One of my new favorite places to hike is the Wenatchee Foothills in Wenatchee, Washington. Hours of trail and old jeep roads ramble on the slopes outside of town and make for great exercise all year round. Spring is the most popular time as the green hills are punctuated with intense yellow and purple of Arrow-leaf balsamroot and Sulphur Lupine. Saddle Rock is just one of the many summits you can aspire to while meandering this network of trails maintained by the Chelan-Douglas Land Trust. This system exists on ancestral P’Squosa land of the Wenatchi people.
I have visited mostly winter and spring as the summers are pretty hot in Wenatchee. I even scouted out a new trail in nearby Sage Hills called Kenzie’s Landing and wrote about it for Washington Trails Association.
But my favorite hikes so far are Saddle Rock:
And Rooster Comb, which sits across from Saddle Rock:
So I was super excited when I saw both these rock features on an Instagram post being highlighted on a new PBS episode by Nick Zentner. Nick is a senior geology professor at Central Washington University and local expert on all things rock and its history. His livestreams draw viewers from around the world! “Nick On The Rocks” is his latest venture on PBS and there will be 8 new episodes this winter.
He explains how the pinnacles of Saddle Rock (and Rooster Comb) came to be over 44 million years ago (read: older than the Cascade Mountain range which are about 36 million years old). Stiff volcanic rock called rhyolite pushed up as lava and formed these unique features we now see in the hillside surrounding the town of Wenatchee. No, there is no super volcano in Wenatchee but he offers it as “clickbait” in the video so I did the same for this post.
Want to learn more? Watch the video and just ignore the parts where he’s walking off trail:
Learn more about hiking at Saddle Rock here.
This is not the first time I have written about geology on the blog, you can also read about geology and where to hike it on Geology Underfoot in Western Washington. And if you really want to learn more about our local geology, check out Nick on his website and podcast!
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