From the beginning of the 20th century to the 1960s, gypsum was the key ingredient in both making plaster and building the local community that mined the gypsum beds. Besides being an amazing piece of northern Colorado’s ancient past, gypsum also played a role in the region’s more recent history. This white, porous rock is composed of the remains of aquatic creatures that lived in Colorado’s inland sea more than 206 million years ago. If you look carefully as you hike along the Wild Loop, you can see rock that dates back to the Triassic Period – gypsum. Today, you can hike trails that take you along this unique natural phenomenon as part of one of Larimer County’s open spaces. The rock layers are part of the ancient beach that surrounded the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, created by erosion from the second rising of the Rocky Mountains mixing with the ancient sea. It’s a spine of hard Dakota sandstone rising about 220 feet above the surrounding valleys that was deposited during the Cretaceous Period, 145 to 65 million years ago, the same time that Tyrannosaurus rex lived. Because of the way the rock erodes, hogbacks are often rich in evidence of the deep geology of a region.ĭevil’s Backbone is one such hogback. The rock formations are usually made up of two different types of sedimentary rock (rock created when layers of sediment are deposited atop one another) that erode at different rates, creating cliffs that become steeper and steeper as the softer sedimentary rock continues to erode. Hogbacks are ridges of rock made up of steeply tilted layers, or strata, of rock jutting out from the surrounding landscape. “Hogbacks,” known scientifically as homoclinal ridges, are a fantastic example of those changes. The geology of Colorado has gone through massive and multiple changes that are visible throughout the Front Range.
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