Page 17 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

ago, these layers of rock strata rise like hands
in prayer, or like the pinnate vanes along a Stegosaurus’s tail. They could be giant sharks’ teeth, or bears’ teeth. The famous basalt dike in New York along the Hudson River just north of Manhattan is called a palisade, after fort walls built by soldiers during the colonial period.
But these palisades are just chapters from that longer book. The uplifted sediments have eroded, leaving only incidents, platelets, wings sticking up. Some are almost 300 feet tall, and thin. They pop up in inaccessible places, like Godzilla emerging from the deep, but also along the road leading to the Red Lodge ski area, and along the Beartooth Front.
Five hundred million years ago, the entire region was below the sea. Seventy million years ago,
the ocean began to recede. You can still find fish fossilized in the cliffs. More than twomiles of sed- iment from the ocean was left behind. Fossilized trees are buried in the sediment around the highest points of Tippet Rise.
Much of the current landscape was sculpted by glaciation that moved down the Beartooth Front, eroding the uplifted mountainscape to create cirques, arêtes, and hanging valleys, which can all be observed above the gorgeous East and West Rosebud canyons.
A glacier is like a snowplow; it pushes sediment
in front and to the sides of it. The material that gets pushed to the side forms a lateral moraine. The
two parallel moraines on either side of the glacier form a valley with steep moraines or walls on
either side. Kettle lakes, kames, eskers, and outwash plains are left behind when the glacier’s plow finally melts and disappears, which is how the land around
Tippet Rise got its distinctive shapes. However, the Beartooth Mountains still retain an estimated 107 cirque glaciers (tucked into the base of mountains) and 390 rock glaciers, more glaciers than Glacier National Park.
Into this geologic showplace rose the limestone remains of the ocean sediment which we call the palisades, and which give the Beartooth Range its teeth. The teeth are reflected in Ensamble Studio’s Portals, which rise like Stone Age erratics from the soil beneath them.
Tippet Rise, at the northern tip of this 22.6 million-acre ecosystem, is further buffered on the west by the Gallatin National Forest, which may have trees but which is really a million-acre roadless wilderness anchored by the Absaroka Mountains.
To the south run the legacy ranches: the Switchback Ranch which begins in Sunlight Basin and encom- passes large swaths of land all the way up and around the toe of the Beartooths to Roscoe; the Lazy E-L Ranch, run by the MacKays since 1901; the Padlock Ranch; and the Bench Ranch. Quite a lot of this region is mandated for ranching. The rolling grasslands have been scraped raw of soil and trees by wind and fire until grazing has become the best use of the land,
so cows are mainly what you see for 50 miles as you drive to Red Lodge from Fishtail.
What you see at Tippet Rise is only the tip of an immense system, a microclimate of cloud patterns, wild Chinook thermals, sudden squalls and
blizzards, in the rainshadow of Yellowstone and the Beartooths, all of which contribute to the otherworld- ly light, the soothing breezes, and the long lines of the land created by one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on Earth.
2018 Summer Season 17