Wind River Canyon
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Wind River Canyon
Wind River Canyon is a scenic Wyoming canyon on the Wind River. It is located between the towns of Shoshoni and Thermopolis and is a popular stop for visitors to Yellowstone National Park. It is accessible by U.S. Highway 20 and Wyoming Highway 789. It was designated as a Wyoming Scenic Byway in 2005. Description U.S. 20/Wyo 789 travel through the canyon, at times level with the canyon floor. The scenic route offers views of the canyon and landmark natural structures like the Chimney Rock. The canyon is at times as much as feet deep. The change in elevation between the Bighorn Basin and the Wind River Basin is about . The southern mouth of the canyon is near the Boysen Dam in Boysen State Park several miles north of, and about half a mile east of, the state park's borders with the Wind River Indian Reservation. The canyon includes a number of homes along the highway and a Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad line. The north end of the canyon is at the Wedding of the Waters, w ...
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Wedding Of The Waters, Wyoming
Thermopolis is the county seat and largest town in Hot Springs County, Wyoming, United States. As of the 2020 U.S. Census, the town population was 2,725. Thermopolis is Greek for "hot city." It is home to numerous natural hot springs, in which mineral-laden waters are heated by geothermal processes. The town is named for the hot springs located there. The town claims the world's largest mineral hot spring, appropriately named "The Big Spring", as part of Hot Springs State Park. The springs are open to the public for free as part of an 1896 treaty signed with the Shoshone and Arapaho Indian tribes. Dinosaur fossils were found on the Warm Springs Ranch in 1993, and the Wyoming Dinosaur Center was founded soon after. Geography Thermopolis is located near the northern end of the Wind River Canyon and Wedding of the Waters, where the north-flowing Wind River becomes the Bighorn River. It is an unusual instance of a river changing names at a point other than a confluence of two stre ...
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Landforms Of Hot Springs County, Wyoming
A landform is a natural or anthropogenic land feature on the solid surface of the Earth or other planetary body. Landforms together make up a given terrain, and their arrangement in the landscape is known as topography. Landforms include hills, mountains, canyons, and valleys, as well as shoreline features such as bays, peninsulas, and seas, including submerged features such as mid-ocean ridges, volcanoes, and the great ocean basins. Physical characteristics Landforms are categorized by characteristic physical attributes such as elevation, slope, orientation, stratification, rock exposure and soil type. Gross physical features or landforms include intuitive elements such as berms, mounds, hills, ridges, cliffs, valleys, rivers, peninsulas, volcanoes, and numerous other structural and size-scaled (e.g. ponds vs. lakes, hills vs. mountains) elements including various kinds of inland and oceanic waterbodies and sub-surface features. Mountains, hills, plateaux, and plains are ...
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Landforms Of Fremont County, Wyoming
A landform is a natural or anthropogenic land feature on the solid surface of the Earth or other planetary body. Landforms together make up a given terrain, and their arrangement in the landscape is known as topography. Landforms include hills, mountains, canyons, and valleys, as well as shoreline features such as bays, peninsulas, and seas, including submerged features such as mid-ocean ridges, volcanoes, and the great ocean basins. Physical characteristics Landforms are categorized by characteristic physical attributes such as elevation, slope, orientation, stratification, rock exposure and soil type. Gross physical features or landforms include intuitive elements such as berms, mounds, hills, ridges, cliffs, valleys, rivers, peninsulas, volcanoes, and numerous other structural and size-scaled (e.g. ponds vs. lakes, hills vs. mountains) elements including various kinds of inland and oceanic waterbodies and sub-surface features. Mountains, hills, plateaux, and plains are the fou ...
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Canyons And Gorges Of Wyoming
A canyon (from ; archaic British English spelling: ''cañon''), or gorge, is a deep cleft between escarpments or cliffs resulting from weathering and the erosive activity of a river over geologic time scales. Rivers have a natural tendency to cut through underlying surfaces, eventually wearing away rock layers as sediments are removed downstream. A river bed will gradually reach a baseline elevation, which is the same elevation as the body of water into which the river drains. The processes of weathering and erosion will form canyons when the river's headwaters and estuary are at significantly different elevations, particularly through regions where softer rock layers are intermingled with harder layers more resistant to weathering. A canyon may also refer to a rift between two mountain peaks, such as those in ranges including the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, the Himalayas or the Andes. Usually, a river or stream carves out such splits between mountains. Examples of mountain-type c ...
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Chugwater Formation
The Chugwater Formation is a mapped bedrock unit consisting primarily of red sandstone, in the states of Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado in the United States. It is recognized as a geologic formation in Colorado and Montana, but as a Group (set of formations) in Wyoming. Due to its lack of fossils and its presence below the highly studied Morrison Formation, the Chugwater receives little attention. Description The most noticeable feature on a large scale is the brick-red color, caused by oxidation of iron minerals in the rock. This color is periodically interrupted by streaks and spots of reduced iron, a light bluish-gray shade. Near the top of the formation is a thick layer of gypsum of very high quality. The whole rock is interrupted by gypsum veins as well as having a disrupted texture because of the precipitation of gypsum crystals after deposition of the rock. The Chugwater consists mainly of siltstone and shales with interspersed sandstones. While this composition will l ...
