Pryor Mountains

Geography

The Pryor Mountains are just forty miles south of the Montanan city of Billings, the biggest city in all of Montana. These mountains are different from most mountains on the prairie, as it was created from the erosion of uplifted limestone instead of glacier-carved granite. These mountains are also made up of a number of Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary rocks aside from limestone, though limestone is the most common. The limestone and older sediments rest on Archean metamorphic rock consisting of gneiss and schists. Throughout the Pryors, are a number of caves carved by groundwater into the limestone such as the Shield Trap Cave, which features a vertical shaft about 33 feet deep. The mountains are divided by a perennial stream called Crooked Creek. The east side of the mountains are bordered by the Bighorn River and across the river, people can see the Bighorn Mountain.

Fauna & Flora

Some humans live in these mountains but, for the most part, the mountains have been left to the animals. Wild horses, for example, call these mountains home. In addition to the wild horses, are the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, black bears, blue grouse, cougars, elk, gray wolves, mule deer, ring-necked pheasant, sage grouse, Baird's sparrow, long-eared myotis, pallid bat, peregrine falcon, spotted bat, Townsend's big-eared bat, and Yellowstone cutthroat trout as well as 15 different species of bats.
The flora of the area is more diverse than most people might think of an area in the plains. There are thirty different types of shrubs such as Broom Snakeweed and Winterfat, over 100 different kinds of forbs such as Desert Indian Paintbrush, Smooth Woody Aster, and Wild Parsley, twenty-four different types of grasses such as Indian Ricegrass and Sandberg’s Bluegrass, and four types of trees such as the Box-Elder and the Utah Juniper.

Natural Resources

Aside from the natural beauty of the mountains, the only resource would be the wild horses and the grasses that could be used for cattle grazing.

Type

Mountain Range