Loose_Grip/Pete's photos with the keyword: Rocky

The beautiful gold and silver of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway on the locomotives and baggage car contrasts with the light covering of snow on the approach to Glenwood Canyon in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. The conductor allowed me to take this view from the open door of our passenger train travelling from Denver to Salt Lake City (where we changed in the middle of the night to an Amtrak train to San Francisco). The lead locomotive is F9 diesel 5771. This was the last private long distance passenger train in the USA but it has long since been taken over by Amtrak. We were moving homes via San Francisco & Australia after a 2 year assignment in New Orleans to live in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia.

During our Tectonic Seminar field trip we studied outcrops of Upper Cretaceous Cardium Formation sandstone in the Bow River by the Kananaskis Dam (Foothills sub-province). Towering in the background is Mount Yamnuska which is made up of Cambrian limestones carried 20km from the southwest on the McDonnell thrust and faulted over the Upper Cretaceous, marking the eastern boundary of the Rocky Mountain Front Ranges

The scale of the fabulous compressional tectonic features of the Front Ranges of the Rocky Mountains are definitely best appreciated from the air and the participants in our Mobil Oil field seminar were privileged to have an overflight of the Rockies on the last day of the course. I was living in The Hague, the Netherlands, at this time and working on the sub-surface Alpine tectonics in the North Sea. Superficially the Geology of Holland is pretty boring but 1000m below the surface in the Dutch offshore all hell breaks loose and believe it or not it looks just like this! It could be a seismic cross-section through the Lower Cretaceous oil fields in Block Q1. The subsurface oil and gas fields in the Foothills west of Calgary are trapped in analogous thrust anticlines.