Gold Belt Tour
Phantom Canyon Road Part 1

The rock along the road changed pretty quickly and the road got narrower. Again, the cottonwoods say that we're following a streambed with regular waterflow.

Most of the rock between here and Victor looked like granite to me. The mass of granite that we know as the Front Range hardened about 1.8 billion years ago, at the same time as the mass of the Wet Mountains to the south and the Blanca Massif to the southwest. The Arkansas River Gorge is also mostly the same rock. According to the geologists, this rock actually cooled and hardened several miles underground and has been pushed up with the covering rock eroding away over the millenia. Throw in several ice ages and lots of water erosion and you can see how these canyons came to be.