Wichita Mountains
The Wichita Mountains can be found inside the southwestern percentage of the U.S. point out of Oklahoma.[one] It's the principal relief method during the Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen, remaining the results of a failed continental rift. The mountains can be a northwest-southeast trending number of rocky promontories, numerous capped by 500 million-calendar year previous granite. These were being uncovered and rounded by weathering in the course of the Pennsylvanian & Permian Periods. The jap conclude of your mountains presents 1,000 toes (305 m) of topographic aid in the region usually dominated by Carefully rolling grasslands.
The mountains are residence to a lot of Doing the job ranches and quarry operations, the state reformatory, recreational residences and campsites, and scenic parklands. Fort Sill, household on the U.S. Army Discipline Artillery University, occupies a substantial percentage of the southeastern stop on the mountains.
Recreation
The Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge, a favorite for hikers and rock climbers in the area, is found adjacent to Cache, Medication Park, Indiahoma, and historic Meers, and is also a brief drive from Lawton and Walters. Bison, elk and deer are shielded on the 59,020-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 those and also other fauna.[two]
Backcountry camping is available in the Charon Gardens Wilderness location.[three] The park is household to a small number of fishing lakes. There are various trails for mountaineering. The Treasure Lake Position Corps web site is situated listed here. Supplemental points of interest include things like the refuge's visitors Middle, Holy Metropolis from the Wichitas, Quanah Parker Lake & Dam, Lake Jed Johnson, and Lake Lawtonka.
Terrific Plains State Park is located near the geographic center from the Wichita Mountains, north with the town of Mountain Park.
Quartz Mountain Nature Park and Arts Centre is usually a recreation space Situated north of town of Altus.
Geography
At 2,464 ft (751 m) Mount Scott is the second maximum mountain throughout the Wichita Mountains Countrywide Wildlife Refuge boundary. Mount Pinchot within the Exclusive Use Spot [a] is twelve feet (4 m) taller.[four][5] A paved road leads to the summit of Mount Scott, giving views from the granite promontories for the west, the wind farm over the Slick Hills to the north, the lakes into the south and east, Fort Sill, and Lawton. The highest peak while in the Wichita Mountains (which includes areas outdoors the refuge) is Haley Peak, at 2,481 ft (756 m). Haley Peak is situated on private house just outside the northwest corner of the refuge.[6]
Wichita Mountains Narrows
Heritage
When the region was Portion of Indian reservations and thus off-boundaries to non-Native Us citizens, the Wichita Mountains have been rumored to incorporate loaded gold deposits. When the area was initially opened up for settlement, many prospectors staked mining promises, and towns ended up laid out to provide the presumed bonanzas, but no financial deposits have been discovered. The gold growth was prolonged by some unscrupulous assayers who found gold in each check out this one from Wichita Mountains individual sample, nevertheless the miners finally gave up, abandoning ghost towns which include Wildman, Oklahoma.[seven][eight]
Geology
Granite knob in the Wichita Mtns.
Granite overlying gabbro - a check out of Mount Sheridan from the northeast
American Bison
Wichita Uplift fault map
Wichita Uplift fault cross segment, With all the Anadarko Basin to the proper of your fault zone
Overview
The Wichita Mountains are rocky promontories and rounded hills crafted from crimson and black igneous rocks, mild-coloured sedimentary rocks, and boulder conglomerates. The Wichita Mountains have been formed in four distinctive geologic episodes following a unsuccessful continental rift.
Magmatism induced by continental rifting just ahead of and during the Cambrian Period of time generated the granites and rhyolites (the purple rocks), gabbroic rocks, anorthosites, and diabases (the black rocks).
Subsidence resulted in burial by sandstones and carbonates (The sunshine-colored rocks) through the early Paleozoic.
Uplift over the Pennsylvanian Ouachita Orogeny brought these rocks into the area as mountains.
Weathering and erosion during the Permian Period flattened the mountains and developed a mantle of conglomerates.
The mountains them selves are Permian landforms covered and preserved by river-borne sediments during the Permian and partially excavated only in the latest geological instances. Publicity of those fossil mountains is biggest to the southeast; much of your western part of the Permian vary continues to be buried beneath sandstones and mudstones.
