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7 .... ,4 ..' snowfall; or/and 3) an increase in the amount of potenti'ally t()xlc silver or iodide compounds in the environment. Such changes are difficult to predict during a short-tel~m research program, though much of our work was des i gned for that task, and they may not c:>ccur unt H after 10 or more years. At that time, however, there may be questions about what the ecosystems of the Medicine BOw Mountains were like prior to thfi initiation of cloud seeding., We do not have every useful bit of baseline informatll:>n, but during the courS'B of our research a considerable amount of information has been synthesized. '.... ,In.!l ..... GEOLOGY AND SOILS ... The Medicine Bow Mountainsl are located in southeastern W'yoming, 48 km west of laramie, and are composed prlmari ly of a comp1 e)(, upl ifted mass of Pre~ambrian rock (Houston, et al. 1968). Sedimentary rocks of Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Tertiary age are foundi~the center of the range as we\l as on the flanks. Pleistocene gl~ci~l deposIts are abundant in the north, having originated from an lee cap near Medicine Bow Peak (3,640 m elevation). Surroun,ded by plains that are about 1,800 to 2,100 m in elevation, the mOlJlntains rise rather abruptly to a roll ing p.lateau at about. 3,180 m. L.ibby Flats comprises mue::h of this plateau which is broken by the Snowy Range, a 10-km long axial remnant in the north-central portion elf the mount,alns. The Rawah Range is an axial remnant in the Colorado portion of the Medlc;ine Bow Mountains. Since cloud seeding would probablyt;.e effective only above about 2,700 m, the usual bottom of thel orographic clouds on the western slopes, it is of interest to note that about 49 percent of the Medicine Bow Mountains are above 2,700 m in Wyoming (approximately 677 km2). The 'soi Is of the Medicine Bow Mountains have not been studied extensively, and most of the literature on mounta.in soils focuses on ,... .. - .... - -... ~- ... The Medicine Bow Mountains extend ~iouth into Colorado, but this report is limited primarily to the Wyoming portion, Fig. 1.