2022 “No Moss” field trip: North Table Mountain

Saturday, March 26, 2022, 9-12 a.m.

Trip Leader: Pete Modreski, USGS, retired

“No Moss” N Table Mountain Geology Hike for CSS, 9-12 a.m. Sat. March 26

Rescheduled from last Saturday due to very muddy trail conditions, we’ll be meeting tomorrow morning, 9 a.m. Saturday Mar. 26, for the first of our “No Moss” short geology trips or hikes. With only light precipitation at the beginning of this week, the trails should be all dry now.

This Saturday, I expect our trip may take close to 3 hours, allowing some time to chat a bit at some of the rock exposures. We will meet at the Tony Grampsas Sports Complex Park, located at the end of Salvia Street, off W. 44th Ave., Golden, the first N-S street east of the Colorado Railroad Museum. The hike, on the Open Space trails, will take us up through the three lava flows on Table Mountain and intervening Denver Formation sediments, and our destination at the top will be the small waterfall where surface drainage collects and cascades (or more usually, trickles) over the lip of one of the lava flows. Our route will take us past a nice exposure of the lower contact of the earliest lava flow. Our route will take us on a path parallel to Easley Road to the “East Access” trailhead; north to the Lithic Trail, which switchbacks up to North Table Loop Trail; south and west (clockwise on the mountain) on North Table Loop to the Cottonwood Canyon Trail; up Cottonwood Canyon to the Mesa Top Trail; east on it to the waterfall and then down to reconnect to North Table Loop, north of our starting point; then back south to Lithic Trail and return. The total distance will be about 3.5 miles, with about 800′ elevation gain. I’m enclosing a trail and topographic map of the southern half of North Table Mountain from Jefferson County Open Space; a simplified geologic map and cross section of the Table Mountains; and for those interested, a diagram illustrating the appearance of the three most common zeolite minerals found in the vesicles in the Table Mountain Shoshonite lavas. You may wish to print these out for yourself.

In mid-winter the waterfall is frozen into a fairly spectacular (by my local standards) ice fall, but I expect that now, with our recent warm weather, there will be little or no ice left.