noun
definition
An isolated hill with steep sides and a flat top.
Examples of buttes in a Sentence
Here we find gigantic, red rock buttes rising out of the desert.
Taylor volcano (11,389 ft.), which is surrounded by lava tables and some of the most wonderful volcanic buttes in the world.
The valleys of the principal streams are deeply eroded; bluffs are common along their borders, and buttes elsewhere on the plains.
Its surface consists of a thick sheet of pumiceous sand and dust, from which arise occasional buttes and mesas.
The region of the Colorado river is largely desert, with occasional buttes and spurs.
It is dominated by high mountains, gashed by superb canyons of rivers, scarred with dry gullies and washes, the beds of intermittent streams, varied with great shallow basins, sunken deserts, dreary levels, bold buttes, picturesque mesas, forests and rare verdant bits of valley.
Several valleys often unite into a large elevated plain, broken only by scattered buttes and spurs.
The surface of this plain, however, ranges from level river valleys in the east to irregular plateaus broken by buttes and scored by canons in the west.
Mt Taylor in western New Mexico is of similar age, but here dissection seems to have advanced farther, probably because of the weaker nature of the underlying rocks, with the result of removing the smaller cones and exposing many lava conduits or pipes in the form of volcanic necks or buttes.
A little north of the centre of the valley rise the Marysville Buttes, the remains of a maturely dissected volcano (2128 ft).
Erosion buttes and mesas occasionally rise as picturesque monuments above the general level of the plains, and in the vicinity of the mountains the plains strata, elsewhere nearly horizontal, are bent sharply upward and carved by erosion into " hogback " ridges.
In the region between the Northern and Southern Rockies, the plains are interrupted by minor Mountain groups, volcanic buttes and lava flows, among which the Leucite Hills and Pilot Butte are prominent examples.
The most prominent features of this part of the state are the arid Snake river plains and three mountain-like elevations - Big, Middle and East Buttes - that rise from their midst.
Besides these highest points there are a considerable number of mountains in the central provinces of Imerina and Betsileo and the intervening and surrounding districts; and in the Bara country the Isalo range has been compared to the "Church Buttes" and other striking features of the scenery of Utah.
The surface of western Nebraska is characterized by high, barren table lands, broken by canyons, dotted with buttes, and dominated by some bold and lofty ridges.
A ridge of low hills and bluffs, often precipitous, marked by buttes and deeply cut in places by Canons, it is the most striking surface feature of the state.
The buttes - bare, pyramidal or conical, flat-topped, precipitous hills, and often fantastic, towering pinnacles - are rather widely distributed through the foot-hill region.
This plateau, however, is not a plain, but contains many buttes and mesas and isolated mountain ranges rising from 1000 to 8000 ft.
The faces of buttes and ravines that are turned toward the sun are usually devoid of vegetation.
The buttes are characteristically Arikaree or Gering formations topping Brule clay.