Please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. I also appreciate your continual support of these geology education videos. To do so, click on the "Thanks" button just above (right of Download button) or by going here: www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=EWUSLG3GBS5W8 Or: www.buymeacoffee.com/shawnwillsey
These roadside observation youtube videos make a great substitution for a traditionally-led field trip for those of us who are starting to learn about geology through non-traditional venues ( ie, not enrolled as formal students, but as newbie sponges taking in geological info thirstily). These make it all real, not just theoretical. Definitely keep these up (I say selfishly…👍)
Thanks for the videos, I enjoy them. I am somewhat amused that most of the world is taught that "this is rock A, this is rock B" as if all rocks fall into specific categories, when in reality, rocks occur in a wide spectrum of components, and the deliniation people thinks exists in rocks is really only a deliniation of names people assign to rocks. Your videos do allude to that that from time to time, which is great. In this cut, I noted how the granite changed from one area to another, with that one wash/eroded section probably a weaker part of the entire formation. Again, thanks for taking the time to make these.
@@boblatkey7160 well, we already do that, right? And then we have to name the flavors, and pretend that flavors never blend and are all distinct and unique, especially in most geology classes. A metaphor for many things in life, I think.
I said " epidote " right before you did and popped up the name on the screen , lol . That bush is likely growing in a vug , probably containing epidote crystals . Something to keep in mind when you are prospecting and see vegetation growing from otherwise barren rock outcrops especially large areas of flat laying rock . There have been more than a few historic mineral discoveries made this way , especially when a tree potted in a big pocket gets uprooted by a storm . Pay special attention to anomalous lines of vegetation in such areas .
Me too, the dirt road shortcut from Stanley/Lowman to Boise that avoided the twisty highway through Idaho City. I remember when they "oiled" it, and then widened it a little before it was paved--which I never thought they'd do but did. It is a very, very steep canyon and hard place to put a road anywhere. Dr. Walt Blackadar from Salmon, the pioneer of the modern sport of kayaking--and my neighbor as a kid--lost his life in this canyon below that road on the South Payette, after kayaking rivers all over the world. It was a stunning and sad day in my hometown for al of us that knew and remembered him as a doctor and all his kayaking adventures. But what a beautiful canyon through what I once thought generically was referred to as the "Idaho Batholith"--the story of the Idaho Batholith isn't as simple as they once thought.
Another great Random Roadcut! I loved it that in one little section of granite there were 3 different intrusions - a hydrothermal vein, a fine-grained mafic rock, and the andesite. (But we can see that "a little hazy" means there's a massive amount of wildfire smoke in the air.}
An oft-traveled-road of my youth, and now at least once a year for old time's sake. In the 60s-70s the pavement ended just after the GV Ranger station and didn't take up again until the Deadwood River bridge out of Lowman. Dusty washboard with few turnouts and no concrete barriers; pick-up windows open, no ac. A road grader would go back and forth every couple of days and always after thunderstorms to clear the rock fall. If you got behind one, well, such is life. Geology and humans coexisting. Good fishing. Hot Springs. Don't recall ever seeing a river raft, just a rare Kayak, perhaps Dr. Blackadar.
Watching your videos is paying off...I got the three major types of rock (granite, basalt, and andesite) as soon as you gave a close up, and the dike formation too. Now I can add grus and epidote to the vocabulary.👍🏻👍🏻 for your teaching methods, and my 65-year-old brain!😊
Oh wow! This is a fantastic roadcut! The granitic rock is so fractured and shattered, there are so many dikes and so much to see here! And it wasn’t long winded at all ;) Thank you, Shawn :)
Great job. Keep up your work in teaching us not so smart people and mapping the area where we can see it for ourselves when in the area. Just wanted to say keep doing your videos
Love the video. Wife and I drive it a couple times a year. Always stop in Horseshoe Bend for a soft serve ice cream cone. The continue on to Idaho for lunch.
