Wichita Mountains
The Wichita Mountains are located inside the southwestern percentage of the U.S. point out of Oklahoma.[one] It's the principal aid process inside the Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen, staying the results of a failed continental rift. The mountains are a northwest-southeast trending series of rocky promontories, a lot of capped by five hundred million-year old granite. These were uncovered and rounded by weathering over the Pennsylvanian & Permian Intervals. The eastern conclude from the mountains presents one,000 toes (305 m) of topographic aid in the area usually dominated by Carefully rolling grasslands.
The mountains are dwelling to quite a few Operating ranches and quarry operations, the condition reformatory, recreational homes and campsites, and scenic parklands. Fort Sill, home from the U.S. Military Industry Artillery School, occupies a significant part of the southeastern close from the mountains.
Recreation
The Wichita Mountains Countrywide Wildlife Refuge, a favourite for hikers and rock climbers while in the location, is located adjacent to Cache, Medicine Park, Indiahoma, and historic Meers, and is also a short generate from Lawton and Walters. Bison, elk and deer are secured on the fifty nine,020-acre (23,880 ha) wildlife refuge. The refuge also manages a herd of longhorn cattle. A scenic highway traversing the park permits leisurely views of such and other fauna.[two]
Backcountry tenting is available while in the Charon Gardens Wilderness region.[three] The park is household to a little number of fishing lakes. There are lots of trails for climbing. The Treasure Lake Task Corps internet site is found listed here. Extra details of curiosity include the refuge's people Centre, Holy Town from the Wichitas, Quanah Parker Lake & Dam, Lake Jed Johnson, and Lake Lawtonka.
Terrific Plains Point out Park is located near the geographic Heart of the Wichita Mountains, north of the city of Mountain Park.
Quartz Mountain Nature Park and Arts Center is often a recreation area Situated north of the town of Altus.
Geography
At 2,464 ft (751 m) Mount Scott is the second highest mountain within the Wichita Mountains Countrywide Wildlife Refuge boundary. Mount Pinchot from the Specific Use Spot [a] is 12 ft (four m) taller.[4][five] A paved road brings about the summit of Mount Scott, offering sights from the granite promontories into the west, the wind farm within the Slick Hills towards the north, the lakes on the south and east, Fort Sill, and Lawton. The highest peak while in the Wichita Mountains (together with parts outside the house the refuge) is Haley Peak, at two,481 ft (756 m). Haley Peak is found on personal assets just outdoors the northwest corner of the refuge.[six]
Wichita Mountains Narrows
Heritage
When the realm was Element of Indian reservations and for that reason off-limits to non-Native People, the Wichita Mountains had been rumored to comprise prosperous gold deposits. When the realm was very first opened up for settlement, numerous prospectors staked mining claims, and towns were laid out to serve the presumed bonanzas, but no economic deposits had been uncovered. The gold boom was extended by some unscrupulous assayers who uncovered gold in every single sample, but the miners inevitably gave up, abandoning ghost cities like Wildman, Oklahoma.[seven][eight]
Geology
Granite knob inside the Wichita Mtns.
Granite overlying gabbro - a view of Mount Sheridan from the northeast
American Bison
Wichita Uplift fault map
Wichita Uplift fault cross area, Using the Anadarko Basin to the proper in the fault zone
Overview
The Wichita Mountains are rocky promontories and rounded hills product of pink and black igneous rocks, gentle-coloured sedimentary rocks, and boulder conglomerates. The Wichita Mountains ended up shaped in four unique geologic episodes adhering to a unsuccessful continental rift.
Magmatism induced by continental rifting just just before and within the Cambrian Period made the granites and rhyolites (the red rocks), gabbroic rocks, anorthosites, and diabases (the black rocks).
Subsidence resulted in burial by sandstones and carbonates (the light-coloured rocks) in the early Paleozoic.
Uplift in the course of the Pennsylvanian Ouachita Orogeny brought these rocks on the surface area as mountains.
Weathering and erosion throughout the Permian Interval flattened the mountains and produced a mantle of conglomerates.
The mountains on their own are Permian landforms included and preserved by river-borne sediments during the Permian and partially excavated only in recent geological moments. Publicity of such fossil mountains is finest in direction of the southeast; Significantly from the western A part of the Permian range stays buried below sandstones and mudstones.
