page_title: Sawtooth National Forest
section_title: Geography and geology
hierarchical_section_title: Sawtooth National Forest / Geography and geology
caption_attribution_description: English: The Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho from a ridge southeast of Stanley
context_page_description: Sawtooth National Forest is a National Forest that covers 2,110,408 acres in the U.S. states of Idaho and Utah. Managed by the U.S. Forest Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it was originally named the Sawtooth Forest Reserve in a proclamation issued by President Theodore Roosevelt on May 29, 1905. On August 22, 1972 a portion of the forest was designated as the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, which includes the Sawtooth, Cecil D. Andrus–White Clouds, and Hemingway–Boulders wilderness areas. The forest is managed as four units: the SNRA and the Fairfield, Ketchum, and Minidoka Ranger Districts.
  Sawtooth National Forest is named for the Sawtooth Mountains, which traverse part of the SNRA. The forest also contains the Albion, Black Pine, Boise, Boulder, Pioneer, Raft River, Smoky, Soldier, Sublett, and White Cloud mountain ranges, as well as Hyndman Peak, the ninth-highest point in Idaho at 12,009 feet above sea level. Sawtooth National Forest contains land cover types which include sagebrush steppe, spruce-fir forests, alpine tundra, and over 1,100 lakes and 3,500 miles of rivers and streams.
context_section_description: The elevation in the forest ranges from 4,514 feet (1,376 m) at Rock Creek south of Twin Falls to 12,009 feet (3,660 m) above sea level at the top of Hyndman Peak, an elevation gain of 7,495 feet (2,284 m). The mountains of the Minidoka District are part of the Basin and Range Province, while those in the northern section of the forest are part of the Rocky Mountains. The Sawtooth Mountains have at least fifty peaks over ten thousand feet (3,050 m).
  The mountains of Sawtooth National Forest have a varied geological history. The northern Sawtooth Mountains formed from the Eocene Sawtooth batholith, while south of Alturas Lake the Sawtooth, Smoky, and Soldier mountains formed from the Cretaceous granodiorite of the Idaho Batholith. Foothills of the Smoky Mountains are from the Pennsylvanian and Permian Dollarhide formations. The White Cloud Mountains are underlain by the gray granodiorite of the Idaho batholith, while some of the exposed rock is baked impure limestone from the Permian Grand Prize Formation.
  The central mass of the Raft River Mountains consists of Precambrian metamorphic rocks with Elba quartzite and interlayered schist on the southern slopes and Cambrian quartzite outcrops on the western part of the range. Below the Sublett Mountains the Phosphoria Formation, a basal phosphorite overlain by a thick sequence of chert and cherty sandstone, reaches its greatest thickness. Soils in the northern part of the forest are generally deep and highly fertile in lowlands but shallow and less so on steep slopes. In the Minidoka Ranger District, soils are generally productive, derived from volcanic and sedimentary material, shallow on steep slopes, and deep in the lowlands.
  The Boulder, Pioneer, Sawtooth, Smoky, and White Cloud mountains are generally jagged, while the ranges on the Minidoka District, the Albion, Black Pine, Raft River, and Sublett mountains, are generally smooth and rolling. Galena Summit is a mountain pass at 8,701 ft (2,652 m) on State Highway 75 between Stanley and Ketchum, roughly where the Boulder and Smoky Mountains meet. While not in Sawtooth National Forest, Banner Creek Summit is a 7,037-foot (2,145 m) mountain pass on State Highway 21 at the northern end of the Sawtooth Mountains, on the border of the Boise and Challis National Forests.
caption: The Sawtooth Mountains from southeast of Stanley
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