There are two different English words being discussed, both spelled 'grus.' The Germanic term grus means gravel or grit (as some have noted for Swedish) and that's the source of the geologic word for decomposing granite. 'Grus' from the Latin for crane is a different word, from a Proto-IndoEuropean root meaning 'to cry hoarsely.'
Something for my part of the state thank you Shawn you must be hiking up in the sawtooth this weekend 🤔 You're braver than I am or something I wouldn't be standing right there. Not without my head looking skyward.
We missed the faulting and tilting of the granite. One would "assume" that the original granite would be an uplift, then erosion from the top downwards. The porphyritic granite and andesite would be a later intrusion. Then you have the thrusting and tilting of the multiple strata. Later there is the vertical, near-vertical, intrusions of dikes and veins of basalt, black andesite, and porphyritic andesite. The biggest issue is how the thrusting and faulting happened, which is the majority of all the igneous rocks shattering into the many layers. Or ... is there a multitude of continual extrusions of original granite and porphyritic granite, which later become these multiple layers disassociating from themselves in later times. Then you have the later basalt, black andesite, and porphyritic andesite coming into the strata. One also would consider that the porphyritics with their higher volume of independent crystals would be a cooler and massive intrusion, or these crystals are broken off the contact metamorphism of the granite or porphyritic granite, and incorporated into the new and hotter flowing andesite dikes and veins. There is more to this road cut and this valley and mountain than what is currently being talked about,
QUICK note to John Lord. This video is one of an ongoing series followed avidly by non geologists. Shawn pitches these "Random Road Cuts" at entry level to help the lay person. Their popularity says a lot about demand for this type of "learn together". approach. If you are a high level geologist yourself (?) perhaps you could subscribe and watch a representative bunch of these films and perhaps appreciate what is intended... Maybe even get into Geology Outreach the way Shawn has done so brilliantly.
Excellent, plus those were some decent looking mullein plants at the first dike. Mullein is a great medicinal plant but you don't want to have mullein seeds with you if you're fishing.
Thank you for doing these videos. I highly recommend you visit a road cut on Hwy 46 in Gooding County. The cut is just as you cross over from Twin County into Gooding County on the canyon rim!
Awesome scenery. In your rocks and minerals classes you present several types with cleavage plans which are at this road cut, muscovite, feldspar, plagioclase. Could that cause the fracturing here. Maybe it is apart of the weathering and aging of the exposed rock faces. Thanks a gain for a great video.
I am very jazzed that I was able to guess what type of rock/ geological term you were about to say maybe 90% of the time, I must be learning something from all your educational videos! (But why don't I have that same ability to guess what I'm looking at when I'm looking at an outcrop on my own?!!!)
OH PLEASE be as long winded as you please. That was a beautiful location you took us to today. I'm off to Google some new rock names 👍 and see what more I can find out.
I know this road. Drove it one winter in a 1951 Willys jeep, snow floor, slid off the road that night and got stuck. Prepared to spend the night someone came along and helped pull me out. Hwy 55 was closed due to the snow. I was driving from Moscow to Boise.
This is an AWESOME! roadcut. So many different events happened here and so many minerals! I think that it would have been cool if you could have walked or climbed from the ends to try and uncover one of the dikes on top. Thanks for all of ther coo info on your channel!!
I have spent much time here. Thanks for your info. It is known as a dike swarm. On the other side of the canyon you can see the ryolite spires. I have the believe each spire has a dike under it
for the granites of the Sawtooths, is the thought that the plutons formed where they are, then were uplifted; or are they thought to have formed elsewhere (such as offshore when NA's shoreline was inland of today's), accreted as exotic terrains, and then uplifted?
Google says "grus" is Latin for "crane" it refers to their coloration. The horses of this same color are called "grulla" from Spanish, also means "crane colored" Interesting discussion
I think Grus also means gravel in German. A lot of geological terms in English are borrowed from German. The meaning is definitely (granitic) gravel, it's not from the Latin word for "crane", that's just a coincidence! Grus probably means other things in other languages, too.
