I'm going to the snow-covered St. Francois Mountains

[SaintLouisBlues]

It is supposed to be sunny tomorrow and I haven't seen my favorite star in what seems like weeks.

I'll be hiking the shut-ins between Millstream Gardens and the Silver Mines. In another six weeks or so the Midwest Whitewater Championships will be held here, as they are every year.

Here's some info on them thar' hills:

"The St. Francois Mountains of southeast Missouri are among the oldest mountains on earth. We should be proud to have such geologic antiquities in Missouri.

The bedrock of the eroded knobs of the St. Francois Mountains is at least 1.5 to 1.3 billion years old. As with human longevity, it is a complexity not easily explained in a few paragraphs. All mountain ranges are the result of the succession of interplay of fundamental earth forces.

The buried igneous bedrock of the whole Ozarks region is similar to the hard, exposed, igneous rock of the St. Francois Mountains. But only in the counties of St. Francois, Madison, Iron, Carter, Washington, Shannon, Reynolds and Wayne is this ancient rock exposed at the surface. These mountains sit like islands in the vast expanse of younger, softer sedimentary limestone, sandstone and dolomite rocks that lie spread out in all directions from their flanks.

Around 1.4 billion years ago, the foundation of the Ozarks was formed by the eruptions of hundreds of separate volcanoes. Steam, smoke, ash, cinders and lava flows buried the landscape. Intrusions of unseen molten material also swelled beneath the crust but did not reach the surface. This raised the foundation of the Ozarks in southeast Missouri above the rest of the region as well as above the surface of the ancient ocean that covered the land at that time. In so doing, the St. Francois Mountains were born. From ocean floor to peaks, the mountains could have been 10,000 feet high, half of which was above the ocean's surface. It was a cataclysmic period that lasted more than half a billion years.

http://www.dnr.state.mo.us/magazine/1999_fal/one-last-word.htm