170-feet up on a two-pitch climb in a thunderstorm: the awesome conglomerate of Maple Canyon, Utah

[@gerrycoleman7290]

Nice touch with the rumble of thunder at the end of the video.

[@dianasvend7717]

Shawn, so great to see you creeping up on 5k subscribers! My husband and I found you by going deep into a KZbin search on geology, and he didn't want to watch because the video was short. I convinced him to give the video a chance, and we fell in love immediately and subscribed. You had 27 subscribers at the time, and we were the 28th. Thank you so much for the quality content!

[@shawnwillsey]

Thanks for the kind comments and for being a loyal subscriber since the early days. I largely ignored this channel for years until the pandemic provided an opportunity to connect with students and others by doing videos. Now its a fun and mostly easy thing to do while traveling and such. I appreciate you and your husband sticking with it.

[@celticmugwump]

This reminds me of the conglomerate that Dunnottar Castle in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 sits on. You need to visit Shawn if you haven’t already.

[@voixdelaraison593]

You have such an incredible & natural way of describing the geology.

[@gerrycoleman7290]

That is some serious thickness and extent of conglomerate.

[@AvanaVana]

Very cool site. One reason why I love your videos is you always find great locations. I can only imagine the scale of those Sevier mountains-a narrow ribbon of a continent filled with precipitous peaks and volcanoes, extending from Mexico, up through Alaska and on into Siberia, one continuous, gigantic orogen and continental arc, with fast, huge braided rivers (as you can see here, and all those other coeval conglomerates!) and deltaic swamplands populated by magnificent Cretaceous dinosaurs, clinging to its eastern flanks, down to a vast inland interior seaway filled with gigantic aquatic reptiles and diving pterosaurs with 30-foot wingspans soaring on thermals above. Must have been truly incredible.

[@shawnwillsey]

Thanks Avana. I was hoping to do the video from the top and have a bit more room to move around but this one turned out ok. I always seem to forget a thing or two to mention in each video in hindsight but they are never too big a deal to fret. I would have liked to dive in a bit more on the quartzites as source material for the cobbles. And I echo everything you wrote about the Cretaceous. What a scene it must have been!

[@amandaedwards1649]

Your awesome! Thanks for the knowledge and culture! Local Idahoan I love learning about the Rocky Mountains!

[@shawnwillsey]

You bet. Thanks for watching and learning with me.

[@hunt4redoctober628]

Stunning location again and a great short film. Keep em coming!

[@Yetibiker67]

Thank you Shawn!

[@jennetal.984]

Impressive video

[@raecollins9756]

What's an example of a river today that could make similar deposits? The Ganges?

[@LizWCraftAdd1ct]

Only you could stop and do a geology video like this. You Rock, Shawn.

[@cameronstoneadams1183]

Thanks for the quick video. I learned something..

[@shawnwillsey]

Mission accomplished. Thank you.

[@TheKrisg50]

It’s fun to try to locate you location on google earth. I think I found the rock face your climbing. Thanks for bringing us along.

[@shawnwillsey]

You bet. Glad the GPS coordinates help. I think spatially with maps so I know I would want them too.

[@TheKrisg50]

@@shawnwillsey GPS coordinates? Didn’t know about that! 🙄

[@shawnwillsey]

@@TheKrisg50 Yeah, they are listed with video description for most of my videos. If not, let me know and I can get you something close.

[@metamorphiczeolite]

Another interesting video! Succinct, scenic, and information-dense. Question: if the depositional age of the quartzite cobbles is Cretaceous, what’re the age of the initial deposition of the sand that became the sandstone and the age of the metamorphosis that cooked the sandstone into quartzite?

[@shawnwillsey]

Thanks and good question. The deposition of the cobbles occurred in the Cretaceous. The quartzite cobbles themselves likely range in age from late Precambrian (~800 million years) to Devonian (~360 million years). To the west, there are tens of thousands of feet of quartzite that was originally deposited as sandstone. When the sandstone turned into quartzite is tough to say. Plus its a gradational process where, as a sandstone is buried and compressed, it loses pore space, and ultimately the quartz grains are fused together into quartzite. It doesn't have to involve high temperatures. Hope this helps.

