SkyScape Prairie Dog Hills (off season)
The perspective on this wide angle shot was amazing to me and I see this view regularly. Wyoming is on the left and Montana is on the right looking west right down the 45th parallel. (1/2 way precisely between the Equator and the North Pole coincidentally) This became a well dissected landscape. Rocks fractured due to freezing ice/ dry cycles is a huge process.. Boulders break into smaller and smaller iterations with enough time. Each sand grain thus formed actuates from the motion of wind and water. One sand grain at a time, the hillocks wear down, wash to the Gulf of Mexico
I stand on Cretaceous age sands but the Olive green tainted hills distant are younger age. Their rocks formed from sediments washed over 130 miles away from the BigHorn Mountains. This outwash from that massive tectonic uplift so far away transported here in the form of a “Fangclomerate” deposit. Those beds deposited eons after debris from the Big Horns filled up the tectonic “bathtub” . Located at their eastern mountain front (called the Powder River Basin).
The current rivers/hydrologic regime wore many thousands of feet of that debris off the older sediments I stand on. That just to expose them to the sky. All the dirt/rocks/sediment that USED to be above me, is currently all in transport to or in the Gulf of Mexico’s Mississippi River Delta. Just like the Prairie Dog Hills are made of sediments in Transport From the BigHorns (their source), to the gulf of Mexico (sink). Ultimately all of this ground will wash into the Gulf. That is assuming all precesses we observe today, continue into the future (a primary assumption in Geology/science)
Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)
Title: SkyScape Prairie Dog Hills