Huerfano County, Colorado
The Cuchara River Valley

This photo was taken from north of Raspberry Mountain, looking southeast. You can clearly see where strata in the Earth were tilted upward and broken off in the rising of the Sangre de Cristo's, 27 million years ago. The first big ridge you can see on the lower right is the Dakota Wall. The ridges that rise to the left of that are the edges of relatively hard (but geologically younger) formations. Between these other ridges are upturned seams of coal, separated by other upturned layers of sedimentary materials. To walk across the surface here from west to east is to climb a couple hundred million years of the geological ladder right up to today. The Cuchara River is in that valley where this lower fractured plateau meets the Spanish Peaks stock.