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The Jbel Issoumour
The Issoumour is a large cliff sections that stretches for several dozen
kilometers around the Northwest corner of the Madar Basin. The cliffs get up to
over 500 meters in height. And of course we had to climb that to get to the
other field sites.
Here's a view on the way up. Our guide's car broke down on that plain somewhere.
There's the Jbel Issoumour.
More cliffs as we're hiking up.
And more cliffs, you can see Maia and Mr.Ihmadi on the right.
A look west from the shadow of the cliff.
There's the cliff again.
And we continue up... This took a while.
Finally we get to site 3, which is similar to site 1. Plenty of trilobites.
You can see where the workers dug out the main trilobite layer looking for
Psychopyge trilobites.
Lets see, there's some coral to the left, and a trilobite on the right.
Now that we're over the wall/cliff, we descent into the basin, towards that
tower actually.
Maia standing on a polished limestone layer.
Near our site 4.
Note the angle, I'm holding the camera level but everything dips slightly
inwards.
There's site 4. This is where the giant phacops related species Megalomanicus
comes from.
After the site we head back upvalley, but we get lost and are forced to climb
onto one of the plateaus.
There's a cool detachment fold.
It's getting dark...
And everything is still at that weird angle. Did I mention the hike was 8 km in
and 10 out?
There's the cliff where we came in, but how do we get down?
After a dangerous climb down we get back to our trail.
Looking downvalley again, in shadow this time, you can compare it to a previous
picture.
Here's the landscape, you can see a lot of dipping sections.
Last bit of sun.
Hey look, it's the profile of a former US president!
Going.
Going.
Still going. Essentially gone. A few minutes after this picture was taken, I
slipped on some rough trail and slipped off the side of the trail but managed to
catch myself on some rocks before being pulled up by Maia. Ya, close call.
Moonrise.
Pretty isn't it? Descent by darkness.
Darkness, you can barely makeout the profiles of the mountains.
End of part IV.
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