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Sandstone
Sandstone is a clastic sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized (0.0625 to 2 mm) silicate grains. Sandstones comprise about 20–25% of all sedimentary rocks. Most sandstone is composed of quartz or feldspar (both silicates) because they are the most resistant minerals to weathering processes at the Earth's surface. Like uncemented sand, sandstone may be any color due to impurities within the minerals, but the most common colors are tan, brown, yellow, red, grey, pink, white, and black. Since sandstone beds often form highly visible cliffs and other topographic features, certain colors of sandstone have been strongly identified with certain regions. Rock formations that are primarily composed of sandstone usually allow the percolation of water and other fluids and are porous enough to store large quantities, making them valuable aquifers and petroleum reservoirs. Quartz-bearing sandstone can be changed into quartzite through metamorphism, usually related to ...
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Bighorn Dolomite
The Bighorn Dolomite is a Formation (geology), geologic formation in Wyoming. It preserves fossils dating back to the Ordovician Period (geology), period. See also * List of fossiliferous stratigraphic units in Wyoming * Paleontology in Wyoming References

* Geologic formations of Wyoming Ordovician System of North America {{Ordovician-stub ...
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Madison Limestone
The Madison Limestone is a thick sequence of mostly carbonate rocks of Mississippian age in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains areas of the western United States. The rocks serve as an important aquifer as well as an oil reservoir in places. The Madison and its equivalent strata extend from the Black Hills of western South Dakota to western Montana and eastern Idaho, and from the Canada–United States border to western Colorado and the Grand Canyon of Arizona. Age and nomenclature The Madison is formally known as the Madison Group. In Montana, where its thickness reaches , the group is subdivided into the Mission Canyon Formation and Lodgepole Formation. Equivalents of the Madison are named the Pahasapa Limestone in the Black Hills, Leadville Limestone (Colorado), Guernsey Limestone (Wyoming), and Redwall Limestone in the Grand Canyon. The upper part of the Madison Group, the Charles Formation in the subsurface of North Dakota and northern Montana, is not strictly an equivalen ...
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Water Gap
A water gap is a gap that flowing water has carved through a mountain range or mountain ridge and that still carries water today. Such gaps that no longer carry water currents are called wind gaps. Water gaps and wind gaps often offer a practical route for road and rail transport to cross the mountain barrier. Geology A water gap is usually an indication of a river that is older than the current topography. The likely occurrence is that a river established its course when the landform was at a low elevation, or by a rift in a portion of the crust of the earth having a very low stream gradient and a thick layer of unconsolidated sediment. In a hypothetical example, a river would have established its channel without regard for the deeper layers of rock. A later period of uplift would cause increased erosion along the riverbed, exposing the underlying rock layers. As the uplift continued, the river, being large enough, would continue to erode the rising land, cutting thr ...
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Boysen Reservoir
Boysen Reservoir is a reservoir formed by Boysen Dam, an earth-fill dam on the Wind River (Wyoming), Wind River in the central part of the U.S. state of Wyoming. It is near the town of Shoshoni, Wyoming, Shoshoni in Fremont County, Wyoming, Fremont County. The dam was constructed between 1947 and 1952 at the mouth of Wind River Canyon, just upstream from a previous dam that had been built by Asmus Boysen in 1908 on land he had leased from the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes. The dam and much of the reservoir are physically located on the Wind River Indian Reservation. Boysen Dam Railroad Tunnel As a result of construction of the dam a major railroad track that connected Billings, Montana with Casper, Wyoming was flooded. A new track was laid, starting near the new dam where a 1 mile tunnel carried the tracks under the dam and around the edges of the reservoir.
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Hot Springs State Park
Hot Springs State Park is a public recreation area in Thermopolis, Wyoming, known for its hot springs, which flow at a constant temperature of . The state park offers free bathing at the State Bath House, where temperatures are moderated to a therapeutic . The petroglyph site at Legend Rock, some 25 miles away, is also part of the park. The park is managed by the Wyoming Division of State Parks and Historic Sites. History The land on which the state park sits was a cession agreement, and the ceded portion was purchased from the Eastern Shoshone by the federal government in 1896, when Indian Inspector James McLaughlin negotiated a purchase price of $60,000 for a 100-square-mile portion of the Shoshone reservation. A square-mile section of that land was released to the state in 1897 which became Wyoming's first state park, known as Big Horn Hot Springs State Reserve. Features The park features a managed herd of bison, a suspension foot bridge across the Big Horn River, picnic sh ...
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