The Crags Day Hike

The Crags Day Hike

Many mysteries still surround the formation of the Rocky Mountains, but one of the most intriguing puzzles concerns the formation of Pikes Peak on the southern tip of the Front Range. Pikes Peak was created some 60 million years ago when a large deposit Pikes Peak Granite was pushed up from deep within the earth. The puzzling thing is that after the rock reached the earth’s surface it seemed to expand and flow outward, eventually covering many square miles of much younger sedimentary rock. This wouldn’t seem unreasonable if the rock had been in liquid or plastic form, but in this case the material was far from liquid. It was solid Precambrian granite that had cooled and crystallized a billion years before it was pushed to the surface. It is difficult to imagine solid granite being squeezed out of the earth like toothpaste from a tube and then flowing horizontally like cold molasses across the earth’s surface. But that appears to be exactly what happened.

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