So, rocks are this week’s subject, and my photo library is chock-full of rocks, from near and far. Did you know that there is only one approved building material in the city of Jerusalem? That material is the stone called…wait for it…Jerusalem Stone! All city buildings and dwellings must be built of this sandstone, and here are a couple of examples.

This part of the Western (wailing) Wall is over 2000 years old. It was destroyed by the Romans in 79CE.

The King David Hotel, built of Jerusalem Stone, was under renovation when we were there in 2007.

My state of Washington sits on bedrock of fairly young granite, and we are surrounded by high granite peaks. In North Cascades National Park, you can see the various kinds of metamorphic granite, shaped by volcanic activity, and plate tectonics.

What starts as high mountains often ends up at sea level, as rivers wear away the mountains over millions of years.

These rocks, formerly part of the Rocky (!) Mountains, are now on the banks of the Clark Fork River in Missoula, Montana.

These rocks are along the Columbia River, and were part of the Cascade Mountains.

And so are these! These broken up rocks are part of formations along the Columbia called Columnar Basalt, rock that cooled quickly when a volcano coughed them up. The big rock below cooled inside the cone of a volcano, and the stone around it wore away, so you can see the outlines of the volcano!

And this is what that columnar basalt looks like on top. This is Devil’s Postpile in California.

One of my favorite kinds of rock was actually something else before it became rock. What do you think this was?

I saw this rock embedded in a concrete wall at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I wondered if the people who built the wall knew what it was. Petrified Wood. In Colorado, we went to a national monument where there were the remnants of an entire petrified forest!

This is a closeup of…

This! Those were two big trees in their youth, millions of years ago, and are now rock.

And people will always try to leave their mark on the world. Some enterprising people built these little towers of rocks near the shoreline in Port Townsend, Washington.

Here’s the Link to this week’s Original Post. And Tina‘s too!