I am always curious about the estimated age of the various rock formations, very generally, like tens of millions of years old versus hundreds of millions of years old versus billions of years old.
I was wondering if those dikes all happened at a roughly contemporaneous timeframe if it would have caused a linear eruption like we were seeing in the early stages of the eruptions in Iceland or the southeast rift zone in Hawaii?
Interesting one thing I noticed is that those bushes are only found growing along the more mafic basaltic or andesitic dikes I would guess it needs elements not present in the granitic rocks? Geology and biology are intricately linked.
I think it's from German, a LOT of geological terms in English are loan words from German, probably because they were first described by German geologists. However the word trap as in 'the Siberian Traps' or 'Deccan Traps' is from the Swedish word for stairs. The geological term grus is specifically gravel formed from decomposed granite.
@@loopbraider Possibly north-German (Niederdeutsch, Plattdeutsch) where the word seems to exist. Another geological word that comes from Swedish is 'varved' used for layered clay.
Hey Professor Shawn two years ago late April I was driving from Boise to McCall and was shocked by the major work being done on a road cut. They were installing massive steel nets over the surface. What type of rocks are at that site?
From north Wales. Good observation - MY are those nets ugly. However our own highway and coastal defence engineers use these to contain rockfall. So to that end they are of practical value - as far as I can make out they are most common on off-vertical faces where the material is broken up and liable to be disturbed by animals or by weather.
👁️ ❤️ 🪨's! ...Not to divert from the rocks, but I wanted to share a quick 🐺 story in that exact location.. Bout 10 years ago I was hiking with my dog directly above you a couple hundred yards, just over the first peak of that hill.. Aaaand that morning we were in the wrong place at the wrong time and I had to shoot at 2 gray wolves to save my dog. Wolves don't bother humans, but they'll get mighty courageous if they see a lone hiker and an opportunity to steal his dog. **I don't think I hit either of them, I found no blood trails and did my due diligence to make sure. So all involved made it out of that wacky scenario unscathed (probably)😁🎉 *Also, 👁️ ❤️ 🪨's*
Please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. I also appreciate your continual support of these geology education videos. To do so, click on the "Thanks" button just above (right of Download button) or by going here: www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=EWUSLG3GBS5W8 Or: www.buymeacoffee.com/shawnwillsey
Thanks!
Many thanks
These roadside observation youtube videos make a great substitution for a traditionally-led field trip for those of us who are starting to learn about geology through non-traditional venues ( ie, not enrolled as formal students, but as newbie sponges taking in geological info thirstily). These make it all real, not just theoretical.
Definitely keep these up (I say selfishly…👍)
Thanks for the videos, I enjoy them. I am somewhat amused that most of the world is taught that "this is rock A, this is rock B" as if all rocks fall into specific categories, when in reality, rocks occur in a wide spectrum of components, and the deliniation people thinks exists in rocks is really only a deliniation of names people assign to rocks. Your videos do allude to that that from time to time, which is great. In this cut, I noted how the granite changed from one area to another, with that one wash/eroded section probably a weaker part of the entire formation. Again, thanks for taking the time to make these.
@@justmyopinion99 so we shouldn't put them into categories and just called them all rocks? 😂😂😂
@@boblatkey7160 well, we already do that, right? And then we have to name the flavors, and pretend that flavors never blend and are all distinct and unique, especially in most geology classes. A metaphor for many things in life, I think.
I said " epidote " right before you did and popped up the name on the screen , lol .
That bush is likely growing in a vug , probably containing epidote crystals .
Something to keep in mind when you are prospecting and see vegetation growing from otherwise barren rock outcrops especially large areas of flat laying rock .
There have been more than a few historic mineral discoveries made this way , especially when a tree potted in a big pocket gets uprooted by a storm .
Pay special attention to anomalous lines of vegetation in such areas .
These geologic tours are great ways to illustrate different processes….veins and dikes in this vid. New words for me: grus and epidote. 👍
Such an interesting roadcut! The darks and lights, different crystal sizes. Just beautiful. Thanks.