Information
The geologic background of your region commenced With all the deposition of late Precambrian to early Cambrian sandstones collectively called the Tillman metasedimentary group.[nine] These sediments have been intruded by a coarse mafic layered intricate as being the location started to rift aside in the course of breakup of your Neoproterozoic continent, Pannotia.[ten] The exposed part of this unit, named the Glen Mountains Layered Complicated, is made up of gabbro, anorthosite and troctolite. Latest significant-precision dating yields an age of 532.49 ± 0.fifteen Ma.[eleven] These are definitely the dark grey rocks found through the Raggedy Mountains, the central lowlands location of your wildlife refuge, and to the fast north of the refuge.[twelve]
Uplift and erosion followed, as being the layered sophisticated is unconformably overlain with the considerable lava flows of the Carlton Rhyolite Team.[9] The rhyolites undoubtedly are a brown-red to orange porphyritic rock with 5–10 mm orange-coloured alkali feldspar crystals. Almost all of the rounded hills on Fort Sill are created of this rhyolite, together with Medication Bluffs. Added publicity of the rhyolite is present in Blue Creek Canyon, in which Oklahoma Highway 58 cuts from the Slick Hills. Tabular intrusions of granite and plutons of hydrous gabbro exploited the boundary involving the layered complex as well as rhyolites.[thirteen] The granites, collectively named the Wichita Granite Group, differ a bit in composition and texture. The granites kind the peaks and highlands within the japanese Wichitas plus the isolated peaks of your western Wichitas. Some are equigranular, but most are porphyritic.
The Mount Scott Granite is among the most thoroughly exposed Wichita Granite. It types the topographic feature from which it will require its title, and it is actually distributed through the entire northern 50 % on the wildlife refuge. Dark rounded alkali feldspars, generally a person centimeter or considerably less in diameter, dominate the porphyritic texture of the rock.[14] SiO2 ranges On this granite range from 72.8% to seventy five.8%.[15]
Somewhat small and compositionally distinctive plutons, referred to as the Roosevelt Gabbros, are present in the japanese and central Wichita Mountains. Much like the layered elaborate, they are dim rocks. In contrast to the layered elaborate, they have considerable quantities of biotite, a mineral that types in magmas with elevated dissolved drinking water. One particular of these bodies, the Mount Sheridan Gabbro, Wichita Mountains report is exposed in roadcuts at Meers and underlies the Mount Scott Granite to the north aspect from the wildlife refuge. Weathered gabbroic soils are thicker and support extra vegetation than those generated on weathered granite, Therefore the tree line about the north side of Mount Sheridan approximates the Get in touch with among the Mount Sheridan Gabbro and the Mount Scott Granite. Geologic relationships counsel the granites and gabbros intruded at depths no greater than 50 % a kilometer while in the crust.[nine] Insignificant uplift ensued, and magmatism concluded with the intrusive emplacement of subvolcanic functions: rhyolite and diabase dikes.[9] They are improperly uncovered, except a significant diabase dike during the Mount Scott Granite unveiled in the the latest widening of Oklahoma Point out Highway 49, just west of Interstate forty four.
Pursuing the cessation of magmatism, the region subsided and was inundated by a shallow sea, leading to the deposition of detrital sediments followed by carbonates.[16] The modify marks the local expression on the Sauk Unconformity. The sunshine-coloured rocks exposed during the Slick Hills are reduce Paleozoic marine sediments, and so are such as Individuals exposed while in the Arbuckle Mountains, 100 km towards the east.
In the Pennsylvanian Period (330–290 million several years back) the area was subjected to powerful strain through the continental collision or orogeny which developed the Ouachita Mountains towards the east.[seventeen] This resulted in faulting and folding placing alongside a WNW route and involves the Arbuckle and Wichita Mountains of southern Oklahoma and the Amarillo Uplift in the Texas Panhandle.[seventeen] Up to twenty,000 feet (6,one hundred m) of local uplift transpired for the duration of this time.[eighteen]
This uplift regionally established rugged mountains lessened by erosion to their current point out largely in the course of the Pennslyvanian & Permian Durations. In depth weathering manufactured the tors in the Charon Gardens location along with the "river" of boulders that descends the west slope of Mount Scott. Also, weathering produced the bowling-ball sized boulders inside the Permian Put up Oak Conglomerate regionally found in and round the mountains. In combination with outcrops of the conglomerate, the boulders are preserved from the distinctive rock properties of Drugs Park. Given that the Permian progressed, river sediments buried the Wichita Mountains, preserving them from even further weathering. Modern geological erosion has removed these sediments, excavating these once buried fossil landforms.[9]
The commonest soil in the Wichita Mountains is Brico sequence, that has a topsoil of brown cobbly loam over a reddish brown to pink cobbly clay loam or clay subsoil.[19]