[@jasonstevens8870]

Awesome video! Those anchors look familiar, and represent the bolting practices of their time. I should get up there and replace them with glue-ins!

[@emerald-lj5bb]

Suddenly, my tall step-ladder doesn’t seem so imposing…

[@shawnwillsey]

Love this. It's all relative, right?

[@toughenupfluffy7294]

Farther to the east, near Green River, UT, there is the Buckhorn Conglomerate at the base of the Cedar Mountain Formation, and even farther east in SW Colorado there is the Karla Kay Conglomerate at the base of the Burro Canyon Formation. These are the distal conglomerates that were near the seashore of the Western Interior Seaway, which had a western shoreline here in Eastern Utah/Western Colorado. Where Dr. Willsey is in Central Utah is essentially the hingeline where the Sevier orogeny's most eastward thrusts ended. It's hard to picture it, but in the Cretaceous there was a huge continent crossing sea where the Rocky Mountains now stand. Weird.

[@Snappy-ut4bj]

Sweet spot!

[@WayneTheSeine]

Thought I wanted to be a geologist....nah, I pass. Crazy. It looks like any of those could pop right out.

[@winnettryan4566]

I stumbled across maple canyon this year very cool makes me wonder if there any gold in the creek so I drove up about 3 weeks ago and it was so packed I didn’t get a chance to do some panning so makes me super curious

[@michaelcapeless3268]

Really interesting. I've climbed on a surface like that in the Crestone Basin in Colorado. Both the Crestone Needle and the Crestone Peak are made up of very hard, glued together cobbles. I'm not a geologist, so I'm not at all sure about the composition. Do you know anything about the Crestones?

[@AvanaVana]

Famously purple conglomerates. Those rocks were shed off of what are known as the “Ancestral Rocky Mountains”, basically there were several ranges of mountains located in the neighborhood of today’s Rocky Mountains, back in the Carboniferous and Permian periods. They were completely eroded away by Triassic time and you can see how that happened right in those rocks…brought down one rock at a time and carried away by braided rivers and onto alluvial fans. Then, much later, during the Laramide orogeny of Cretaceous and Tertiary time, the Rocky Mountains were reborn, and actually eroded so much that the rocks they shed nearly covered them by around 30 million years ago, and then starting about 10-5 million years ago, the Rockies were once again rejuvenated, and then increasingly so during the Pleistocene Ice Age, and those are the mountains you climb on today in the Sanger de Cristos. Interesting thing about the Ancestral Rocky Mountains (ARM) is, like today’s Rockies, they were unique in that they formed very far away from an active plate boundary, where most mountains form. This has proved something of a mystery to geologists, who have lots of theories, but no consensus on why this should have been the case for the ARM and today’s Rockies.

[@michaelcapeless3268]

@@AvanaVana Wow! Thank you for the detailed explanation. I have to say that it's still over my head, technically, but it's interesting to learn that their formation is still mysterious to geologists. The climbing on that solid knobby surface was grand, I'll tell you that much.

[@AvanaVana]

@@michaelcapeless3268 So, basically the surface of the earth (i.e. the “lithosphere”) is broken up into several different “plates”, some of which host entire continents or parts thereof. These plates move with respect to one another at about the speed a fingernail grows, and over the course of geologic time, they move long distances and the geography of the earth changes from one configuration to the other. When two or more of these plates collides at this growing fingernail, it is called an “active margin”, and depending on whether the plates consist of dense oceanic crust or less dense continental crust, either subduction (sinking underneath) of the denser plate, or continental collision will occur. In subduction zones, that is, an active margin where an oceanic plate dips and sinks below a less dense plate above it, water and other volatile compounds from the subducting plate lower the melting point of the rock of the mantle, the layer on which the lithospheric plates float as they move around Earth’s surface, causing melting and volcanic arcs to occur behind subduction zones. In either case, subduction or continent-continent collision, it is common for mountains to be build as a result of the contractional deformation. Shortening of the crust causes thickening of the crust, which, floating on the denser mantle below it, causes that thickened crust to sit at higher elevation, and mountains are formed. Typically, such mountains and volcanic arcs are located within about 200km of the collisional plate boundary. However, in the case of both the Ancestral Rocky Mountains and today’s Rocky Mountains, the plate boundary was nearly 1000km away from the mountains that formed. This is not typical nor explainable by traditional plate tectonic theory, and so as a results, geologists have had to come up with all kinds of different explanations-none of which have broad consensus in the scientific community. Geologists understand the structure of the mountains, but they don’t yet agree on the specific causes of those structures.

