Black Mountain
Black Mountain looks like one of those mountains I used to draw as a child, jagged; craggy, with a lookout posted on the highest point. This 9485 foot (2891 metres) peak overlooks a good portion of the northern Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. Though far shorter than the range’s highest peaks, the fire look out, built in 1939-40s by the CCC, has a sweeping view of a large swath of the forest. The current outlook replaced an earlier fire tower. The present fire tower is no longer in use and is very run down. The tower can reached by a steep hiking trail that brings the hiker to scenic vistas of the mountains. The tower itself is not assessable.
Fractured granitic rocks make up the peaks and erode into rounded spires. Geologically, the core of the Bighorn Range is composed of a igneous-metamorphic rock complex of Archean age which has been dated radiometrically at around than 2.6 billion years old. These rocks represent a time when Wyoming was a separate microcontinent called the Wyoming Craton which existed 500 million years before the North American Continent formed.
Black Mountain
Black Mountain looks like one of those mountains I used to draw as a child, jagged; craggy, with a lookout posted on the highest point. This 9485 foot (2891 metres) peak overlooks a good portion of the northern Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. Though far shorter than the range’s highest peaks, the fire look out, built in 1939-40s by the CCC, has a sweeping view of a large swath of the forest. The current outlook replaced an earlier fire tower. The present fire tower is no longer in use and is very run down. The tower can reached by a steep hiking trail that brings the hiker to scenic vistas of the mountains. The tower itself is not assessable.
Fractured granitic rocks make up the peaks and erode into rounded spires. Geologically, the core of the Bighorn Range is composed of a igneous-metamorphic rock complex of Archean age which has been dated radiometrically at around than 2.6 billion years old. These rocks represent a time when Wyoming was a separate microcontinent called the Wyoming Craton which existed 500 million years before the North American Continent formed.