I always find your random road cuts so interesting and informative. Wish I could see it in person.
Having watched your ID series and watched many Nick videos I was able to identify all but the epidote. Thanks, guys.
I'm old enough to remember when that road was unpaved. Great video Shawn! I love that area of my beautiful state!
Me too, the dirt road shortcut from Stanley/Lowman to Boise that avoided the twisty highway through Idaho City. I remember when they "oiled" it, and then widened it a little before it was paved--which I never thought they'd do but did. It is a very, very steep canyon and hard place to put a road anywhere.
Dr. Walt Blackadar from Salmon, the pioneer of the modern sport of kayaking--and my neighbor as a kid--lost his life in this canyon below that road on the South Payette, after kayaking rivers all over the world. It was a stunning and sad day in my hometown for al of us that knew and remembered him as a doctor and all his kayaking adventures.
But what a beautiful canyon through what I once thought generically was referred to as the "Idaho Batholith"--the story of the Idaho Batholith isn't as simple as they once thought.
11:58 Holy cow, Shawn can break granite with his bare hands😅
Decades of rock climbing hehe
Interesting and educational. Thank you 😊
Thank you so much for this wonderful series. It's like reliving field camp from my couch! Best content on youtube.
Ha! I'm learning...👏🏻 caught the oops and identification of mineral compositions. (grus is new) Very cool.
Always like hearing your lectures. The Wind River canyon in Wyoming is an area I find interesting. Thanks for taking me along…..
Thanks Shawn. I always love a random roadcut video.
Another great Random Roadcut! I loved it that in one little section of granite there were 3 different intrusions - a hydrothermal vein, a fine-grained mafic rock, and the andesite. (But we can see that "a little hazy" means there's a massive amount of wildfire smoke in the air.}
Great episode. I learned several things.
An oft-traveled-road of my youth, and now at least once a year for old time's sake. In the 60s-70s the pavement ended just after the GV Ranger station and didn't take up again until the Deadwood River bridge out of Lowman. Dusty washboard with few turnouts and no concrete barriers; pick-up windows open, no ac. A road grader would go back and forth every couple of days and always after thunderstorms to clear the rock fall. If you got behind one, well, such is life. Geology and humans coexisting. Good fishing. Hot Springs. Don't recall ever seeing a river raft, just a rare Kayak, perhaps Dr. Blackadar.
It was not long winded ! 😊 It was wonderful and eye opening ! I won’t look at road cuts the same again !! 🙏🏼🌸🌼☺️✨🌷🦋☕️☕️
Watching your videos is paying off...I got the three major types of rock (granite, basalt, and andesite) as soon as you gave a close up, and the dike formation too. Now I can add grus and epidote to the vocabulary.👍🏻👍🏻 for your teaching methods, and my 65-year-old brain!😊
Nice road cut. Thanks.
Really enjoy the process and investigation. Thanks!
Oh wow! This is a fantastic roadcut! The granitic rock is so fractured and shattered, there are so many dikes and so much to see here! And it wasn’t long winded at all ;) Thank you, Shawn :)
Thanks Shawn, Roadcuts are great!
Welcome!
Great job. Keep up your work in teaching us not so smart people and mapping the area where we can see it for ourselves when in the area. Just wanted to say keep doing your videos
Thanks, will do!
Thanks for this! I’ve kayaked all that section-the canyon, swirly canyon, staircase. This helps understanding how the rapids fit in the landscape
Thanks a bunch!
Amazing formations and that canyon view, wow! Thanks for the video!
greetings from mount krakatau indonesia
Love the video. Wife and I drive it a couple times a year. Always stop in Horseshoe Bend for a soft serve ice cream cone. The continue on to Idaho for lunch.
Thank you, excellent road cut and a good description of what you see.
Thanks for all the hard work on these videos!
Santa Barbara city College geology program road trips! Some of the greatest memories of my entire life.
WOW, Shawn this was so education...........316 like
Thans so much. This series is super interesting . You explain so very well.