[@michaelcapeless3268]

@@AvanaVana Thank you very much for taking the time to explain the dynamics behind the mystery, Avana. It is a fascinating collection of variables and their relationships. I won't ask what it is that determines the direction (s) of movement of the plates, as I'm sure it is a very complicated subject, but it is a question that pops next into my head.

[@Brian_yeah_that_brian_Strang]

Good story

[@leechild4655]

Nice view from there but not much room to move around. It probably looks sketchier from the gopro view than real-life? Be safe!

[@markvincent522]

Awesome video! Are there ever chickenheads on the routes in Maple Canyon, or are all of the cobbles too rounded to sling? Is it hard to find decent spots to place bolts? Are bolts best placed in the clasts or the matrix? Sorry for the twenty questions, I'm just curious about climbing on conglomerate.

[@shawnwillsey]

Good question. Sometimes they stick out pretty far but never enough to form a proper chickenhead. Your handholds are often either grabbing cobbles, finding positive edges or jugs on broken cobbles, small pockets between cobbles, or scoops where cobbles have fallen out. It's quite the game of hold shopping which usually leaves you pumped. I've learned to grab the first decent looking hold and if its usable, move ahead. As for bolts, you see them mainly in the matrix (which also is made of small pebbles and sand but also sometimes in a cobble. Because the quartzite and the matrix are primarily quartz with little to no pore space, they behave somewhat as a homogeneous material.

[@markvincent522]

Thanks, Professor Willsey! Conglomerate is just so wild looking that it seems like it would be super fun to climb. Is there much concern with cobbles popping out, or are they generally pretty solidly welded in place? That would be the one thing that would worry me a bit at a belay. Getting clocked in the noggin by a cobble might make your head pop off😂😂

[@shawnwillsey]

@@markvincent522 Yeah, it is super fun to climb. On lead, it takes a while to trust everything. Initially your brain is telling you that something is going to pop. In general, as these climbs are established, they are cleaned of loose rock. Each ascent cleans the route a little more so with some traffic a route can be super solid quickly.

[@DallasGunther]

I love Maple Canyon. Haven't been there for about five years ish but the first time was before there were assigned camping spots, a camp director, fees, all that crap that comes with too many people moving into a quaint little neck of the woods near you......but I digress. Anyways, first time we were headed up there after it was already night time and when the sun came up I was astonished by the bright orange rock against the lush green backdrop. Also, the whole place was people partying the night before and I was surprised that as drunk as other campers sounded from afar people were trading stereo's in a very respectful way. I think I squeezed in "a farewell to kings" by Rush. But it was way fun, nobody parties as hard as people from Sanpete county. And thems just the facts.

[@DavidHuber63]

Wow! 👍🏻❤️

[@carygrant8796]

Is there any serious pursuit of paleo-meteorology? What type of weather patterns would it take to feed the rivers or glaciers. How would the ocean currents flow around Pangea and the subcontinents as it broke up? It takes a lot of computing power to run current weather models and they diverge greatly for more than a week out. Modeling the weather millions of years in the past would be very challenging but it seems it would compliment geologic studies.

[@troyhargadon7807]

I've been up maple canyon and box canyon it's so beautiful in Utah but there's a rock formation in slate canyon I'd like some professional information on.

[@shawnwillsey]

I''d be happy to take a look. Send me GPS coordinates and/or photos.