Sunlight Canyon
Sunlight Canyon runs down into the Clarks Fork Canyon (“The Box”) as seen from this view atop the Sunlight Bridge on the Chief Joseph Highway in the Soshone National Forest, Wyoming. The canyon cuts through gray, Precambrian granites, gneisses, and schists that formed when older sedimentary and volcanic rocks were heated and recrystallized deep in the Earth at extremely high temperatures during the development of what became a microcontinent. These basement rocks form part of an ancient continental land mass of Archean age called the Wyoming craton. This microcontinent was assembled through the collision and accretion of smaller plates and terranes driven by plate tectonics during the middle Archean (3.2-2.65 billion years). The Wyoming craton remained an independent microcontinent for over 750 million years and is some the oldest continental crust in the Rocky Mountains.
Sunlight Canyon
Sunlight Canyon runs down into the Clarks Fork Canyon (“The Box”) as seen from this view atop the Sunlight Bridge on the Chief Joseph Highway in the Soshone National Forest, Wyoming. The canyon cuts through gray, Precambrian granites, gneisses, and schists that formed when older sedimentary and volcanic rocks were heated and recrystallized deep in the Earth at extremely high temperatures during the development of what became a microcontinent. These basement rocks form part of an ancient continental land mass of Archean age called the Wyoming craton. This microcontinent was assembled through the collision and accretion of smaller plates and terranes driven by plate tectonics during the middle Archean (3.2-2.65 billion years). The Wyoming craton remained an independent microcontinent for over 750 million years and is some the oldest continental crust in the Rocky Mountains.