Information
The geologic heritage from the area commenced with the deposition of late Precambrian to early Cambrian sandstones collectively known as the Tillman metasedimentary team.[9] These sediments ended up intruded by a coarse mafic layered elaborate as being the location began to rift aside throughout breakup from the Neoproterozoic continent, Pannotia.[10] The uncovered portion of this device, named the Glen Mountains Layered Complicated, consists of gabbro, anorthosite and troctolite. Latest high-precision courting yields an age of 532.49 ± 0.fifteen Ma.[eleven] These are definitely the darkish gray rocks observed through the Raggedy Mountains, the central lowlands region of the wildlife refuge, also to the rapid north on the refuge.[twelve]
Uplift and erosion followed, since the layered elaborate is unconformably overlain from the substantial lava flows from the Carlton Rhyolite Team.[9] The rhyolites are a brown-pink to orange porphyritic rock with five–ten mm orange-colored alkali feldspar crystals. Almost all of the rounded hills on Fort Sill are created of this rhyolite, which include Drugs Bluffs. Further publicity of the rhyolite is found in Blue Creek Canyon, where by Oklahoma Highway 58 cuts throughout the Slick Hills. Tabular intrusions of granite and plutons of hydrous gabbro exploited the boundary involving the layered advanced plus the rhyolites.[thirteen] The granites, collectively named the Wichita Granite Group, fluctuate a bit in composition and texture. The granites variety the peaks and highlands during the eastern Wichitas as well as the isolated peaks with the western Wichitas. Some are equigranular, but most are porphyritic.
The Mount Scott Granite is easily the most thoroughly uncovered Wichita Granite. It kinds the topographic element from which it will require its name, and it really is distributed throughout the northern 50 % of your wildlife refuge. Darkish rounded alkali feldspars, typically a single centimeter or less in diameter, dominate the porphyritic texture of the rock.[fourteen] SiO2 amounts On this granite range between seventy two.eight% to seventy five.eight%.[15]
Reasonably little and compositionally distinct plutons, generally known as the Roosevelt Gabbros, are located in the jap and central Wichita Mountains. Such as layered elaborate, these are definitely dim rocks. Unlike the layered intricate, they include appreciable amounts of biotite, a mineral that sorts in magmas with elevated dissolved drinking water. Just one of such bodies, the Mount Sheridan Gabbro, is uncovered in roadcuts at Meers and underlies the Mount Scott Granite around the north side of the wildlife refuge. Weathered gabbroic soils are thicker and assist more vegetation than Those people produced on weathered granite, so the tree line to the north side of Mount Sheridan approximates the Get in touch with amongst the Mount Sheridan Gabbro plus the Mount Scott Granite. Geologic associations suggest which the granites and gabbros intruded at depths no higher than fifty percent a kilometer in the crust.[9] Minor uplift ensued, and magmatism concluded Together with the intrusive emplacement of subvolcanic attributes: rhyolite and diabase dikes.[nine] These are definitely poorly uncovered, apart from a sizable diabase dike in the Mount Scott Granite exposed over the current widening of Oklahoma Point out Highway 49, just west of Interstate 44.
Next the cessation of magmatism, the area subsided and was inundated by a shallow sea, causing the deposition of detrital sediments followed by carbonates.[sixteen] The change marks the community expression on the Sauk Unconformity. The light-coloured rocks uncovered in the Slick Hills are reduce Paleozoic maritime sediments, and are akin to All those uncovered from the Arbuckle Mountains, 100 km for the east.
In the course of the Pennsylvanian Period (330–290 million a long time in the past) the location was subjected to powerful tension through the continental collision or orogeny which made the Ouachita Mountains into the east.[seventeen] This resulted in faulting and folding placing alongside a WNW path and includes the Arbuckle and Wichita Mountains of southern Oklahoma and also the Amarillo Uplift of your Texas Panhandle.[17] Up to 20,000 ft (6,one hundred m) of neighborhood uplift happened during this time.[eighteen]
This uplift regionally created rugged mountains reduced by erosion for their present state mostly in the Pennslyvanian & Permian Periods. Substantial weathering developed the tors with the Charon Gardens region as well as the "river" of boulders that descends the west slope of Mount Scott. Furthermore, weathering produced the bowling-ball sized boulders in the Permian Article Oak Conglomerate locally present in and round the mountains. Along with outcrops of the conglomerate, the boulders are preserved inside the distinct rock structures of Medication Park. Since the Permian progressed, river sediments buried the Wichita Mountains, preserving them from additional weathering. Recent geological erosion has taken off these sediments, excavating these when buried fossil landforms.[9]
The commonest soil inside the Wichita Mountains is Brico collection, which has a topsoil of brown cobbly loam around a reddish brown to pink cobbly clay loam or clay subsoil.[19]