 Hello and welcome to the Rugged Rockhound. Today I thought I'd do something a little different. So I've made quite a few rockhounding videos now, and of course, that's what the channel is about. But I also wanted to add geology education videos. I love geology. I love talking to people about it, love teaching about it. So here we are just above the city of Pleasant Grove in Utah, and we are at a place called Battle Creek Canyon. And right here we have the trail marker. Today I'm going to hike up the trail and we're going to look at the geology a little bit and talk about it a little bit. Of course, along the way I'll look for any fossils and see if we find any or any other rocks. And if you stay to the end of the video, I actually found something up here that I wasn't expecting. A really nice fossil, and I'll show you that at the end of the video. Okay, made it to the first outcropping of rock along the trail. Right here's the trail. I am hiking along it. And here's the first outcrop. Now, some of you might be like, well, what's an outcrop of rock? Well, an outcrop is basically a layer of rock that you can see. Simply put, that's what it is. So behind me you can see a layer of rock. Now, you might notice it looks interesting. You see how you've got lines in it. These indicate the layers. The layers as they were originally deposited or laid down over time by natural processes like erosion and weathering. And they form layers. But you see how it's curved? Let's see if I can do this. It's curved. It has a curve to it. That might just be due to the angle in which I'm looking at it, but it actually is curved in this location. These layers of rock are curved. So why? Let me look across the river and you can see the curve a little bit better. You see that? See how it's got a nice curve to it? The curve is due to something known as the severe orogeny. A couple hundred million years ago, there was what is known as the severe orogeny. Well, it started roughly, you know, about 200 million years ago or so. And went on for a couple hundred million years for a long time. Orogeny is basically where you have tectonic plates that kind of slam into each other over time and deform the rock. Really deform the rock. And the curve you're seeing is part of that deforming that's going on. The deformation is what we call it. This unit of rock right here is limestone. Let's go take a closer look at it. All right. If you can see that right there, it is a very dark gray where it has broken. And then when you look at a surface where there's been a lot of water on it, it's kind of a lighter gray. Looks dirty. And then you also have all this white through here. What we have going on here is the white is calcite. Limestone is calcite or calcium carbonate, which is the chemical formula. This mineral deposited in the ocean. This is basically tons and tons and millions and billions and trillions and however many microscopic organisms in the ocean that died that when they were alive, they created a shell, a small little shell to protect themselves made of calcium carbonate. Kind of what our bones are made out of. So the calcium carbonate over a long period of time and lots and lots and lots of microorganisms all dying over a long period of time. All these little shells, teeny teeny microscopic shells form into a layer of rock known as limestone. A few other things you might see in here. There are parts where the rock is really, really broken. And this is usually due to faulting. Also joints, basically parts of the rock right here is a really good example. Parts of the rock where because of movement in the Earth's crust where there's faults going on, the rocks are brittle. They don't want to change their shape. And so they break. And when they break, they leave this look, what we like to call breccia, where the rocks shatter into angular pieces. And what can happen is underground, you can have water move through, get some of the calcium carbonate and cement the thing together and create a natural cement to form a rock known as breccia. This limestone here formed roughly in the age of about 500 million years ago during what we call Paleozoic, Proterozoic time period. This is when life in the ocean was fairly simple, where most things were microscopic. That's what the human's made out of. But during this time period as well, this is when it started to explode in what we call the Cambrian explosion. It's where life started to evolve and grow into multicellular organisms. And so if you go further up, you might be able to find some fossils of those organisms. Well, now we've made it to the reason why most people hike this trail. Behind me, the waterfall, Battle Creek Falls. Unfortunately, we are in a drought right now. That is not a lot of water. So Utah is in one of the worst droughts it has seen in a long time. But traditionally, after a very, very dry year since last year in the early spring, we normally then will have a very wet winter. Across our fingers, we get a lot of snow this winter. We'll find out though. Alright, looking across the way. I'll zoom in for you. You can see right there. Beautiful fold. Look at those layers. They go from straight to curved. And then kind of back to straight to get everything out of tilt like this. What caused that? Like I said, the severe orogeny. And here I am at the top of the waterfall. And then the waterfall is right below me. A bit of a drop right there. Take a look. That's where the waterfall is. Nice little secreted waterfall. Well, here I am staring at the sun. Okay, let me do that so the sun's in my eyes. Here we are. We've hiked quite a bit further. And there's down into the valley. This is the canyon. And this is where I'm going to stop today. It's getting pretty warm already. And behind me is getting near the top of the limestone unit. So what am I saying about that? Well, the limestone unit, like I said down there, was formed over a long time by the sacrifice of billions, trillions, and quadrillions, whatever, of tiny microscopic organisms that dropped through a little shell. Now we're going to start getting to where the water was more shallow. So the water here was fairly deep. But a little further up, it gets more shallow. And it starts turning into layers of shell, siltstone, and sandstone. So if you think about that, shell is mud. Siltstone is small, small, small particles of sand, basically. And then sand. What's happening is we're getting closer and closer to the shore. So the larger the particles of sand, dirt, whatever, the closer we get to the shoreline. And as we go back that way, we'll go up in the rockrothers. So as we go up in them, they'll get to larger grains up to sandstone. And the very top of this peak is a rock known as quartzite, which is sandstone that's been under a lot of pressure and turned into a metamorphic rock. As has this limestone been under a lot of pressure, you could almost call it a marble for those who know their metamorphic rocks. But I just wanted to talk about time here. So the bottom of the canyon, we're talking 500, 600 million years ago, probably close to 500 million years ago. And as we go up all of this time, by the time we get to the top of the mountain, we're into basically the Triassic period, which is about 150 million years ago, 200 million years ago. So from the bottom of the canyon up to the top of the mountain, we're representing around 300 million years in time, maybe more. That's a lot of time. A lot of time. But that's how long it takes to form these layers, especially when they're made out of microscopic organisms over a long period of time. And that's the geology of this area. The mountain above us is known as Mount Tipinogos. And for anybody who's hiked it, it's quartzite up there. So there you go. That's the geology of this area. I was going to go a little further, but it is hot today. I don't want to really hike uphill anymore, so we're going to head back down. And here it is! The fossil I promised you at the end of the video. This is a crinoid stem that I found a while back, and that's one of the best preserved ones I've found. And take a look at this end. Look at that beautiful star pattern. This is a beautiful specimen. I was so happy to find it up here because you don't find much up here. There aren't many fossils here.