16: Montana Musings A
A grace-filled Pentecost Octave, y'all, still ongoing!
We Byzantines don't have the Traditional Roman Ember Days this Octave, rather, we celebrate, including no fasting or abstinence on Friday coming up!
As Gene Autry (I think.) sang, “I'm back in the saddle again!”
I was gonna write about living pterosaurs, but that'll have to wait. After a geologically intense albeit short visit to Montana last week, I'm barely containing my blurting!!
This post is occasioned by a dizzying (literally bc altitude sickness and a bit of lingering vertigo from an acute case at home before the trip) but fascinating visit to the Lewis and Clark Caverns near Whitehall, Montana, which is off Interstate 90 roughly halfway between Bozeman to the East and Butte to the West. The region is just within the Rockies, a sorta short distance above Southeast Idaho.
To say that the scenery was spectacular, both above and under the ground, is to not do it justice. Jaw-dropping is more like it.
Unlike the many folk who have no doubt seen the Mountains and Caverns through Old Earth, multi-million-year-processes eyes, I chose to look at them through the accurate lens of the literal Great Flood, employing the Hydroplate Theory as the paradigm to explain the processes that produced both features.
For the Hydroplate Theory, I refer y'all to my previous posts on the subject. (Oh, no! He's assigning homework again! 😫) (Darn tootin’! No assignment too big, no grade too small! 🤓)
Essentially, there are mountains with obviously tilted strata. Very tilted.
(Screen shot from approach video.)
They are steep-sided.
The Jefferson River that runs between them is in a gorge rather than a regular valley.
Some of the strata have obvious caves. They're on the cliff sides, and beckon strongly to my explorer’s heart!!
The Jefferson River looks inviting for trout fishing, and is THE Jefferson River that meets up not far away with the Madison and Gallatin to form the mighty (and mighty long!!) Missouri! (The Ohio River near me has a similar start in Pittsburgh at the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela.)
The Lewis and Clark Caverns have their lower entrance on a mountainside over a thousand feet above the Jefferson (Look carefully at the base of the distant mountain!).
To get to said entrance, one has to walk for a third of a mile along a gravel path with a steep slope of rocks on the right and the abyss in the above photo to the left.
Hair-raising for yours truly!
Before we step into the mountain, let's ponder how these local Mountains formed:
FIRST, the fountains of the Great Deep blasted out pulses of subcrustal lime mud plus sediment formed from the power-blasted sides of the rupture that they were fountaining from. That stuff was in horizontal layers.
SECOND, when the world was totally submerged and the suddenly unroofed-from-60-miles-of-granite-thickness Atlantic basin bounded upward, the Pacific side correspondingly downdropped, leading to North America sliding Westward, but eventually snagging on subcrustal irregularities where the subcrustal water had been. This buckled and tilted the strata.
THIRD, these strata were semi-hardened when the Flood waters were receding, hard enough that the water running out through the now-Jefferson River Gorge couldn't wash out a broad valley.
That's how the local landscape developed.
Next post, we'll address the Caverns themselves.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, guide and protect us!!