geology we encounter! Everything around us has a story and it is wonderful when the rock's story comes alive! :)


Foy said:
In readily Google-able form, a number of professional papers are available on the geology of the Wallowas. It's a very interesting area and has some similarities to some Piedmont and Blue Ridge geology here in the East in that the Wallowas are one of several "terranes" which plastered on to the North American craton after traveling to it (eastward travel in the case of the Wallowa Terrane) on a different tectonic plate. As one might expect, the accreted terrane is highly deformed (folded and faulted) and as such it provides the cool contrasting (color wise) contact between limestone/marble and clastics (shale, sandstone, and conglomerate) visible in your view of the Matterhorn. And the glacial geology is totally off the hook!

Thanks for the excellent pics and video!

Foy
Click to expand...

Foy said:
And a late lunch break whilst "traveling at my desk" gives me opportunity to be among the first to see the final installment. A great finish, Sir and Ma'am.

You found an outcrop of volcanic rock with a porphyritic texture, and a very nice example of such, at that. It's not uncommon for extrusive igneous rocks (volcanics) to have porphyritic texture, just as some intrusive igneous rocks (such as granites) have it. Porphyritic texture in extrusive rocks of the basic chemical composition range (basaltic to andesitic) is often a matrix of very fine-grained crystals of black/dark pyoxene with much larger lath-shaped crystals of plagioclase feldspar. While we usually think of extruded lava as cooling quickly and always being fine-grained as a result, the reality is that some volcanic flows are so thick/deep that parts of them cool much more slowly than other parts do, with the resulting development of larger crystals.

Here in the East, the extensive bodies of Triassic sedimentary rock distributed in small grabens and half-grabens up and down the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Georgia are rift basins related to the final breakup of the supercontinent which was the beginning of the formation of the distribution of continents we see today. The crustal thinning which "tore open" these basins, allowing terrestrial sediments to flow into them as they subsided, developing extensive alluvial fans along the border faults, was in many places accompanied by extrusion of basaltic igneous rock and the emplacement of shallow basaltic sills forced in between beds of sediments. Given the similar environments deep within a thick extruded flow and within a shallow sill, the cooling and crystallization processes can produce similar textures. Most of the Triassic igneous rock south of northern Virginia are sills within the Triassic basins and great swarms of dikes cutting the sediments and the much older gneisses and schists. The dikes are most often diabase, so named because of the very fine grained, often aphanitic, matrix of pyroxene with small lath-shaped crystals of plagioclase. Such dikes are often 50' to +200' wide and are very resistant to erosion. The dikes can be mapped across tens of miles of deeply weathered gneisses and schists by the distinct orange-red soils littered with small to large boulders of fresh diabase left by spheroidal weathering. The diabase dikes were feeder dikes for the sills emplaced in the Triassic sedimentary basins as well as feeders for the extruded Triassic lavas, of which the Palisades along the Hudson River in New York are probably the most commonly known example.

Foy
Click to expand...
 
takesiteasy said:
A truly fine report of a fine summer vacation. Thanks for taking us along. It did reinforce my opinion that fly fishermen (of which I used to be one) are a special breed. :)
Click to expand...
"Special breed", oh the definitions we could come up for "special breed" would be endless and generations of fly fishing authors are still taking a crack at it. Thanks for the kind comments takesiteasy! :)
 
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