Here's a couple of more photos from my travels out west this summer. This is in Jackson Hole, the large valley that abuts the Teton Range immediately to the east. If you've never been to the Tetons, you must go and check them out for yourself. They are an awesome, singular mountain range in the United States. Their shapes and sheer relief remind me of the Karakoram, or Torres del Paine, or some other awesome mountainous region of the world. It's really jaw-dropping.

Here's a shot of the Tetons from the northeast, visually pairing them with a line of coniferous trees in the foreground. Photographically, I like this parallelism in their shapes:



So what's up with the Tetons? What geologic processes give rise to their readily-apparent awesomeness? There's two main things going on here: faulting and glaciation. First, there's a major normal fault along the base of the range. The Tetons have moved up as a block while the Jackson Hole basin has dropped down as a block. As the rocks of the Tetons (some as old as 2.8 Ga) have been eroded, sediment was generated, and that dropped down to fill in the hole to the east. Jackson Hole is full of of sediment (over 20,000 feet deep), and then the peaks of the Tetons rise an additional 7000 feet beyond that. Based on offset of the Cambrian Flathead Sandstone on either side of the fault, total displacement is estimated to be 30,000 to 35,000 feet (Love, 1987). Even relatively young geologic units in Jackson Hole, like the Yellowstone-erupted Huckleberry Ridge Tuff (2.1 Ma), dip significantly towards the fault (Good and Pierce, 1996). Movement along this fault is ongoing, raising the mountains on average ~1 centimeter per year, with most movement having taken place over the past 9 million years. The Tetons are generally regarded as the youngest range in the Rockies.

Here's a shot coming north from the Gros Ventre landslide area (subject of a future post) towards the main road. A photogenic herd of bison was grazing on the grassy sagebrush flats, purposely maneuvering between me and the mountains so they would have a nice backdrop:



Once the Pleistocene ice ages began, the tall Tetons accumulated a lot of snow, which packed into glacial ice. Alpine glaciers started flowing downhill, and carving the rock of the mountains as they did so. That created the distinct U-shaped valleys seen in these photos, and left pointy little nubbins between them: the glacial horns like the Grand Teton and Mount Owen. The rocky debris scraped off the Teton block was deposited in Jackson Hole along with till from the Yellowstone ice cap to the north. These piles of glacial till are easily demarcated by the coniferous trees that grow on them, unlike the grasses and sage of the outwash plain.

References:

Good, John M., and Kenneth L. Pierce (1996). Recent and Ongoing Geology of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, Grand Teton Natural History Association, Moose, Wyoming, 58 pages.

Love, J. David (1987). "Teton mountain front, Wyoming." In: Geological Society of America Centennial Field Guide - Rocky Mountain Section, Stanley S. Beus, ed. Geological Society of America, pp. 173-178.

Labels: faults, geology, glacial landforms, travel, wyoming