Basalt of Gertrude Creek description and information

This feature is part of the Saddlehorn Creek Cluster of volcanoes, as defined by Hildreth and others (2004). From Hildreth and others (2004): "Basalt of Gertrude Creek makes up a 1-km-wide remnant of an ejecta cone and lava-flow apron that form a glacially smoothed domical swell about 5 km NE of Becharof Lake, near the trace of the Bruin Bay Fault (Riehle and others, 1993). Surviving outcrop has about 60 m of gentle relief and includes a 200-m-wide degraded crater now only 5 to 8 m deep, rimmed by brick-red scoria blocks and sheets of blobby agglutinate that are broken and frost-heaved into slabs. Outside the rim is a massive to finely vesicular, basaltic lava. The subalkaline high-alumina basalt (49.8% SiO2, 6.8% MgO) contains abundant small phenocrysts of olivine, clinopyroxene, and plagioclase, and inclusions (in olivine) of Cr-spinel. A slab of holocrystalline lava near the north rim gave a 40Ar/39Ar plateau age of 500 +/- 15 ka (Hildreth and others, 2003)."