The Wet Mountains

The Wet Mountains, a small sub-range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, are named for the amount of snow they receive each winter.

Most of the Wet Mountains are in Custer County, although Greenhorn Mountain (the range’s tallest summit) and some other parts of the range are in Huerfano County.

The granite that composes most of the Wet Mountains solidified some 1.7 billion years ago in the Pre-Cambrian Era and is the same age as the granite in the Blanca Massif. While most of this mountain range is Pre-Cambrian granite, there are a couple of areas of Cambrian metamorphic rock (north and east of Lake DeWeese) and the rock deposited at the top of Greenhorn Mountain is only about 25 million years old and solidified about the same time as the Spanish Peaks and the Silver Mountain/Mt. Mestas group.