RED STONE
By
Ron Sorter
Our Redstone Cliffs, with my dear Michelle dancing in the foreground, is the same formation that emerges again at the Maroon Bells, they are known as the Maroon Formation.
It was a lazy summer day, and I sat on Maureen Rogers’ memorial marble bench in Redstone Park, holding a melting ice cream cone from the General Store. I imagined this infant village’s first post office manager, in the 1880s, trying to think of a name to give to the place. Post Office officials needed to know where to send all the mail, especially to Mr. Osgood. The manager had the same view of these mountains as I did, so he sent them; what else? “Red Rocks.”
They kindly responded that one-word names like Aspen, Rifle, Basalt, and Silt are preferred. So, after a head-slapping moment, he named the town “Redstone.” That’s more lyrical than Red Rocks, isn’t it?
Redstone’s cliffs areas emerge again as the Maroon Bells which isn’t surprising since they’re both from what geologists have labeled the Maroon Formation. Is it surprising that they’re the same stone that makes up the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison? I’ll bet I’m not the only one who’s heard John Denver sing “Rocky Mountain High” there.
It’s also the same majestic stone in the Morrison Formation of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. And, yes, the Flatirons in Boulder. You can see where this is going, can’t you?
Where did all this red stone come from? What a great question. We’ll need to do some prodigious traveling to answer that, not in space, but in time.
Now, we just have to jump back 300 million years. Hold on.
The Ice Ages flew by, and see? Three miles of Maroon Formation are being reburied. The lighter stuff on top is Jurassic, with dinosaurs and all that. The present-day Rocky Mountains have disappeared. Hold on; we’re at -80 million years; I’m gonna stop here at the Mancos shale deposition.
Surprise. We’re in the middle of the Cretaceous Seaway. It’s a good thing we float.
The water underneath us is 1,000 feet deep, and the Seaway is 600 miles wide. It separates our continent entirely; you could sail from Texas to Alaska if you wanted. In the present day, you can drive west up Coal Basin and stop at that big pullout with all the dark shale. That’s Mancos Shale, and it eventually filled up this Seaway.
Then, deserts of sand, intermixed with coal deposits, covered it. Twenty million years in the future, the Mt. Sopris intrusion will help heat that coal into “coking coal.” Penny Hot Springs is proof of the proximity of magma under Redstone and Coal Basin.
The next time you drive down to Grand Junction, check out the sandstone cliffs in Debeque Canyon with all those spherical pockets eroding out of them. They’re the same deserts of sand and are called the Mesa Verdean Formation. Its prime feature is the Williams Fork Formation, which holds a lot of coal around here. Osgood knew that when he bought Coal Basin.
OK, we’d better keep going. Running backward through time like this will let us see the breakup of the Supercontinent Pangea when all the continents were attached. A supercontinent also means that the opposite side of the Earth is entirely oceanic. Imagine sailing across that ocean in winter.
OK, almost there. Pangea, -300 million years. See those un-eroding mountains growing back into the sky? Near that island chain, marked in red.
They’re being relentlessly slammed against the African continental plate on our southeast. Off the west coast of Nevada (California is still sea-bottom somewhere), an undersea rift is shoving new continental material onto our western shoreline. They’re pushing from both ends like a rug, making mountains and basins.
These two great island ranges, known together as the Ancestral Rockies, have slowly emerged from the Colorado seas, and Redstone stands in their surf line. The left range will be called Uncompahgria, and the right one will be called Frontrangia. I know. Geologists are such a hoot.
Tropical hurricanes are stripping the rock and silt off these mountains. Rivers carry their iron-rich red sand and sediment (with a hint of manganese, making them maroon), exposing them to the air and then sluicing the rusting maroon deposits into the Redstone basin. These fast-moving rivers first polish the bigger stones from these ancient mountains and cement them into maroon conglomerate riverbeds. When we get back to the present, take a drive upstream from Redstone, and as you curve around west, there by the remains of the Osgood powerhouse, look to your right, and you can see the conglomerate of one of those ancient rivers.
In a few hundred million years, these Ancestral Rockies will be eroded flat, and Redstone will lie buried under 3 miles of sand and siltstone. As Pangea pulls apart, different mountains will emerge to the south and west and pour more vertical miles of sediments on top of us. These are also subsequently washed away.
Then, starting about -65 million years, the modern Rockies will begin to rise. New seas and freshwater swamps appear, with vegetation growing in low-sulfur water, which age into coal. The pressure and the heat in local Redstone buried sediments will help transform gypsum into alabaster, limestone into marble, and soft bituminous coal into hard and valuable “metallurgical” coal, prized by Ozgood.
Let’s jump back into the future to -30,000,000 years. These second-generation Rockies have now fractured our maroonstone as they pushed up through them, dragging the strata into the air. Through these millions of years, the sediments have frozen, fractured, and eroded by the weather at increasingly dizzy altitudes.
Water and annual cycles of cold and heat will continue to work on a fault zone that runs through Redstone. It will erode, widen, and deepen into a beautiful valley filled with elk, eagles, bears, and bighorns.
The Utes will eventually arrive to inhabit this valley, carved by the Crystal River through the now-uplifted Maroon Formation. After they are banished in 1881, a town will be built to cook coal into coke to add to iron to make steel. This process will make John C. Osgood a very rich man, and he’ll give the village of Redstone its life. Ready? Let’s jump back to the present.
Redstone is such a beautiful place. The masons who built the Inn used 300,000,000-year-old Red Stone in its arched entryway. And in the silence of the night, if you wander down to the river under these incredibly dark skies, you can hear the whisper of the Crystal. Like those ancient rivers, it’s still carrying the Maroon silt of Uncompahgria to the sea.
RON SORTER, historian, author, geologist – He and his wife Michelle were vital members of the Redstone community for 20 years. Ron and Michelle worked tirelessly to secure the resources to purchase, protect and restore the Coke Oven property. He now lives in Sequim, Washington where he wrote a book memorializing his wife, LOVE MICHELLE…, and co-authored a book LETTERS IN A HELMET: A story of Fraternity and Brotherhood.