Roc Doc Travel

Canyon Range Thrust, West-Central Utah Sevier-Laramide Project Looking north in East Fork of Eightmile Creek in the Canyon Range. The Canyon Range is the place the Sevier orogeny is named for because the thrust faults are parallel to the Sevier River, and the river sweeps around the north end of the range to empty into the Sevier desert.  It's a natural!  Of all the places where I've visited the Sevier faults and folds, this may be my favorite because of its unique scenery, beautiful quartzite bedrock, remoteness, and geologic significance. The range is made of Proterozoic metasedimentary rocks (quartzite, metasiltstone, and slate) overlain by Cambrian, Ordovician, and Silurian sedimentary rocks.  The rocks here are beautiful!  I went home with hundreds of pounds of quartzite with cross-bedding, coarse clasts, and colorful bands.   Access on the south end is by primitive 2-track roads that are rocky, rough, narrow, and little used, so I advise a good 4WD (...

Sevier Thrust Belt in SW Utah This is part of the Sevier-Laramide Project, an archive of photos, videos, documents, and maps of outcrops of faults and folds created in the Sevier (Cretaceous period) and Laramide (Paleocene-Eocene periods) orogenies in the western United States. Materials herein may be used freely for classroom, research, and personal use only. Use for commercial purposes or in blogs, social media, or news articles is forbidden without express, written permission from the author. To see where these features are, watch a flyover of this region on YouTube by clicking on this picture or following the link:   https://youtu.be/0CZ3Aa-naAA St. George Area The Virgin Anticline forms the tilted and folded strata just east of St. George.  This fold is at the Extra Space Storage facility on East Washington Dam Road. Watch an aerial view of the southern part of the anticline on YouTube by clicking on the image or the link:   https://youtu.be/OPMR6QscTRA Wat...

Sevier Thrust Faults in Southern Nevada Thrust faults in southern Nevada formed because of tectonic collisions during the Sevier orogeny (Cretaceous, about 160-60 million years), which shoved continental shelf and margin sedimentary rock layers eastward by at least 50 km.   Watch this video flyover on YouTube by clicking on the picture or the link:  https://youtu.be/tsIOEjypEcQ Wheeler Pass Thrust See in YouTube:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFzsFXEs6aA This thrust places the early Proterozoic (1.6 to 2.5 billion years) Stirling Quartzite over the much younger Mississippian and Pennsylvanian strata (between 360 and 300 million years).  A close-up view of the thrust in Wheeler Pass. Looking northeast from Wheeler Pass along the fault.  The Stirling Quartzite is the lighter colored rocks above the thrust. Gass Peak Thrust To the east of Wheeler Pass is Gass Peak and its namesake thrust, which are interpreted as correlative. The current Google aerial...

 Mountain Pass, California Sevier-Laramide Project See the southernmost exposures of the Cretaceous Sevier orogeny! Mountain Pass in southeastern California is the site of America's most important rare earth element (REE) mine.  The mine lies in the footwall just below the early to mid-Cretaceous Keystone thrust, part of the Sevier orogeny and one of North America's largest thrust faults.   Mountain Pass is on Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  Las Vegas is shown at the upper right; the closed solar plant at Ivanpah is the three dark blotches in the valley NE of the pass.  Millions have seen this location as they drive by, but few have know the site's significance. Looking north from west of the mine, the Keystone thrust (red) places Cambrian strata over the Proterozolic granitic rocks, including the unusual rock called carbonatite that hosts the REEs. The carbonatite intruded into this leucogranite, which contains almost no dark minerals....