An Informative Hike with the Geology Club
The PVCC Geology club organized a hike to Ragged Mountain Nature Area on Feb. 16th. Ragged Mountain Nature Area is 980 acres and full of trails and rock formations, which Kira Miller said are “mostly quartz.” Certain trails can be up to as long as 6.7 miles and the smell of fresh air on a crisp winter day by a lake and the ground covered with leaves
As they were walking along the winding rustic trail, Kira Miller identified some geological features and said, “This here is a mylonite. You can see the kind of like different smearing here. It is indicative of a shear zone. It’s shearing that’s encountered during faulting or folding of the rock so any rock deformation there is a lot of friction and pressure that makes the minerals smear out which is what creates the texture here you can see these lines of black and white which is caused by the smearing of the smear zone.”
Miller and Julianna Gutierrez said, “There are a couple of Catoctin dikes in here. A dike is pretty much a vertical intrusion like a column the rock breaks apart. The existing rock breaks apart and magma is able to flow inside of that dike and solidifies. It creates a difference in color there that is part of a Catoctin formation which is around 570 million years old. As Rodinia started breaking apart, tension was released as the rocks were breaking apart, and so magma was able to well up and flow and that created the big Carters Mountain is all catoctin flow.”
Gutierrez said, “PVCC is on top of the Catoctin formation.”
The Geology club had a great time Visiting the Ragged Mountain Natural Area. Gutierrez said, “It was great! It was kind of casual, but I’m really happy we got to go on this Ragged Mountain Reservoir. Even though it’s a longer hike, it’s not too difficult and it’s great for building stamina for our trip to Costa Rica.”
After scouring the ground and finding many different quartz formations, Ivy Hill, another Geology Club member, came across something very peculiar. Hill said, “The weirdest thing I saw on today’s hike was the clearest quartz I’ve ever seen and the giant wall of mylonite which was really neat to see, because I didn’t know what it was the first time I saw it. I also really enjoyed the hike. I never hiked the loop before.”
