Increasing his range of expertise even more, Wild started the Peep O’Day Kiln Company to make bricks from the clay deposits located just above the gypsum he was already mining. He also experimented with growing hops and became known as “Colorado’s Pioneer Hops Grower,” selling his crop to the country’s western breweries. ![]() Gypsum Corporation in 1915 to mine the mineral and transport it to a plaster mill.Ī true entrepreneur, Wild also found success growing fruit and berries, ending up with over 2,000 fruit trees on his land. Wild then built the Buckhorn Mill, which operated from 1887 to 1965 and partnered with the U.S. Researching how to mine and process the mineral, Wild began experimenting with the gypsum on his property by using an old threshing machine as a crude outdoor mill where he heated the gypsum in an iron kettle over an open coal fire to create plaster. Sending a sample off to Brown University back east, Wild learned that the material was high quality gypsum, the mineral most often used in manufacturing plaster of Paris and fertilizers. Wild noticed that when water ran into the ditch it was largely absorbed by this white substance. When workers were excavating the ditch, they reached a layer of soft, white material. He owned land at the south end of the rock formation and had recently put in an irrigation ditch. While digging the gypsum, local miners also found fossils embedded within the rock, including a prehistoric elephant with 5-foot long tusks.Īlfred Wild: “Colorado’s Pioneer Hop Grower and Plaster King”Īlthough the view was expansive from where he stood atop the rocky outcropping people called Devil’s Backbone, Alfred Wild was more interested in what lay at his feet. 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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