This view is looking downstream along the Colorado River in Black Canyon. The landscape is this view consists of volcanic rocks of middle to late Miocene age (about 17 to 13 million years old) that have been faulted and folded. The flat-top butte in the distance is capped by remnants of lava flows and ash fall deposits. These volcanic rocks rest unconformably on older basin-fill sediments which, in turn, rest on an older surface of volcanic rocks. These rocks that once were in a basin between a range of volcanoes and tectonically faulted mountains are now an erosional remnant of a mountain top nearly 1,500 feet above the modern Colorado River level (Beard and others, 2007).

The URL is: https://gotbooks.miracosta.edu/gonp/lame/html/black051.htm Last modified: 9/22/2010