Loose_Grip/Pete's photos with the keyword: Rockies

On the Trans-Canada Highway in the Rockies west of Calgary. I'm not certain exactly where but I believe we were between Canmore and Banff.

A view looking west across the Rocky Mountain Trench along which the Columbia River flows northwards (to the right). I'm not 100% sure which peaks are seen but they are in the Dogtooth Range at the northern end of the Purcell Mountains west of Golden. The trench is cut into Cambro-Ordovician McKay Slates and is bounded on this side by the Purcell Thrust dipping west under the Dogtooth Range. The mountain range consists of a series of folds and thrust plates involving Proterozoic and Lower Cambrian rocks. Obviously it's not the main point of interest in this scene but there is a fence (& a railway!!) in there.... HFF & have a great weekend.

Mobil Oil Canadian Tectonic Seminar. The Plateau Mountain Ecological Reserve (although it wasn't called that in 1982) is quite a windswept place at a height of over 8000ft. We made a lunch stop here. The grass covered patterned ground in front is caused by periglacial conditions which shatter the Permian Rocky Mountain quartzite, by thawing & refreezing, into polygonal patterns. This is the crest of an anticline and the quartzite is almost flat-lying. It may be Ecological but in fact it is home to the highest gas well in Canada - Savanna Creek-3A drilled in 1952 at 8132 ft. East of the McConnell Thrust, the zone of highly imbricated and deformed Mesozoic to Tertiary rocks around 50 km wide, forms the Foothills where the Lower Carboniferous & Devonian oil and gas fields are found. The mountains in the background about 9 miles away to the west are in the High Rock Range, on the Alberta/British Columbia boundary, which lies above the Lewis Thrust and forms the Continental Divide. The peaks are in the 9000-10,000 ft range. Mount O'Rourke, left, Mount Pierce, centre, the highest peak right of centre is Mount Farquar with Mounts Holcroft & Scrimger to the right

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.

Dwarfed by the Rocky Mountains a Canadian Pacific freight train heading by 4 unidentified locos - probably EMD SD40s - passes Kananaskis heading east towards Calgary. I was attending a Mobil Oil Tectonic Geology course through the mountains and should have been listening to the description of the rock outcrops here but the chance of a photo of a train in this fabulous landscape was too much of a diversion. Mount Yamnuska, right, & Old Goat Peak, centre, are part of the Rocky Mountain Front Range and the abrupt change between the steeply dipping, folded & thrusted rocks in the west and the flat lying Interior Plains rocks to the east is dramatic. Here Middle Cambrian carbonates have overridden Cretaceous Belly River Formation along the McConnell thrust fault. (I may not have been listening but I still have the field notes!)