Rocky Mountain National Parkways Tourism Magazine

Description: ORDER BEFORE 2 PM CENTRAL - SAME DAY SHIPPINGBANK246Neither words nor pictures can fully cap reality of Rocky Mountain National Par graphs only portray the past, being locked and space. Words merely convey informat occasionally our impressions. The Rockies superlatives, yet here expressions of awe sound trite.Rocky Mountain National Park must be experienced to be appreciated. It must be explored to be understood. For here it is possible to smell a pine-scented spring breeze blowing across Moraine Park on a June morining. In Rocky one can glimpse an elk, a pika, or a porcupine. Here our eyes can dance across a mountain, a moraine, or meadow, each in turn or all at once. Here it is possible to skim the sky, whether driving across Trail Ridge Road, strolling to the Toll Memorial, or standing atop Longs Peak. In Rocky Mountain birds chirp, marmots whis-tle, waterfalls roar, and the wind sings in our earsHere the Rockies elevate our spirits. Worriessubside when confronted with sculpture made bytime and glaciers. Here it is possible to become reacquainted with nature. Landscape looms large. The role of mankind shrinks. Backcountry trails beckon.People discover themselves sauntering along forest pathways, heading toward hidden spots like Mills Lake, or Lulu City or Ouzel Falls. Somethreehundred and fifty-five miles of trail wait to be trod.Much of Rocky Mountain Park remains wild. Itswilderness stirs excitement andattracts; it signalsadventure afoot. Yet Rocky also offers motoristsplenty to see. Trail Ridge Road provides an enchanting drive, with eleven of its forty-four miles of roadway above treeline, cutting across the crest of the continent, reaching 12,183 feet above sea level. It is a traveler's surprise, a highway to the sky. Adding the older, one-way-uphill Fall River Road and a scenic avenue to Bear Lake as well as a few other tangent roads, there is plenty to explore even with minimal exertion.This is a land of majestic mountains. Capped by rock and tundra, the 414 square mile park is draped with a mantle of forested green, dotted with 156lakes, and decorated with golden aspen comeautumn. It is a rock-crested land, with 104 named peaks over ten thousand feet in elevation, all glistening white come winter and festooned with glaciers on even the hottest days of summer. Here is a perfect national playground, a region cherished and enjoyed since its discovery. This continental crest demands our exploration, for both the reality and the romance of the Rockies are introduced in Rocky Mountain National Park. Rocky Mountain National Park is still being created, geologically speaking. The scenery of tomorrow is being made today. A small rock is dislodged by a rainstorm and rolls a few feet down the mountain. A stream moves its sandy bed a little closer to the plains below. Winds blast sand against a granite boulder and wear away a few grains. So the mountains are eroded little by little. At the same time, they may be growing. We have not observed them long enough to know. We do know, from the evidence of the rocks, that today's scenery is the result of great events of the past. Mountains from a Sea BedThe story began when the earth was created, but that is too far back to trace. Geologists have penetrated the dimness of time back more than a billion years, into the Precambrian Era when they believe this region was covered by an ancient sea. Sediments washed into the sea until they were thousands of feet thick. The lower layers of sediment were compacted by great pressure into sedimentary rocks, the sandstones and shales. As sediments continued to accumulate, these sandstones and shales were metamor-phosed-changed by tremendous heat and pressure-into meta-morphic rocks such as the coarse-grained gneiss (nice), with its light and dark mineral bands, and the very finely banded schists.Eventually, the land began to rise. Those ancient metamorphic rocks, topped by younger shale and sandstone, slowly pushed above the sea and welled up into an ancient chain of mountains. This rise put tremendous strain on the rocks. They broke and faulted Molten rock forced its way into the cracks and slowly cooled into granite. Over millions of years, erosion ate away the mountains.The upper sedimentary rocks were stripped off, exposing the underlying metamorphic strata. The mighty mountains were leveled into a massive, low-lying plain which geologists call a peneplain. This lowland sank beneath a shallow sea. And again the old rocks were covered with sediment.How many times the sea invaded andretreated we do notknow. We do know that for tens of thousands of years this was a low marshy coastal plain where ponderous dinosaurs plodded through semitropical forests. But finally about 60-70 million years ago, during what geologists term the Laramide revolution, greatforces in the earth arched up a new Rocky Mountain chain.It is conjectured that erosion reduced these mountains to a vast sloping arch, or peneplain, that was continuous with the plains and basins on either side. Only 5 to 7 million years ago the plain was elevated, terminating a geologic process that had lasted for over 20 million years. The result was a great highland plateau.Some evidence of this plateau is still to be seen in the gently rolling mountain tops. Such as the one Trail Ridge Road crosses for many miles and the peaks of Flattop Mountain and Mount Ida.Most of the overlying sedimentary rocks were again stripped away, although upended and truncated fragments of them can be seen as the sandstone hogbacks so noticeable near the towns of Lyons and Loveland. Once again the ancient gneisses and schists were exposed. Most of the rocks seen in the Park today are those that formed nearly two billion years ago on the bottom of a sea and were metamorphosed into their present form thousands of feet below the surface. They are still intermingled with the intrusive granite.The land continued to rise and a drainage system similar to that of today was developed as the rivers cut deep, narrow and twisting canyons in the sides of the steep mountains. Then came the event that shaped the land much as it is today. The Ice Ages came to North America. There is no definite agreement on when they first came, but it was probably over one million years ago.

Price: 14.99 USD

Location: Saint Paul, Minnesota

End Time: 2024-11-07T23:31:53.000Z

Shipping Cost: 7.63 USD