Henry Mountains
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An image of peaks in the Henry mountains viewed from a high mountain road. Copyright © Steven Mahoney 2005 |
The
Henry Mountains are located in the southeastern portion of the U.S. state of
Utah and run in a generally north-south direction, extending over a distance of about 30 miles (50km). They were named by
John Wesley Powell in honour of
Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the
Smithsonian Institute. The nearest town of any size is
Hanksville, Utah, which is north of the mountains. The Henry Mountains were the last mountain range to be added to the map of the 48 contiguous U.S. states.
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The Henry Mountains dominate the center of this view, a lower-resolution, cropped image from the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. Lake Powell and the Colorado River are to the south, and the Waterpocket Fold is to the west" |
The range is clustered into two main groups, with
Highway 276 dividing the two portions. The northern group is by far the taller of the two with Mount Ellen: 11,506 feet above sea level; Mount Pennell: 11,371 feet; and Mount Hillers: 10,723 feet. The southern group is much lower in elevation. The southern group has two peaks: Mount Ellsworth: 8,235 feet and Mount Holmes: 8,000 feet. The southern group is also known as the "Little Rockies".
The Henry Mountains are drained by a number of canyon systems which radiate away from the isolated range, flowing north into the
Fremont River, east into the
Dirty Devil River, or south into
Lake Powell.
The geology of these mountains was first studied in 1875-1876 by
Grove Karl Gilbert. He coined the term "laccolite" (now
laccolith) to describe the characteristic shapes of some of the igneous intrusions that core the mountains. The main type of igneous rock is
porphyritic diorite.
Ages of the igneous rocks are important for understanding the evolution of the
Colorado Plateau. Ages of these rocks were reported to be about 45 to 50 million years in older geologic literature. However, it has been established that these intrusions formed in the period from about 23 to 31 million years ago, using
uranium-lead dating of
zircon and
argon-argon dating of
hornblende;
fission track dating also has yielded consistent results (the older, erroneous ages were by
potassium-argon dating). The intrusions are hosted by
Permian to
Cretaceous sedimentary rocks. The geology of these mountains is similar to the geology of the
La Sal Range and of the
Abajo Mountains, both also on the
Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah: locations are shown on a satellite image presented with information about the
La Sal Range.
The mountains are home to approximately 200
bison, one of the larger free-ranging herds in the U.S. Special licenses are issued annually to hunt the animals.
Much of the area is managed by the United States
Bureau of Land Management.
Jules D. Friedman and Curtis Huffman, Jr., coordinators,
Laccolith Complexes of Southeastern Utah: Time of Emplacement and Tectonic Setting -- Workshop Proceedings, United States Geological Survey Bulletin 2158, 1998. http://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/b2158/B2158.pdf
W. Kenneth Hamblin, Beyond the Visible Landscape: Aerial Panoramas of Utah's Geology. Regal Printing, Ltd., Hong Kong, 300 p., 2004. ISBN 0-9760722-0-3
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The Henry Mountains by Roy Webb
