You never know, they might enjoy the view too. The photo was taken around 18.00 so that's evening sun and sky. Soon we'll be able to read outside all night. I can't wait!
mountain Where I live - on the Llano Estacado - this entire plateau is built of eroded soil from the Rocky Mountains. So I reckon, I technically live on top of mountain material. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_Estacado Excerpt from http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/onli ... /ryl2.html The underlying rocks of the Llano Estacado consist of clearly defined geologic deposits, which date from near the end of the Paleozoic era. By the end of the late Mesozoic the last retreat of the seas and the building of the Rocky Mountains began. It was the uplift of the Rockies during the Cenozoic (which began 70,000,000 years ago) that provided the materials underlying the Llano Estacado. As rain and snow melt eroded the Rocky Mountains, debris was carried eastward onto the High Plains. As the mountain streams left the precipitous and confining canyons of the high mountains and moved out on the plains, they slowed, and unable to carry the vast load of boulders, pebbles, and silt, dropped those materials into their beds. The stream beds were aggraded, and the streams overflowed and found new avenues of descent over ever lower and flatter terrain. This process left large interconnected alluvial fans much like the deltas which form at some river mouths. The land surface was made up of aggraded materials, which theoretically stretched all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Calcium carbonate, which had been carried in solution from the mountains, seeped into the alluvial deposits and through evaporation formed a hard caprock of impervious material, commonly called caliche. Subsequent fracturing of the caliche caprock allowed weathering by wind and water of the more humid east to form the lower plains of Texas but left the more arid Llano Estacado high and dry.
I find that landscape so cool, WTxDaddy. It's almost alien compared with what I'm used to. Thanks for linking and telling.
llano estacado Yeah. Droopy, it's very flat here, but as the links said, the South Plains are dotted with small playa lakes, which provided habitat for birds & other creatures (which we call "critters" in Texas). We are pretty close to the Eastern edge, where the "caprock" drops off to the lower, rolling plains. It is a pretty dramatic and beautiful view. The water in Winter draws millions of Canada geese and each Winter, there are more geese than people out here. The rest of the year, there are more cattle than people! But here & there you find little lakes with trees & slightly different flora & fauna.
