Pumpkin Buttes, Powder River Basin, Wyoming

    Along the way to Devils Tower, we passed through the Powder River Basin, Wyoming.  This region is know for its abundance of natural resources and this is very evident by oil fields and coal mines.  Uranium has been a more recent discovery is the area as well.  Most of the area is relatively flat and featureless beside the buttes.

     During the Eocene epoch, between 55.8 to 33.9 million years ago, after the inland sea of the Cretaceous withdrew, the climate was very wet and warm at the time, producing swampy low lands.  In these lowlands, the Wasatch Formation was created.  Fresh water sandstones, shales, clays, and coal beds with fossil remains we're deposited here.  Region uplift and erosion occurred soon after.  

     It is believed that lightning a strike ignited the exposed coal bed mixed with clay, leaving the red/orange/black layers seen on the upper portions of Pumpkin Buttes.  This is called 'clinkers' and are more resistant to the effects of weathering than the surrounding landscape, thus creating the mounds you see today.  

     This has great cultural importance to the Native Americans.  They lived around the buttes and used them to spot settlers for raids.  They say the buttes had the color of gourds and that is why we call them Pumpkin Buttes.  Settlers used the buttes as a welcome waypoint on their travels westward.  It is also associated with the Teapot Dome Scandal in which a politician took bribes to pass legislation to drill and mine for natural resources on protected land.

     We all noticed how flat and vast this area of Wyoming is.  It was just as much as a relief to us as it must have been for settlers to have the Pumpkin Buttes as stopping point.