Hi All. I watched an interesting program on the idiot machine (TV) tonight. It was about the Lost Dutchman’s Mine in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.

I had flown over the area a couple of times, but never paid that much of attention to terrain below me. That is a mistake I won’t make again. Anyway after watching the program I thought I would take a look see on the old computer and see what I could find in regards to the geology of the Superstition Mountains. What I found tells me that that part of Arizona has a very violent past.

The Precambrian rocks across the region contain one of the best records of the formation of continental crust from originally oceanic environments. These rocks contain pillow basalts, massive sulfide deposits representing ancient black smokers, shear zones, one of the oldest known thrust belts, and beautifully exposed, on-end crustal sections.

The Mesozoic and Cenozoic geology of Arizona features world-class examples of calderas and rhyolite domes, recent volcanoes, porphyry copper deposits, huge fold nappes, metamorphic core complexes, and Quaternary deposits and landforms.

Twenty million years of quiet times then passed, before more mountain masses began their violent growth, to the east of the present day Phoenix area.

In places they became so steep that mud and rock and even catastrophic landslides rushed from their slopes.

The evidence of these is the fragment-laden reddish rocks of Papago Park, Red Mountain, and the west end of Camelback Mountain.

Great volcanic calderas soon exploded from the crust of the earth. Their thick, layered ash deposits form part of the Goldfield Mountains and the famed Superstition Mountains, which pierce the skyline east of Phoenix.

For reasons not yet well understood, large domes of young molten rock in turn pushed upwards through the surface rocks, throughout the new continent from northern Mexico to southern Canada.

A number of these dome structures are prominent in Arizona. One of the classic ones, studied by geologists from around the world, is South Mountain at the end of Central Avenue!

Geologists call them "metamorphic core complexes", and what caused their arrangement is still a mystery.

Almost forgot. Did anyone ever find the “Lost Dutchman’s Mine?” Nope. No one has ever found it. At least no one is admitting to having found it. The question has been asked many times. Is the story about the “Lost Dutchman’s Mine” true? The answer. How many people have to believe it before it becomes true? USGS says the geology of the area shows that there should be some very rich ore in the area. As a matter of fact a mine called Mammoth Mine yielded 3 million dollars in gold in just 4 years. Take Care…Don in creepy town

• Superstition Mountains