Balancing basalt boulder Location: Between Big Bend Ranch and the Solitario Uplift Year: 1991 Merckslides catalogue number: 06-17170 Comments: For a week during field camp, we would bounce over the world's worst road for the better part of an hour, crossing weathered tertiary volcanics, to reach our field site in the Solitario. The mountains int he background, the outcrops, the balancing rocks were all the remains of what, during the Oligocene, must have been a magnificent shield volcano.

Tertiary volcanic landscape Location: Between Big Bend Ranch and the Solitario Uplift Year: 1991 Merckslides catalogue number: 06-17171 Comments: More of the same. An impressive, forbidding landscape inhabited by lean feral cattle.

Caballos Novaculite cuesta Location: The Solitario Uplift Year: 1991 Merckslides catalogue number: 06-17174 Comments: The Solitario Uplift is a circular blister in which the folded roots of the Ouachitas (that in this region were worn flat and covered by sediments during the Cretaceous) are exposed. It was a good place to learn geological mapping because a major rock unit, the Caballos novaculite, was snow white and a major ridge former. To make things better, it cantacted the flat black Maravillas limestone. Hard to miss. The bad news was that this was a very difficult landscape. Every plant had thorns, and the practical distinction one made was between the ones that merely poked and the ones that could inflict serious damage. It was hot as hell, hilly, and covered with sharp rocks. I liked it, though.

Caballos Novaculite cuesta Location: The Solitario Uplift Year: 1991 Merckslides catalogue number: 06-17173 Comments:

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