Crowsnest Mountain is a

mountain A mountain is an elevated portion of the Earth's crust, generally with steep sides that show significant exposed bedrock. Although definitions vary, a mountain may differ from a plateau in having a limited summit area, and is usually higher t ...

in the southern

Canadian Rockies The Canadian Rockies () or Canadian Rocky Mountains, comprising both the Alberta Rockies and the British Columbian Rockies, is the Canadian segment of the North American Rocky Mountains. It is the easternmost part of the Canadian Cordillera, w ...

of southwestern

Alberta Alberta is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Canada. It is a part of Western Canada and is one of the three Canadian Prairies, prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to its west, Saskatchewan to its east, t ...

, Canada. It can be seen from

Alberta Highway 3 Highway 3 (officially named the Crowsnest Highway) is a List of Alberta provincial highways, highway that traverses southern Alberta, Canada, running from the Crowsnest Pass through Lethbridge to the Trans-Canada Highway in Medicine Hat. Tog ...

west of the town of

Coleman Coleman may refer to: Places Antarctica * Coleman Glacier (Antarctica) * Coleman Peak, Ross Island Canada * Coleman, Alberta * Coleman, Ontario * Coleman, Prince Edward Island United Kingdom * Coleman, Leicester, England United States * C ...

in the

Crowsnest Pass Crowsnest Pass (sometimes referred to as Crow's Nest Pass, ) is a low mountain pass across the Continental Divide of the Canadian Rockies on the Alberta–British Columbia border. Geography The pass is located in southeast British Columbia an ...

. The mountain was originally named by the Ktunaxa First Nations due to

raven A raven is any of several large-bodied passerine bird species in the genus '' Corvus''. These species do not form a single taxonomic group within the genus. There is no consistent distinction between crows and ravens; the two names are assigne ...

s nesting in the area. The scrambling route on the north side was first ascended in 1915.

Geology

The grey rocks exposed in the cliffs on the upper part of Crowsnest Mountain are

limestone Limestone is a type of carbonate rock, carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material Lime (material), lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different Polymorphism (materials science) ...

s and

shale Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of Clay mineral, clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g., Kaolinite, kaolin, aluminium, Al2Silicon, Si2Oxygen, O5(hydroxide, OH)4) and tiny f ...

s of

Late Devonian The Devonian ( ) is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic era during the Phanerozoic eon, spanning 60.3 million years from the end of the preceding Silurian period at million years ago ( Ma), to the beginning of the succeeding ...

Early Mississippian The Mississippian ( ), also known as Lower Carboniferous or Early Carboniferous, is a period (geology), subperiod in the geologic timescale or a system (stratigraphy), subsystem of the geologic record. It is the earlier of two subperiods of the ...

age (the Palliser at the base, overlain by the Exshaw and Banff, with the Livingstone Formation at the summit). They were moved up from the west along the Lewis

thrust fault A thrust fault is a break in the Earth's crust, across which older rocks are pushed above younger rocks. Thrust geometry and nomenclature Reverse faults A thrust fault is a type of reverse fault that has a dip of 45 degrees or less. I ...

and emplaced over younger rocks (the

Late Cretaceous The Late Cretaceous (100.5–66 Ma) is the more recent of two epochs into which the Cretaceous Period is divided in the geologic time scale. Rock strata from this epoch form the Upper Cretaceous Series. The Cretaceous is named after ''cre ...

Belly River Formation) that underlie the wooded lower slopes of the mountain. During that movement they were formed into a broad

syncline In structural geology, a syncline is a fold with younger layers closer to the center of the structure, whereas an anticline is the inverse of a syncline. A synclinorium (plural synclinoriums or synclinoria) is a large syncline with superimposed ...

by fault-bend folding.R.A.Price, 1961. Geological Survey of Canada, Paper 61-24 and Map 35-1961.R.A. Price, 1962. Geologic structure of the central part of the Rocky Mountains in the vicinity of Crowsnest Pass. Journal of the Alberta Society of Petroleum Geologists, vol. 10, no. 7, p. 341-351. The Devonian to Mississippian rocks are part of the Lewis thrust sheet which was originally continuous from the High Rock Range immediately to the west. The thrust sheet has since been cut through by erosion along Allison Creek, however, leaving Crowsnest Mountain and its northerly neighbour, Seven Sisters Mountain, standing together as an isolated

klippe 350px, Schematic overview of a thrust system. The shaded material is called a window or fenster. The klippe is the isolated block of the nappe overlying autochthonous material. A klippe ( German for cliff">German language">German for cliff or c ...

References

{{Canadian Rockies, state=collapsed Two-thousanders of Alberta High Rock Range Pyramidal peaks