I watch movies with an eye on the background geology
and scenery, always asking myself--is everything up to snuff. Was it really the correct geology for the scene? As a native Kansan I was always interested in
the TV series Gunsmoke, but even as
kid with no geological training I knew those mountains and pine trees really did
not exist down at Dodge City! I had
visited the southwestern plains and had not seen a tree other than a cottonwood
and the highest hill had a relief of about 50 feet. At about that time I begin
to doubt the truthfulness of what I observed on TV---several decades before the
term “reality TV” was coined!
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Rooster Cogburn ready to take on Ned Pepper. Photo from movie trailer courtesy of Utube.com.
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So, I always find it entertaining to watch the
scenery in a TV series or movies and that leads me to True Grit, the 1969 edition with John Wayne. The scenery was spectacular if you were just
looking at the rocks and were not trying to figure out how those big mountains
were jutting up at Ft. Smith, Arkansas, the home of Judge Parker’s courtroom
and gallows. Now, I have visited Ft.
Smith and there are numerous trees and a nice river valley but certainly there
is not a high mountain in sight. The
reason behind this conundrum is that most of the movie was filmed near Ridgeway,
Colorado, near the high peaks of the San Juan Mountains. So, movie viewers just need to imagine that
Arkansas and “Indian territory” (Oklahoma) had the mountains and enjoy the
scenery.
Most everyone’s favorite scene in True Grit is near the finale when
Rooster Cogburn (Wayne) is facing the “bad guy”, Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall) and
his three sidekicks:
(Rooster) I
mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hang in Ft. Smith at Judge
Parker’s convenience. Which will it be?
(Pepper) I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man. (Rooster)
Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch.
And off they ride towards each other
with six-guns a blazing, with a wonderful geological feature, Lizard Head,
popping up in the background!
The Lizard Head Wilderness (~42,000 acres), located
southwest of Telluride along CO 145, contains some of the region’s most spectacular
peaks including several 14ers: Mount Wilson (14,245'), Wilson Peak (14,017'),
El Diente (14,159'), South Wilson (14,110'), and “an almost 14er”, Gladstone Peak (13,913'). Lizard Head, a peak that gives its name to the
Wilderness Peak, comes in at 13,113' and is often considered as the toughest
peak in Colorado to summit (a technical climb on loose rock). Although it is easy to find references stating
that Lizard Head is a volcanic neck, it actually is a weathered hunk of Tertiary
volcanic tuff capped by a harder welded tuff.
Peak baggers usually refer to the rock as “rotten” and consider it as
somewhat unsafe to climb.
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Lizard Head Peak, an outcrop of volcanic tuff.
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Lizard Head Pass, near the peak, is the high point
of CO 145 running from Telluride to Cortez and displays some great views and interesting
geology. Although the San Juans are
composed primarily of various volcanic rocks, from the Pass summit to the
southwest a variety of sedimentary formations (Pennsylvanian through Cretaceous)
begin to crop out along the road. The
most conspicuous unit travelers observe is the Cretaceous Mancos Shale, a
fossiliferous, fissile black or dark gray, marine shale that is easy to locate near
the summit where marine fossils like pelecypods (clams) are common. The shale is also very easy to spot to the
east below the tuffs of Yellow Ridge where the volcanic rocks form a massive
and sharp ridge while the easily erodible shale is slope forming.
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Trace fossils in Mancos Shale, Lizard Head Pass.
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Fossils, note pelecypod, in Mancos Shale, Lizard
head Pass.
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Of course, Jeff Bridges stared in the 2010 remake of
True Grit. Although I liked the second
movie the original is still my first choice and I will always remember the
sound of John Wayne—Fill your hand……….
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Looking east from Lizard Head Pass. Outcrops of volcanic rocks overlying Mancos
Shale.
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