Awesome video, I think your random road cut analysis is a fantastic idea!
Thank you for sharing. This cut was super interesting!
ありがとうございます！
There are two different English words being discussed, both spelled 'grus.' The Germanic term grus means gravel or grit (as some have noted for Swedish) and that's the source of the geologic word for decomposing granite. 'Grus' from the Latin for crane is a different word, from a Proto-IndoEuropean root meaning 'to cry hoarsely.'
Is the basaltic ‘softer’ than the granite? It seems eroded farther back.
Something for my part of the state thank you Shawn you must be hiking up in the sawtooth this weekend 🤔
You're braver than I am or something I wouldn't be standing right there. Not without my head looking skyward.
Thank you, as always, rocks are fascinating!
Thanks to your Iceland videos and diagrams, I have no difficulty seeing the magma forcing its way through the fissures of the granite.
Very interesting random road cut. Thank you for taking the time to explain it.
We missed the faulting and tilting of the granite. One would "assume" that the original granite would be an uplift, then erosion from the top downwards. The porphyritic granite and andesite would be a later intrusion. Then you have the thrusting and tilting of the multiple strata. Later there is the vertical, near-vertical, intrusions of dikes and veins of basalt, black andesite, and porphyritic andesite. The biggest issue is how the thrusting and faulting happened, which is the majority of all the igneous rocks shattering into the many layers. Or ... is there a multitude of continual extrusions of original granite and porphyritic granite, which later become these multiple layers disassociating from themselves in later times. Then you have the later basalt, black andesite, and porphyritic andesite coming into the strata. One also would consider that the porphyritics with their higher volume of independent crystals would be a cooler and massive intrusion, or these crystals are broken off the contact metamorphism of the granite or porphyritic granite, and incorporated into the new and hotter flowing andesite dikes and veins. There is more to this road cut and this valley and mountain than what is currently being talked about,
QUICK note to John Lord.
This video is one of an ongoing series followed avidly by non geologists. Shawn pitches these "Random Road Cuts" at entry level to help the lay person.
Their popularity says a lot about demand for this type of "learn together". approach.
If you are a high level geologist yourself (?) perhaps you could subscribe and watch a representative bunch of these films and perhaps appreciate what is intended... Maybe even get into Geology Outreach the way Shawn has done so brilliantly.
Can you do a beach sometime? Especially the ocean or one of the great lakes if you visit
Excellent, plus those were some decent looking mullein plants at the first dike. Mullein is a great medicinal plant but you don't want to have mullein seeds with you if you're fishing.
Thank you for doing these videos. I highly recommend you visit a road cut on Hwy 46 in Gooding County. The cut is just as you cross over from Twin County into Gooding County on the canyon rim!
Clear Lakes grade north of Buhl?
Thank you.
Awesome scenery. In your rocks and minerals classes you present several types with cleavage plans which are at this road cut, muscovite, feldspar, plagioclase. Could that cause the fracturing here. Maybe it is apart of the weathering and aging of the exposed rock faces. Thanks a gain for a great video.
I am very jazzed that I was able to guess what type of rock/ geological term you were about to say maybe 90% of the time, I must be learning something from all your educational videos! (But why don't I have that same ability to guess what I'm looking at when I'm looking at an outcrop on my own?!!!)
Magma always find a way to insert itself.
OH PLEASE be as long winded as you please.
That was a beautiful location you took us to today. I'm off to Google some new rock names 👍 and see what more I can find out.
I know this road. Drove it one winter in a 1951 Willys jeep, snow floor, slid off the road that night and got stuck. Prepared to spend the night someone came along and helped pull me out. Hwy 55 was closed due to the snow. I was driving from Moscow to Boise.
This is an AWESOME! roadcut. So many different events happened here and so many minerals! I think that it would have been cool if you could have walked or climbed from the ends to try and uncover one of the dikes on top.
Thanks for all of ther coo info on your channel!!
