Earth caching across the Royal Gorge Bridge 🌎 EarthCache

This cache was placed in Between International Earth cache day. If you log any cash between October 11 Through October 13, 2024 you will get a Earth cache souvenir what's better than getting a souvenir and getting to see the royal gorge? To log this cache you will have to answer the 3 following questions. You do have to pay to get into the road gorge, but it's actually not that much to get in

1. How was the royal gorge created and how do you think it became famous 

2.  What are the royal gorge walls made of and what rock layers of rocks can you see when looking at the gorge wall

3. Post a photo of your self at the royal gore proving that you visited

The Royal Gorge is so narrow—only about 40 to 50 feet across—and precipitous because the Arkansas River sliced through a dome of especially hard rocks, including gray granite and dark metamorphic gneiss, in this spot, creating a terrain so rugged that U.S. Highway 50 must leave the river to skirt around it via a lower valley. This prompts the question: Why did the Arkansas River carve a gorge through these hard rocks instead of taking the path of least resistance down a lower valley floored with softer sedimentary rocks?  

The reason is that the landscape that existed about five million years ago, when the river began carving the Royal Gorge, was quite different from what we see today. Back then the dome’s resistant rocks were buried beneath several thousand feet of soft sedimentary rocks that formed a westward extension of today’s Great Plains. The Arkansas River flowed eastward across this gentle upland, oblivious to the dome of hard rock lurking below.

With each passing year, floods dragged rocks and sand across the riverbed, causing abrasion that scoured the channel deeper into the sedimentary stack. When the bed finally lay directly atop the hard rocks, additional abrasion carved a shallow notch into the dome. This notch then served as a “guide groove,” trapping the river like a carpenter’s initial incision ensnares the blade of a cross-cut saw to prevent it from skittering across the wood’s surface.

The Arkansas River’s guide groove forced it to carve ever deeper into the hard rocks with which it had unwittingly surrounded itself. Meanwhile, smaller, less-powerful streams excavated the surrounding, soft sedimentary rocks with comparative ease, cutting the lower-elevation valleys that today lie both north and south of the Royal Gorge.

Today these valleys seem like logical paths that a less confused river should have taken to reach the Great Plains, but the river, of course, wasn’t confused; its early course just serendipitously overlay the buried Royal . At its narrowest point, the Gorge is approximately 1,250 feet wide and 1,050 feet deep; its walls consist of granite and gneiss of pre-Cambrian age. On each side of the Gorge a gently rolling plateau extends away from the rim for several miles. The rock layers visible in the Royal Gorge are primarily composed of Precambrian metamorphic rocks, including gneiss, schist, and granite, with some intrusions of other igneous rocks like granodiorite, quartz diorite, and gabbro; essentially, very old rock that has been significantly altered by heat and pressure over time. The dominant rock types are gneiss and schist, which are metamorphic rocks formed through intense pressure and heat Some areas also show igneous intrusions like granite, granodiorite, quartz diorite, and gabbro, which are solidified magma that cut through the existing rock layers. Last just uploaded your photo for the last answer and your good to go.

please Message me on the geocache app or press send an answers, don't just log the cache without giving me your answers. If you don't, your log will Be removed so don't forget to send your answers. I won't remove it until 10 days. You have 10 days to send your answers in. 

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https://www.5280.com/colorado-by-nature-how-the-royal-gorge-was-formed/ 

https://npshistory.com/newsletters/region_iii_quarterly/vol3-3h.htm#:~:text=At%20its%20narrowest%20point%2C%20the,the%20rim%20for%20several%20miles.