believe that at the opening of the Cretaceous the oldland of
Appalachia, including the Triassic areas, had been baseleveled at
least near the coast. When, therefore, did the deformation of the
Triassic rocks occur?

WESTERN NORTH AMERICA. Triassic strata infolded in the Sierra
Nevada Mountains carry marine fossils and reach a thickness of
nearly five thousand feet. California was then under water, and
the site of the Sierra was a subsiding trough slowly filling with
waste from the Great Basin land to the east.

Over a long belt which reaches from Wyoming across Colorado into
New Mexico no Triassic sediments are found, nor is there any
evidence that they were ever present; hence this area was high
land suffering erosion during the Triassic. On each side of it, in
eastern Colorado and about the Black Hills, in western Texas, in
Utah, over the site of the Wasatch Mountains, and southward into
Arizona over the plateaus trenched by the Colorado River, are
large areas of Triassic rocks, sandstones chiefly, with some rock
salt and gypsum. Fossils are very rare and none of them marine.
Here, then, lay broad shallow lakes often salt, and warped basins,
in which the waste of the adjacent uplands gathered. To this
system belong the sandstones of the Garden of the Gods in
Colorado, which later earth movements have upturned with the
uplifted mountain flanks.

The Jurassic was marked with varied oscillations and wide changes
in the outline of sea and land.

Jurassic shales of immense thickness--now metamorphosed into