Buck Mountain Fault, Teton Range, Wyoming

In the summer of 1988, the year of the great Yellowstone Fires, I was engaged in my structural geology field research in the Tetons.  I spent some six weeks in the range that year, at times waking in the middle of the night with burning eyes and the smell of wood smoke permeating my being.  This image was obviously taken from the air during a scouting mission over the range with my major advisor and pilot Dave Lageson.  It’s fascinating what we can see from this perspective.  The Buck Mountain Fault is a highly pulverized zone of deformation where the Cathedral Group, including the three Tetons and adjacent peaks north and south, were thrust upward during the great continental compression known as the Laramide Orogeny, some 65 million years ago.