Although it's also known for for wolves, bison, and stunning scenery, Yellowstone National Park was established as the world's first national park in 1872 largely because of its geological wonders. In Geology Underfoot in Yellowstone Country, author and geologist Marc Hendrix takes you to over twenty sites in the park and surrounding region that illustrate the deep-time story of Yellowstone Country, from its early existence as a seafloor hundreds of millions of years ago to an earthquake swarm in 2008 that caused some folks to wonder if the Yellowstone Volcano was going to blow its top, again. Besides covering icons such as Old Faithful and Mammoth Hot Springs, Geology Underfoot in Yellowstone Country visits sites that are less well known but just as mind blowing, including outcrops of rock deposited by superfast incendiary flows of hot ash; the glacially sculpted grandeur of the Beartooth and Absaroka mountains witnessed along the Beartooth Highway; and the deadly Madison landslide that killed twenty-eight people in 1959. With prose tooled for the lay reader and a multitude of colorful photos and illustrations, Geology Underfoot in Yellowstone Country will help you read the landscape the way a geologist does.
The Geology Underfoot series encourages you to get out of your car for an up-close look at rocks and landforms. These books inform and enlighten, no matter how much--or how little--geology you already know. What's more, they're simply good reading, on-site or at home.