photo: Robert Anderson
What is a big cubic block of white marble doing sitting out in this field? This is but a teeny remnant of the once-thriving Yule marble quarry in central Colorado’s West Elk mountains, not far from the ski town of Aspen. It is from this quarry that the marble for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. was mined – one of Colorado’s greatest and likely its most lasting contributions to our nation’s capital. Marble is basically baked limestone, and the heat that baked this particular marble was molten (igneous) rock that intruded into a pile of layered sedimentary rocks about 30 million years ago. As the granites of this and other nearby intrusions are much more difficult to erode than the surrounding weak sedimentary rocks, the granites remain high and localize more than a dozen of the West Elk mountains.
photo: Rob Hunker