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"Pikes Peak is not a volcano and has never been one. The granite rock of which the mountain is made was once hot molten rock located as deep as 20 miles beneath the earth's surface. The molten rock hardened and cooled below the earth's surface as much as one billion years ago. Great forces within the earth's crust pushed the rocks upward through a process called uplifting which created a dome-shaped mountain covered with a thick layer of soil and softer rock. Erosion and weathering loosened the softer layers and carried them away.

After hundreds of thousands of years of erosion and weathering, a tall granite mountain lay exposed like a large piece of stone waiting for the sculptor to shape it. Anyone seeing this ancient mountain would not have recognized it as the mountain we know today as Pikes Peak. It took the movement of huge glaciers that once existed on the peak to sculpt the mountain. The glaciers lasted about one million years and that ice age ended around 11,000 years ago.

Acting like a giant cookie cutter, the powerful bodies of ice gouged out the rock and left deep, straight-walled basins like the Bottomless Pit with its sharp drop of 1700 feet. The u-shaped canyons that lead down Pikes Peak were carved by the following "rivers of ice". Other v-shaped valleys owe their existence to ordinary streams."

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8y ago

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