A Magic Circle Called the Solitario, Part 9: What Here Passes for a Highway | Big Bend Ranch State Park, Texas, USA
Facing north, I believe, about 0.1 mile (0.16 km) north of the ghost town of Tres Papalotes. On the Lefthand Shutup road. It's one of the Solitario's most successful civil-engineering projects, in that it's generally drivable as long as you avoid the big rocks and the prickly pears.
A lot of the inner Solitario's Paleozoic stratigraphy is on display on these ridges. In the distance at left the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian (Carboniferous) Tesnus forms the ridge crest, while the higher slopes at center and right are held up by contorted white beds of Devonian Caballos Novaculite, with Ordovician Maravillas Chert beneath. Some of the Caballos beds visible here were deformed into nice sine-wave folds during the Late-Paleozoic plate convergence of the Ouachita Orogeny.
For more on this amazing locale, see the other photos and descriptions in my A Magic Circle Called the Solitario album.
A Magic Circle Called the Solitario, Part 9: What Here Passes for a Highway | Big Bend Ranch State Park, Texas, USA
Facing north, I believe, about 0.1 mile (0.16 km) north of the ghost town of Tres Papalotes. On the Lefthand Shutup road. It's one of the Solitario's most successful civil-engineering projects, in that it's generally drivable as long as you avoid the big rocks and the prickly pears.
A lot of the inner Solitario's Paleozoic stratigraphy is on display on these ridges. In the distance at left the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian (Carboniferous) Tesnus forms the ridge crest, while the higher slopes at center and right are held up by contorted white beds of Devonian Caballos Novaculite, with Ordovician Maravillas Chert beneath. Some of the Caballos beds visible here were deformed into nice sine-wave folds during the Late-Paleozoic plate convergence of the Ouachita Orogeny.
For more on this amazing locale, see the other photos and descriptions in my A Magic Circle Called the Solitario album.