July 17, Gallatin Valley Far Traveled Quartzite Boulders - In this short field trip we will examine up close an actual outcrop of well-rounded quartzite boulders from central Idaho. They are out in the middle of the Gallatin Valley at one of the highest points in the valley. We will look at some of the sediment and sedimentary rock that make up the valley fill of Gallatin Valley.
We will meet at the Bozeman Hot Springs at 1 p.m.

August 28 ~ Geology of the Bridger Range - We will hike up and across the top of the Bridger Mountains and down the other side a bit. We will see marine fossils and worm burrows in the rocks, and we will note that the sedimentary rocks are tilted up at a high angle. We will also see the contact between the claimed 540 million year Cambrian Flathead Sandstone that is flat on top of the Precambrian Belt Formation, supposedly dated at about 1.5 billion years. At the contact, there is one billion years of missing time, but yet little or no erosion, which is the same for practically all other contacts between the Belt and the Flathead. This would indicate that this one billion years does not exist. The features in the Bridger Mountains will be related to the Flood. You must be in moderate to excellent shape, as the hike will be a round trip of 5 miles and up a vertical distance of about 1,500 feet to the top of the Bridgers.

2009 Trips

Overview of Southwest Montana Late Flood Events

Summary of June 27th, 2009 Field Trip

Michael Oard

The field trip of June 27th, 2009, was to provide an overview of late Flood activity that produced Southwest Montana.  We drove down the Madison Valley and noted the Sphinx in the Madison Range southeast of Ennis.  This isolated mountain is a 3,000-foot pile of mostly limestone boulders (sometimes with fossils) cemented together, called a conglomerate or a breccia.  This conglomerate, as I will call it, has a reddish color due to the iron in it.  It is obvious that the boulders did not pile 3,000 feet high just in this one spot.  The Sphinx represents debris that extended a great distance all around.  We know this also from other isolated mountains, such as Mount Antone in the Snowcrest Range and the Red Conglomerate Peaks along the Montana/Idaho border southwest of Lima. This same type of conglomerate is also found at low altitudes in some of the valleys. We saw one outcrop near Lima Reservoir.
So what does this mean?  It is likely that midway in the Flood that the area of the northwest states was generally flat and well underwater, which can also be determined by the spread of quartzite gravel discussed later.  As the water began to drain off the rising continents (Psalm 104:6-9), the upper crust of granite rose up in central Idaho and wide Flood currents moving from west to east (call it sheet flow) eroded the sedimentary rocks off the granite, spreading a huge amount of debris to the east.  The area in central Idaho is now represented by the Idaho batholith, which is a large mass of granite, which in some areas has an erosion surface on top.  Call the shed debris the “Beaverhead Flood Fan.”  Then the mountains rose up and the valleys sank down by faulting in Southwest Montana.  The currents locally became strong during this vertical change and ended up washed much of the Beaverhead Flood Fan away, but some of the Fan got caught up in the upward rise of the mountain ranges to form isolated mountains of limestone conglomerate.  Other rocks of the mountain ranges also were eroded.  The valleys filled further with sediments (later cementing to sedimentary rock), with what is informally called “valley fill.”  Parts of the Beaverhead Flood Fan ended up in the valleys.  Probably about 95% of the original volume of the Beaverhead Flood Fan was re-eroded and is gone, carried off the continent to form the thick sedimentary rocks of the continental margin.  This is the meaning of the Sphinx and other isolated conglomerate mountains of Southwest Montana and adjacent Idaho.

Then as more and more mountains became exposed, the water was forced to channelized down the valleys from higher to lower elevations (call it channelized flow).  The water was likely flowing at high speed at times eroding the top of the valley fill and the edges of the mountain ranges.  During this time pediments, planation surfaces at the edges of mountains or ridges, were cut in the hard valley fill or the edge of the mountains.  Pediments are not forming today, but are being destroyed by modern day erosion.  But pediments are common not only in the Southwest Valleys but also on the High Plains of Montana, as well as over the continents (it was a global Flood).  We saw quite a few pediments on our trip through the Madison Valley, Ruby Valley, and Beaverhead Valley.  The pediments are capped with a thin veneer of rounded rocks left over from high-speed water rushing down the valleys toward the ocean.

Another important feature we saw were well-rounded quartzite boulders, especially east of Lima in the Centennial Valley.  Quartzite is a metamorphic sandstone that has been heated up and become denser and tougher.  Quartzite boulders we saw in the southwest valleys is high grade and comes from central Idaho, mainly from the Belt Supergroup rock.  This quartzite was rounded by water and contains percussion marks, semicircular cracks on the outside of the rock.  Percussion marks on quartzite or other hard rocks are formed by extreme turbulence in fast flows of water and are not being formed in modern streams and rivers, even during flash floods, as far as I have been able to determine.  Just like pediments, well-rounded quartzite with percussion marks is strong evidence for the Flood, namely the late Flood drainage of the Floodwater.

Another feature to note is that the size of some of the quartzite boulders is up to 2 feet or more long.  Also, the nearest source to the west of quartzite is central Idaho west and southwest of Salmon Idaho, about 100 miles away.  Furthermore, this quartzite we saw is just a small portion of the huge amount of quartzite eroded from the western Rocky Mountains and spread up to 800 miles east into central Saskatchewan and southwest Manitoba and 400 miles west to the Pacific Ocean.  There are billions of these rocks and I have documented many of these locations, which are remnants of this great quartzite spread.  Large quartzite boulders were carried up during mountain uplift in the Pacific Northwest and now are on top of at least four mountain ranges: 1) the Gravelly Range of Southwest Montana (the destination of our August 27th field trip); 2) the northern Teton Range on top of flat topped Red Mountain; 3) several locations on top of the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon; and 4) on the Blue Mountains of central Oregon, 25 miles north of Burns.  During the spread of the quartzite rocks late in the Flood, the rocks sometimes filled huge cracks in the earth between mountain ranges.  One such crack, or paleovalley in geological jargon, is just west of Monida Pass and Spencer, Idaho.  The quartzite is piled up to 15,000 feet thick according to a PhD thesis by Thomas Ryder.  Another huge area of piled quartzite boulders is northeast of Jackson, Wyoming, north up into south central Yellowstone Park. It is 11,000 feet thick.

The evidence for the Flood abounds in Southwest Montana.  During this field trip we not only saw evidence for the Flood, but also we saw evidence of events that occurred late in the Flood.  The spread of the limestone conglomerate, the formation of the many pediments, and the spread of quartzite gravel hundreds of miles is unexplained (although they have hypotheses) by mainstream geology, which depends upon present processes to form all past rocks.