I have spent much time here. Thanks for your info. It is known as a dike swarm. On the other side of the canyon you can see the ryolite spires. I have the believe each spire has a dike under it
for the granites of the Sawtooths, is the thought that the plutons formed where they are, then were uplifted; or are they thought to have formed elsewhere (such as offshore when NA's shoreline was inland of today's), accreted as exotic terrains, and then uplifted?
Thanks for the information, I feel like I’m in a college class, and at 81 that’s an ego booster.
Good camera work..
Interresting, the name "grus" is Swedish for fine gravel so likely the same word
Google says "grus" is Latin for "crane" it refers to their coloration. The horses of this same color are called "grulla" from Spanish, also means "crane colored"
Interesting discussion
I think Grus also means gravel in German. A lot of geological terms in English are borrowed from German. The meaning is definitely (granitic) gravel, it's not from the Latin word for "crane", that's just a coincidence! Grus probably means other things in other languages, too.
Hi Shawn, love your road cuts. This one is very interesting with all the dikes. Any ideas or guesses as to how old those magma dikes might be?
They are Eocene. About 45-52 million years old.
@@shawnwillsey Wow, that's old. You make geology fascinating. Thanks again.
The mafic injected rock is the same width at the bottom as the top...pulling apart? Not uplift, which might be wider at the top?
I am always curious about the estimated age of the various rock formations, very generally, like tens of millions of years old versus hundreds of millions of years old versus billions of years old.
I was wondering if those dikes all happened at a roughly contemporaneous timeframe if it would have caused a linear eruption like we were seeing in the early stages of the eruptions in Iceland or the southeast rift zone in Hawaii?
Interesting one thing I noticed is that those bushes are only found growing along the more mafic basaltic or andesitic dikes I would guess it needs elements not present in the granitic rocks? Geology and biology are intricately linked.
Might the term 'grus' come from Swedish? The Swedish word 'grus' just means 'gravel'.
I think it's from German, a LOT of geological terms in English are loan words from German, probably because they were first described by German geologists. However the word trap as in 'the Siberian Traps' or 'Deccan Traps' is from the Swedish word for stairs. The geological term grus is specifically gravel formed from decomposed granite.
@@loopbraider Possibly north-German (Niederdeutsch, Plattdeutsch) where the word seems to exist.
Another geological word that comes from Swedish is 'varved' used for layered clay.
In fall and winter months lots of rocks roll onto the road, be careful
Hey Shawn. May I call you Grus Wayne?
I thought I could see more dikes on the opposite side of the canyon as well. Either way, beautiful little river valley there. Very picturesque.
When I see the granite I wonder if you as a geologist have a granite kitchen countertop. And if you had discussions with your wife over it. 😀
Basalt dikes related to Columbia River Basalts?
No. These are much older and too far east.
The 'momma' in me is asking if you are safe out there by youself. Do you have a GPS so someone knows where you are?
Hey Professor Shawn two years ago late April I was driving from Boise to McCall and was shocked by the major work being done on a road cut. They were installing massive steel nets over the surface. What type of rocks are at that site?
From north Wales.
Good observation - MY are those nets ugly. However our own highway and coastal defence engineers use these to contain rockfall. So to that end they are of practical value - as far as I can make out they are most common on off-vertical faces where the material is broken up and liable to be disturbed by animals or by weather.
Any climbing here? looks scary
👁️ ❤️ 🪨's!
...Not to divert from the rocks, but I wanted to share a quick 🐺 story in that exact location.. Bout 10 years ago I was hiking with my dog directly above you a couple hundred yards, just over the first peak of that hill.. Aaaand that morning we were in the wrong place at the wrong time and I had to shoot at 2 gray wolves to save my dog.
Wolves don't bother humans, but they'll get mighty courageous if they see a lone hiker and an opportunity to steal his dog.
**I don't think I hit either of them,
I found no blood trails and did my due diligence to make sure. So all involved made it out of that wacky scenario unscathed (probably)😁🎉
*Also, 👁️ ❤️ 🪨's*