Gold Butte, Nevada

Gold Butte is the name of a ghost town and nearby mountain peak in Clark County, Nevada. Both are protected as part of the Gold Butte National Monument, managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Gold Butte, the mountain, is 5,013 feet (1,528 m) high and rises 1,280 feet (390 m) above the town of Gold Butte. This peak lies within the Virgin Mountains and its name apparently refers to the Gold Butte Mining District.

The bedrock of the landscape around Gold Butte Peak and nearby Bonelli Peak consist of gray, Proterozoic, porphyritic perthite-quartz-biotite granites and quartz monzonites that are also classified as rapakivi granite. These granites, which are collectively called the Gold Butte Granite, intrude garnet-cordierite-sillimanite and hornblende gneisses, migmatites, and older granites, pyroxenites, and hornblendites. East of Gold Butte, these Proterozoic medium-to high-grade metamorphic and plutonic rocks are unconformably overlain by 3 to 4 kilometers (1.9 to 2.5 mi) of steeply east-dipping Paleozoic sedimentary. Together, these plutonic, metamorphic, and sedimentary strata comprise a fault-bounded segment of crust known as the Gold Butte Block. The landscapes, of which Gold Butte is a part, within Gold Butte block represents the deeply eroded footwall of a Miocene detachment fault that provides a continuous outcrop of a section of the upper Earth's crust that is approximately 24 to 25 kilometers (15 to 16 mi) thick. Thus, Gold Butte lies near the base of possibly the longest continuously exposed section of the Earth's crust in the southwestern United States. Fryxell and Duebendorfer argued that the strata comprising Frenchman Mountain originated as the hanging wall that originally overlied the now tectonically exhumed Gold Butte block. It was during the Miocene, that these strata were translated to their present position by movement along detachment and strike-slip faults.

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