2025 Colorado Scientific Society Fall Field Trip

South Park

Saturday, September 20. 2025 all day

Peter Barkmann, Ned Sterne, and Cal Ruleman led this trip.

This one-day field trip will visit locations where we will examine how Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic strata record the tectonic signatures of at least three orogenic episodes and present a stratigraphic and structural framework that can be applied in many regions across the Intermountain West and Rocky Mountain region. We will cross the Elkhorn–Williams Range thrust system into the structural block caught between Laramide uplifts of the Front Range and Sawatch Anticlinorium, and visit preserved synorogenic sediments from the Pennsylvanian–Permian ancestral Rocky Mountain tectonic episode. We will visit Late Cretaceous marine sediments from the Western Interior Seaway caught up in complex fold-fault structures between Laramide uplifts create targets for petroleum exploration. We will look at Neogene extensional faulting and evaporitic tectonism originating from Pennsylvanian evaporite deposits. Spectacular glacial and glaciofluvial geomorphology and timing of Pleistocene glacial intervals will be discussed. Lastly, we will look at cross-cutting relationships between Laramide reverse faults and Neogene extensional normal faulting across the region.

We departed from the Morrison Park-N-Ride at the intersection of I-470 with W. Morrison Rd/Bear Creek Ave., east of Morrison at 7:30 am and returned that evening.

CSS South Park field trip, September 20 2025 Announcement (PDF) Sept. 8, 2025 update

Directions for the September 20th CSS South Park Field Trip, updated 9/10/2025 (PDF)