Lamar Station to Sheridan Station

There is an art walk from Lamar Station to Benton Street, just two blocks shy of Sheridan Station. It's part of the West 40 art district around Colfax Avenue. The green line on the pavement leads from the Lakewood Legacy Tree (see the Lakewood-Wadsworth Station to Lamar Station blog) to this piece just off Benton.

Dermal Plate Gateway was created by PUNCH, in MountAir park to commemorate Colorado's state dinosaur, the stegosaurus.

The Lamar Station end of the walk has this column with art pieces on all four faces.

This is one of 11 Story Totems in the area by Nestor Fedak. The panels change occasionally to keep the West 40 Art Line experience fresh and they light up at night.

These installations provide a free art and recreation experience for local people and visitors.

Denver has a thriving art community and there are so many pieces that I pass over simply because there are...well, so many pieces. I hope that I am encouraging residents of, and visitors to, Denver to tour the many art venues. You can usually find background information on the Internet. Try these sites.

https://40westarts.org

https://moaonline.org

https://www.rtd-denver.com/art-n-transit

https://denversartdistrict.org

And that doesn't even include aaaaall the major museums that you have to pay to see.

Don't forget that a gulch runs through it.

At this point near Sharidon Station, I'm following Dry Gulch, a nearby tributary of Lakewood Gulch. Sharidon Station is named for Sharidon Boulevard, part of Colorado highway 95. To the west is Jefferson County and to the east is Denver and Adams Counties. 

The street runs from Broomfield to the southern Denver suburb of Sheridan, named after the Civil War Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan (the one that marched to the sea and burned Georgia - you can see it in Gone With the Wind!) There were those who hoped for Fort Logan, in Sheridan, to be named Sheridan.

There's more about Sheridan, Colorado and Fort Logan in my January 25, 2017 blog, My Range.

The confluence of Dry and Lakewood Gulches is further east but they begin cutting deep banks in this area.

The creek bed is still muddy here. It shows how deep the stuff is that has been washed out of the Colorado Plateau to form the Rockies.

Sheridan Station has the train station under the bridge and the bus stop on top.

The primary art fixture is a space of streamers called "Gift of Rain", by John Flemming. The artist is from Seattle, Washington, so it's understandable that he would think of rain in the high desert.

The walls and columns of the bridge are also decorated with interesting relief depicting the surrounding grasslands.

A trail begins at Sheridan Station and, from the train, it looks like a series of parks with trails run along beside the light rail from here to Empower Field football stadium. That will make navigating these urban areas easier.

Rockd by Walnut Hills

This is going to sound like an advertisement...consider it a recommendation.

Rockd by The Mactostrat lab at the Geoscience department at the University of Wisconsin - Madison is one of my main tools for geological exploration. It's an app on my smartphone. 

Where most geology apps are reference works, like geology textbooks or encyclopedias on your phone, Rockd is equipment. It includes a Brunton compass and information about localities with topographic and geological maps and geology and paleontology profiles. It's pretty impressive how much local information it packs. (The Brunton compass needs a gyroscope and magnetometer to work.)

Let's see what it says about my backyard, Walnut Hills in Centennial, Colorado.

When I open Rockd, I see this, my dash board.

It gives me an overview of my area. 

People that don't live here often mistake Denver for a mountain town. It may be a gateway to the Rockies but it's situated at the western edge of the Great Plains. It's hilly grasslands.

Specifically, Centennial, a town in the Denver metro area, is near the western edge of the Colorado Piedmont region. 

Denver makes a big deal about being the Mile High City but, actually, it's down in a hole carved by the South Platte River. Just about everyone around us is at higher elevations.

We're sometimes called the "high plains" but, technically, the high plains are to the east of us. As explained by Rockd, when I tap the Colorado Piedmont panel, the high plains were formed when the Colorado Plateau was pushed up when the Pacific plate crashed into (and is still crashing into) North America. The Rockies are still growing but erosion is happening faster and the craggy appearance of the Rocky Mountains is due to the deep cutting of millions of years by rain, frost, wind, and chemical action. All the debris that washed out of the mountains piled up to form the high plains, and then streams running from the mountains started cutting the softer sediment down to form the Colorado Piedmont.

How old is the rock around here? Rockd says 0.0117 mA (that stands for "mega annum" or million years) to present. This is fairly new stuff. The late pleistocene began 0.02 million years ago and the Quaternary is the most recent age of geologic time. You probably know that the continents have shifted around a lot in the past. Here's what Rockd says the World looked like in the Quaternary age.

Same as today. Really new stuff.

The colluvium mentioned is "generally unconsolidated material deposited on slopes by gravity and sheetwash". (The original source sited is Trimble, D.E., M.N. Machette, 2003, Geologic Map of the Greater Denver Area, Front Range Urban Corridor, Colorado: U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Investigations Series 1-856-H.

(If I poke the citation, Rockd carries me to the actual paper.)

The layer of colluvium is generally more than 1.5 meters thick. Mind you, that's our bedrock. Above that is the regolith. Regolith is the term for the bedrock after it rots. We have a lot of debris under our feet..

It's sort of hard to tell if the stuff in the Little Dry Creek stream bed is native or if it was placed there to slow erosion, or if it has been washed down from architectural fill upstream, but it could easily be part of the colluvium washed out of the mountains long ago. Some of that is pretty chunky.

So, we're at 5732 feet. Littleton is right on the river at 5351 feet. We're situated right at the top of the rim of the South Platte River valley, which makes the valley 381 feet deep here. The river comes out of the mountains due west of both us and Littleton at Waterton Canyon. Water flows downhill so Denver, through which the South Platte flows is lower in elevation at 5130 feet (Wikipedia says 5139-5690 feet but that would be the whole Denver metro area.)

Here's a geologic map of the area from Rockd.

The lighter stuff is the colluvium I've been talking about. The darker is Dawson formation which is an older Late Cretaceous to Paleocene rock...100.5-56 million years old. It might be worth visiting the next neighborhood over to see if Willow Creek digs into that sandstone.

Most of the fossils listed in this area are nearer the bottom of the river valley, so I don't expect to find any in this neighborhood (though I will look for some microfossils in the creek bank), also most of the minerals will be clays and quartz since most of the other stuff would have broken down long ago.

Rockd is a free download, so install it and see what it has to say about your area. You might be surprised.