page_title: Kimberling Creek Cluster
section_title: Geologic history
hierarchical_section_title: Kimberling Creek Cluster / Geologic history
context_page_description: The Kimberling Creek Cluster is a region in the Jefferson National Forest recognized by The Wilderness Society for its diversity of habitats extending along parts of Brushy and Hogback Mountains. Kimberling Creek, with headwaters in the cluster, flows into Big Walker Creek, a tributary of the New River.
context_section_description: The cluster is in the Ridge and Valley Province that extends along the western boundary of Virginia. The Ridge and Valley province is composed of long, relatively level-crested, ridges with highest elevations reaching over 3600 feet. The province marks the eastern boundary in the Paleozoic era of an older land surface on the east.  It was uplifted and eroded during the Paleozoic with extensive folding and thrust-faulting.  Resistant quartzite, conglomerates and sandstones form the ridge caps while less resistant shales and limestones eroded to form the intervening valleys.  The province is part of the Appalachian Mountains.  
  The brothers William B. and Henry D. Rogers showed, in 1847, that the ridge and valley system in the western part of the Appalachians was caused by erosion   of  large anticlines and synclines.  Similar folds exist in almost all mountain chains, but nowhere as pronounced as in this area of the Appalachians.  A system of parallel anticlines and synclines has become known as an “Appalachian Structure”.
  Brushy Mountain and Hogback Mountain are principal ridges in the cluster.  Brushy Mountain, one of the broad ridges composing the Ridge and Valley formation, is capped by Mississippian Price sandstone. Hogback Mountain is another ridge running parallel to Brushy Mountain on the west.
caption: Satellite View of Ridge and Valley System
exif: {}