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The Kings Peak 7.5-minute quadrangle is located along the crest of the Uinta Mountains anticline in the High Uintas Wilderness Area. The quadrangle’s namesake, Kings Peak, is the highest point in Utah, at 4123 meters (13,528 feet) and was named for Clarence King, a pioneering geologist of the Fortieth Parallel Survey during the late nineteenth century. The quadrangle is dominated by unconsolidated surficial deposits of mostly glacial origin and the middle part of the Uinta Mountain Group (UMG), a succession of mid-Neoproterozoic (ca 750 Ma) sedimentary rocks several kilometers thick. The quadrangle also includes several Ordovician-Cambrian igneous dikes that intrude into the UMG, mostly along pre-existing faults.Glacial till of Smiths Fork age covers the basin floors, and related well-defined headwall cirques cut into bedrock at the heads of the basins. The flanks of the basins are somewhat covered by talus or rock glaciers and much of the high tablelands are covered by thin regolith that likely resulted from periglacial processes. Bedrock units are exposed in the high peaks and steep cliffs and include (from stratigraphic lowest to highest) the Red Castle Formation, Dead Horse Pass Formation, Mount Agassiz Formation, and the informal formation of Hades Pass. Facies and stratal architecture of the middle UMG strata exposed in the quadrangle indicate a paleogeography characterized by offshore, shoreface, and nearshore marine, deltaic, and fluvial environments. The sedimentary bedrock units are interpreted to have been deposited in an epicontinental sea at least 150 million years before the inception of the Laurentian western passive margin. The axis of the Laramide-age Uinta arch strikes through the quadrangle, gently folding the UMG bedrock units with generally shallow north and south dips (3 to 20 degrees). The UMG strata are also cut by minor (several meters of offset) to moderate (several tens of meters of offset) normal and reverse faults. |