This was the view looking southeast from my tent, photographed during sunrise of the second morning of my 2010 Big Bend trip.
According to Park literature, Casa Grande Peak (pictured above) is part of the Chisos Mountains and is igneous rock created from volcanic activity millions of years ago.
The peak appears to be a volcanic dike (a “plug” if you will) that I speculate formed in the opening of the volcano. Subsequent erosion of the surrounding geological material would then be responsible for our now seeing the dike. But again, that’s all speculation based upon my recall of the geology paradigm learned in college—around the end of the last ice age (my geology courses, I mean).
Shooting into the sun seemed to freak-out my camera and I have corrected lens flairs that marred this photograph. The interesting play of colors on the peak are actually there. However this “painted peak” seems to reflect vivid splashes of colors at sunrise and sunset. The coloring is otherwise fairly subdued.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 1.32 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.