ABSTRACT
For all the majesty of its mountains and the fascination of its geology, Colorado would be an uninviting place without the lovely tapestry of greens and seasonal golds and browns, which spread so smoothly over the plains and are wrapped around the shoulders of the mountains, or without birds to praise the mornings and fish to shimmer in the streams. Parent material is the bedrock or loose materials from the bedrock on which a soil develops. Parent material supplies the chemical compounds on which soil-making processes operate and largely conditions the size and shape of soil particles and the way these particles aggregate together in what soil scientists call "peds," the equivalent of what laymen might call "clods." In Colorado, almost every type of parent material is present: new sand and silt in river valleys, ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks in the mountains, varied sediments on the plains.
