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Show J SCENIC U PLAYGROUNDS HI OF AMERICA ll By G. M. K1LBOLRN lil Chief Mountain IF BENJAMLN FRANKLIN were still alive and could bring bis kite and key and wet silk thread to some convention of modern electricians, the contrast of ages represented would probably get a good share of the newspaper headlines. But In Glacier national park, Montana, there Is Just that sort of a contrast with mountains moun-tains rather than men in this drama of inconceivable age. At least eighty million years ago, according to the geologists, a group of rock strata totaling sometimes 11,000 feet In thickness was formed In that j region by sediment slowly settling to some now long-vanished ocean's bottom. bot-tom. All this 11,000-foot cross-section j is now known as "Algonkian" strata ; and on the very bottom of it was a 1,000-foot layer of "Altyn limestone," originally a faint blue in color, but weathering to a yellow. These Algonkian rocks also occur in the Grand canyon, and might never have been revealed there except for the fact that the Colorado river picked that particular spot to dig the world's I biggest hole. But in the Glacier park I region there was a perhaps still stranger circumstance: a bulging and I cracking of the whole Algonkian sec-' sec-' tk)n, with as a climax an overlapping, now called the Lewis Overtlirust. This overlapping whatever the reason or exact details of such behavior placed the Altyn limestone, the lowest and therefore presumably the oldest of the whole eighty-mil!lon:year-old Algonkian Algon-kian family, on top of much newer, "younger" rock that had just previously previ-ously been the surface of the earth. With erosion by wind and temperature tempera-ture changes, as well as by water or grinding glacier, the front of. the overlapping over-lapping layer is slowly but constantly retreating, until the aged yellow 'bottom 'bot-tom layer may now he seen high on the cliffs along the eastern edge of the park, as well as underfoot at Many Glacier, Two Medicine, and other points nearer the divide. But the strangest erosion has been that which wore a gap in the yellow layer to the northeastward and left Chief mountain's moun-tain's 1,500-foot silhouette there alone a sullen, unflinching sentinel of the year S0,000,000 B. C or thereabouts, there-abouts, sitting astride the "young" 7,500-foot plateau formed speck by speck ,by a patient ocean through thousands of later centuries. Chief is a tooth shaped, precipitous yellow monster guarding the northeastern northeast-ern corner of the park. It may be seen by every Many Glacier visitor I f p . s " S ? A V?- t V ss" 1 -iV -- v. -i Chief Mountain. from the highway near Lower St. Mary , lake or Babb, and those riding from Babb to the Canadian boundary get many views of it. Or it may even be glimpsed by west-bound passengers of the Great Northern railway a few miles before the Glacier park station is reached. Another interesting feature of the Glacier mountains is that many of them wear a unique black stripe. This is a diorite layer from 50 to 100 feet thick, which tells a story of some ancient an-cient lava intrusion into the sedimentary sedimen-tary rock. Sometimes the adjacent layers are whitened as if burned to ash by the lava. Wave and ripple marks of some prehistoric pre-historic sea are also frequently encountered en-countered on the Glacier park mountain moun-tain sides. ((c). 1930. Western Newspaper Union.) |