Description

Formerly known as the Martinez Ranch area (e.g., see Davis, 1975; Davis and others, 2004), the Salcito Ranch area is located at the southeastern-most corner of the Rincon Mountains (Figure 1) and contains a magnificent display of the structural characteristics of the Catalina-Rincon metamorphic core complex and superposed Basin and Range faulting. We carried out large-scale mapping of the geology of a part of this area in the mid-1990s. This mapping, which was initiated as a class project, expanded to become part of a larger study of geologic structures associated with extensional tectonics in a region centered on the Catalina and Rincon Mountains. Observations and conclusions based on this larger work were published in the Geological Society of America (GSA) Bulletin (Davis and others, 2004). The GSA Bulletin journal article contains a simplified, generalized version of the more detailed geological map of the Salcito Ranch area. Furthermore, practical page limits for the article prevented an elaboration on certain descriptive details that may be of interest. Thus we take this opportunity to release this more comprehensive accounting of our findings as an Arizona Geological Survey Contributed Report, with the expectation that the map (Plate 1) and this text will be useful to others.