Abstract Recent field and associated studies in eight 7.5-minute quadrangles near Mount Rogers in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee provide important stratigraphic and structural relationships for the Neoproterozoic Mount Rogers and Konnarock formations, the northeast end of the Mountain City window, the Blue Ridge–Piedmont thrust sheet, and regional faults. Rocks in the northeast end of the Mountain City window constitute an antiformal syncline. Overturned Konnarock and Unicoi formations in the window require a ramp-flat geometry in the hanging wall of the Blue Ridge thrust sheet or stratigraphic pinch-out of the Konnarock Formation. Undulose and ribbon quartz, fractured feldspars, and mylonitic foliations from the Stone Mountain and Catface faults indicate top-to-NW motion, and ductile deformation above ∼300 °C along the base of the Blue Ridge thrust sheet on the southeast side of the window. The Stone Mountain fault was not recognized northeast of Troutdale, Virginia. The Shady Valley thrust sheet is continuous with the Blue Ridge thrust sheet. The ∼750 Ma Mount Rogers Formation occurs in three volcanic centers in the Blue Ridge thrust sheet. Basal clastic rocks of the lower Mount Rogers Formation nonconformably overlie Mesoproterozoic basement in the northeasternmost Razor Ridge volcanic center, but the basal contact in parts of the Mount Rogers and Pond Mountain volcanic centers is strongly tectonized and consistent with a NW-directed, greenschist-facies high-strain zone. The contact between the Mount Rogers Formation and Konnarock Formation is nonconformable, locally faulted. Metarhyolite interbedded with lacustrine and fluvial rocks suggests that volcanism and glaciation were locally coeval, establishing an age of ∼750 Ma for the Konnarock Formation, a pre-Sturtian glaciation. Multiple greenschist-facies, high-strain zones crosscut the Blue Ridge thrust sheet including the Fries high-strain zone (2–11 km wide). Foliations across the Fries and Gossan Lead faults have similar orientations and top-to-NW contractional deformation.

New outcrops created during the 1983 draining of Watauga Lake within the Mountain City window exposed the Little Pond Mountain thrust zone, marked by more than 200 m of Max Meadows-type carbonate breccia. The breccias are derived from the lower Rome Formation of the hanging wall, which is thrust 12 km over younger Rome beds. The upper boundary of the fault zone is gradational, beginning with intact shales and dolostones that become progressively disaggregated by boudinage and disharmonie folding, grading into a thick zone of polymict breccia in contact with Rome shales in the footwall. The brecciation is thrust related and tied to a particular stratigraphie horizon. Extreme competency contrast between brittlely deformed dolostones and shales, and interlayered, plastically deformed calcitic laminites is inconsistent with the current mineralogy and suggests the presence of weak evaporite-rich layers during deformation. Within the fault zone, these weak beds grade into the breccia matrix. Boudinaged dolostones and shales form clasts in a breccia mixed by mesoscopic isoclinal folding. Raindrop prints, ubiquitous mudcracks, and evaporite crystal molds in the lower Rome Formation are consistent with evaporative depositional environments. The breccias also exhibit features of evaporite solution-collapse breccias, including sedimentary cavity fillings. Pétrographie evidence for vanished evaporites includes anhydrite inclusions, evaporite crystal molds, and chert nodules pseudomorphous after anhydrite. A sparry calcite mosaic that apparently replaced evaporite laminites also forms the breccia matrix. The evaporite hypothesis is supported by interbedded dolostone and anhydrite discovered in the subsurface at the base of the Rome. The Watauga Lake breccias are postulated to be the result of décollement thrusting within a dolostone-anhydrite sequence at the base of the Rome Formation, producing a polymict evaporite-matrix breccia, which after deformation, underwent local solution collapse and widespread replacement of anhydrite by calcite. The Max Meadows breccias have long been considered unique, but a review of published work shows that these rocks and occurrences at Watauga Lake are identical in many ways to Rauhwacken (cornieules) of Europe and similar carbonate breccias in Nevada, the northern U.S. and Canadian Rockies, Ireland, and southern England, all of which have been interpreted as deformed carbonate-evaporite sequences. There are also similarities to carbonate breccias in Nova Scotia, northern Michigan, and the foreland of the Canadian Rockies that are purely the result of evaporite dissolution. These comparisons show that, in a given occurrence, thick carbonate breccias with similar diagenetic histories may originate from either décollement thrusting, evaporite dissolution, or a combination of the two processes.

The western Blue Ridge Province of the southern Appalachians contains a rich record of the Mesoproterozoic Grenville orogeny, but subsequent Paleozoic metamorphic events have variably overprinted Grenville rocks, and Paleozoic thrusting has telescoped Grenville rock units. Effects of Paleozoic orogenesis must be unraveled to decipher the Grenville record. The Grenville rocks in the Blue Ridge of northwestern North Carolina and eastern Tennessee reside in a stack of Alleghanian thrust sheets that lie above the Grandfather Mountain and Mountain City windows. The composite Fries thrust sheet is the structurally highest unit in the stack and contains rocks of the eastern Blue Ridge juxtaposed against Grenville basement rocks (Pumpkin Patch Metamorphic Suite) along the Devonian Burnsville fault, which is the only identifiable Acadian structure in the thrust stack. West of the Grandfather Mountain window, the Sams Gap–Pigeonroost thrust splays off the Fries fault. Only the Fries and Sams Gap–Pigeonroost sheets appear to have been affected by Ordovician Taconic metamorphism. Below the Fries and Sams Gap–Pigeonroost sheets, Grenville basement rocks in the Fork Ridge and Linville Falls–Stone Mountain thrust sheets display widespread greenschist-facies metamorphism and deformation associated with Alleghanian thrusting. The lowest basement sheet is the Little Pond Mountain thrust sheet, which experienced only Late Paleozoic chlorite-grade metamorphism. Palinspastic restoration of the Grenville rocks to their pre-Paleozoic relative positions places rocks of the Pumpkin Patch Metamorphic Suite outboard of western Blue Ridge Grenvillian rocks.