Buzz, BoBo, and The Boys!: Trek to 4 Peaks

Before I tell you about the 4 Peaks trek, I have to include a few other important pics!

Here's the three little darlings all cleaned up for a family photo shoot! I'm including a few pics of Brent's Dubai visit from yesterday.

Sand surfing!

World's tallest building.

Ok, now onto Four Peaks...For anyone who has visited Phoenix, you know that Four Peaks is a recognizable landmark. Geologically, it's a piece of landscape art. You might think that the four summits (the highest on the left being 7,657 feet high), we see are big piles of rock that were molded into shape on top of the older, lower slopes. The rocks of those four summits were there FIRST! Then the granite below was added. I'm told about 1700 million years ago, our area lay on the edge of an old continent that was much like today's Gulf Coast near New Orleans. All of the sand and muck that came down the rivers from the interior got dumped into a big basin like the Gulf of Mexico. There it got piled up, got buried, hardened and was baked into very hard rock that we call quartzite.

Several hundred million years later, the forces that constantly reshape the Earth's surface crumpled the land and it's many rock formations from side to side, pushing up great mountain ranges. During all of this pushing and shoving a lot of the rock below was very hot- molten granite. The underside of the quartside slab was very unevenly shaped, pulsing up from below. The result was that monstrous chunks of the quartsite now hung down into the granite- four of them. (I don't know if this makes sense!)

Granite erodes away more easily that quartzite. It breaks down into rock grains so the granite around the four big masses of rock slowly wore away, down into the rolling hills and shaped boulders that make the Beeline Highway such a scenic drive.

The southernmost peak has an amethyst mine that is privately owned and said to have some of the premier Amethyst in the United States.