Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Finding Elephants Feet

A few minutes after my epiphanies while visiting the Moenave, AZ dinosaur tracks, we returned to U.S. Hwy 160 eastward towards Kayenta and Monument Valley.  A short time later, after a short rise in the highway and a gentle lefthand bend, on the left was quite the surprise.
Figure 1.
While doing the internet search on my daughter's computer in Phoenix the day before we left, these "things" popped up while I was looking for info on the Moenave dinosaur tracks, but the oddities of Figure 1 weren't labeled in name or locality, so I had no idea where they were or what they were called.

After pulling over and getting my first few photos, I asked a lady "What are these things called?", to which she replied "Elephant's Feet". (So appropriate!)  Some later internet reading yielded the information that these "Erosional Outliers" were of the Jurassic Kayenta Formation.  

Something I find odd about the treatment of the "Elephant's Feet" is the apparent exclusion of them from two popular "geo-tourism" books "Roadside Geology of Arizona" and "Geology Underfoot in Northern Arizona", both of which I had just prior to my two 2015 trips. Especially since they are relatively close to the site of the Moenavi dinosaur tracks.


[In front of the "left foot", you can see a couple of people (for scale).]

No comments:

Post a Comment