By Paul Harris

The grey-bluish limestone ridge in this stone seems to be rising out of the quartz vein piece that intruded it. The display is designed to evoke a mountain range uplifting during a period of orogeny. The stone is from the Snowy Range in the Medicine Bow Mountains in Wyoming, which formed during the Laramide Orogeny 70 million years ago. The rock originated in a shallow marine sand deposit at sea level that was compressed and heated during burial and metamorphosed into quartzite. Episodes of crustal movement, faulting, folding, and nearly vertical tilting formed the mountains where it was found. This tumultuous history is visible in the chaotic lattice-work of intrusive veins in the limestone that result from complex processes of dissolving and recombining minerals, making this rock a visceral touchstone of the region's volatile geologic history. 

British author Jacquetta Hawkes, in her singular geologic memoir A Land (1951), imagines rising and subsiding mountains as the Earth’s respiratory cycle: “The history of the earth’s crust has a rhythm. Denudation weakens it, the mountains are rucked up and the molten layer below forces itself toward the surface, then the storm dies away and denudation begins again. If the movement were speeded up, as in a cinematograph, we should see a rise and fall as though of breathing.”

Poising the stone on a cement columnar pedestal allows it to breathe and adds to the sense of uplift and movement already present in the rock.