Patagonia Mountains the Sonoran town of San Lazaro. The old mining camps and ghost towns of Mowry, Washington Camp, Harshaw, and Duquesne are located in the Patagonia Mountains. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are in the valley to the southwest of the mountain range. The San Rafael Valley and Canelo Hills are to the east of the Patagonia Mountains. The connected Santa Rita, Patagonia, and Sierra San Antonio ranges are part of the Madrean Sky Islands ecoregion, the sky island mountain ranges region on the north of the Sierra Madre Occidental, the major cordillera and mountain ecoregion of central-western and northwestern Mexico.
Geology of the Rocky Mountains Geology of the Rocky Mountains The geology of the Rocky Mountains is that of a discontinuous series of mountain ranges with distinct geological origins. Collectively these make up the Rocky Mountains, a mountain system that stretches from Northern British Columbia through central New Mexico and which is part of the great mountain system known as the North American Cordillera. The rocky cores of the mountain ranges are, in most places, formed of pieces of continental crust that are over one billion years old. In the south, an older mountain range was formed 300 million years ago, then eroded away. The