Mountain lions and deformation bands: just another day in Utah

Guest Blogger:  Tricia Hall

SIXMILE CANYON, UTAH — After a couple of days seeing a good number of mountain lion footprints, Shelley and I have decided that it is best to turn the attention of my I.S. toward using our new Trimble GPS to track mountain lion movements. We have heard from the local residents that the lions are low in the mountains, and have even ran across a potential “lion den”. Along the way, just in case this project does not pan out, I have measured a few deformation band orientations so that I don’t fail I.S. Just kidding! Here’s what we’ve really been up to the past couple of days….

Yesterday, we tackled the faulting and joint sets within the Flagstaff Limestone to the west of the Sixmile Canyon Formation exposure. The Flagstaff unconformably overlies the Sixmile, and the faulting and jointing relationships will be key in interpreting the deformation bands within the Sixmile Canyon Formation. We made good use of the Trimble to map the Formation and the fault (to the best of our ability). The resulting map, even without postprocessing, shows normal faulting within the Flagstaff complete with drag folds.

Above is the jointed Flagstaff Limestone looking to the north. We measured several units of this formation to determine the offset of the faults. In addition to the Trimble, we used the brand new Laser range finder! It was either the range finder or eye heighting up the mountain…I was all for the former.

After a long day yesterday, we made it out to Sixmile Canyon this morning with the intention of measuring the major joint sets in the morning followed by deformation band measurements in the afternoon. The joint sets were harder to find than we thought, but hopefully after we go through today’s data after I’m done blogging we’ll find that we’re okay on joint sets. The afternoon was pretty warm, but there was work to be done. It was finally deformation band time! We began measuring orientations, collecting samples, and yes, we broke out the Schmidt Hammer. Schmidty proved most effective and will be put back to work tomorrow. We’re well on our way to our self-imposed 300 Schmidty hits!

Schmidty was phenomenal on the deformation band shown above.

We’ll check in later, back to Sixmile Canyon tomorrow!