Potholes in the Grand Teton National Park EarthCache
Hidden : 6/23/2015
Difficulty:
2.5 out of 5
Terrain:
2.5 out of 5

Size: Size: other (other)

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Geocache Description:


Potholes in the Grand Teton National Park

This earthcache brings you to a turnout where you can learn something about the geological features of the Grand Teton National Park: outwash and kettles.

Click for enlargement
Meltwater “washes out” sediment from a glacier and deposits the material in a flat area in front of the glacier’s snout. Glacial outwash covers Antelope and Baseline flats. In some areas of the park, outwash material is so thick (60 m [200 ft]) that it obscures the underlying deposits of previous glaciations.

Depressions called kettles commonly pockmark outwash plains, such as in the Potholes area of the park. Kettles form when a block of stagnant ice becomes wholly or partially buried in outwash and ultimately melts, leaving behind a pit. Kettles can be a few or hundreds of feet long, but are generally wider or longer than they are deep. In many cases, water eventually fills the depression and forms a kettle pond or lake. Hedrick Pond, for which the middle advance of the Pinedale glacial phase was named, is a kettle lake. Cow Lake, part of the hummocky pothole terrain seen from Jackson Point Overlook on Signal Mountain, is another example of a kettle lake.

Trees take root in some kettles creating forest islands, while water pools in other kettles forming tiny wetland communities. From the information board at the turnout you have the chance to take a short 1/4-mile trail to a nearby pothole.

To log this earthcache, perform the following tasks (you do not need to wait for a log permission. I will contact and help you in the case one of your answers is wrong.):

  • When you walk the short trail: what has developed in the middle of the pothole? Why?
  • According to the information board how do kettles range in size? According to that information is the nearby pothole large or not?
Sources: Wikipedia; Grand Teton National Park and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway - Geologic Resources Inventory Report
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