Then all hell broke loose, and the granite rose beneath them. The granite core came up like a basement elevator that rises through a city sidewalk, pushing to either side a pair of hinged doors. That was the chronology of numerous ranges-the old hard stuff from far below breaking upward through roofrock and ultimately standing highest, while the ends of the roofrock lean on the flanks in gradations of age that are younger with distance from the core. The broken ends of that Pennsylvanian sand-the outcropping edges of the tilted strata-had weathered out as a rough, serrate ridge along the border of the range. Rocky Mountain ranges are typically flanked by such hogbacks. Boulder, Colorado, is backdropped with hogbacks (the Flatirons), which zakelijke energie vergelijken are more of the same Pennsylvanian strata leaning against the Front Range. Now, on the gangplank, Love said parenthetically, “You are seeing Paleozoic rocks for the first time since the Mississippi River. They go all the way through-under Iowa and Nebraska-but they’re buried.” In the fall of i865, Major General Grenville Dodge and his pack trains and cavalry and other troops were coming south along the St. Vrain Trail, under the front of the Laramie Range. The Powder River campaign, behind them, had been, if not a military defeat, a signal failure in its purpose: to cow the North Cheyennes and the Ogallala Sioux. General Dodge, though, was preoccupied with something else. President Lincoln, not long before he died, had instructed Dodge to choose a route for the Union Pacific Railroad. Dodge, like others before him, had sought the counsel of zakelijke energie Jim Bridger, the much celebrated trapper, explorer, fur trader, commercial entrepreneur, and all-around mountain man. Bridger, who was sixty by then, had preceded almost everybody else into the West by two or three decades and knew the country as few other whites ever would. It was he who discovered the Great Salt Lake, reporting his find as the Pacific Ocean.