West Valley Geology Tour – West Valley Naturalists

by Skip Via
skip@westvalleynaturalists.org

Welcome to a virtual tour of some of the Flathead Valley’s prominent (and some not so prominent) geological features, courtesy of Google Earth.

This tour is a companion piece to several articles that have appeared elsewhere on our website:

This inspiration for this project came largely from the work of Dr. Lex Blood, professor emeritus, Flathead Valley Community College, for his extensive (and clearly heartfelt) efforts to make the geological history of the valley accessible to everyone. Thank you, Lex.

We’ll be adding elements to the tour over time, which we’ll announce in our newsletter.

Taking the Tour

The tour is self-guided. There is no narration and you have several options for navigating, all of which are explained in the video below.

PLEASE NOTE: At this time, the tour will only work on desktop or laptop computers. It will not work properly on iPads or iPhones. It will work on Chromebooks. This is a known issue that Google is working to fix. It will work on most web browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, but you may need to update to the latest versions.

Before you start the tour, we strongly recommend that you watch this short video to learn the many ways to navigate and explore on your own within the tour. You can’t mess anything up and there is always a way back, so feel free to experiment and move around.

Now that you know how to get around, click the link below to start the tour:

https://earth.google.com/earth/d/1cIhat9W4AxQNLwqjHLxhHtu-SeILa3WS?usp=share_link

4 Comments

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Pat Jaquith

1 month ago

What an informative tour! And the tour guide gives so many additional details that I feel like I took a mini-course! The tutorial at the beginning gave me confidence to hop in
on my own. Thanks for such an enjoyable experience!

Author

skip

Thanks so much for the kind words. I’m delighted that the tour worked smoothly for you. I have a few more elements to add once I collect more photos and do a little more research, but it felt done enough to get it out there.

Keith Hammer

Reply to skip

What an excellent tour! I’ve live around here most of my life, but I learned a lot of new things with this tour. Well done!

Reply to Keith Hammer

Thanks Keith. It looks like it’s going to be one of those never-finished projects. It’s easy to add new “tour stops” and I suspect I’ll be doing that for some time.