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How it Was Today: Reflections in Yosemite Valley

April 20, 2013, 11:02 pm
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What is my favorite season in Yosemite? Hard to say, but I tend to think that it is whatever season it is when I happen to be there. Except maybe for hot dusty August. I just had the happy opportunity to spend two straight weekends in the valley introducing my students to the fascinating geology to be found there.
 And a few living things as well. Can anyone tell me what kind of butterfly this is?
The spring melt, very unfortunately, is coming early this year. We had a great beginning in our precipitation totals through December, but the skies suddenly dried up, and we had the driest January to March precipitation on record, with a paltry 26% of normal. The early snows are gone, and the few additional snowdrifts are melting rapidly. But there is water in the valley right now, and the falls were full and booming. It was a beautiful day.
Iconic Half Dome was nicely reflected from a pond in the Cooks Meadow area. Half Dome, or more correctly Three-Quarters Dome, stood high above the icefields that filled Yosemite during the ice ages, and achieved its shape from exfoliation and jointing.
Sentinel Dome is sometimes missed, as it lies on the opposite side of the valley from Yosemite Falls. It is a spectacular edifice that would be the focus of a national park if it existed any place besides Yosemite Valley.
We went to some of the usual places. From Tunnel View we had a perspective of Half Dome from near the spot where the valley was first discovered by Americans of European descent. It must have been a stunning sight in 1851, although the significance of the awesome valley was lost on most of the militia members, who were more intent on capturing Miwok Indians. The medic for the crew, Lafayette Bunnell, was deeply impressed and his writings were part of the inspiration for making Yosemite a national Park. The Cathedral Rocks were sharply etched into the cloudless sky, and Bridalveil Fall was full. Thousands of people see this every day. What was it like to be the first person to see it, whether in 1851, or 4,000-5,000 years ago?
In springtime, Yosemite is graced with a multitude of incredible waterfalls, some of which don't last into the summer. One example is Ribbon Fall, which at 1,612 feet is actually higher than Upper Yosemite Falls (1,430 feet). It is just west of El Capitan and is easily viewed by visitors at Bridalveil Falls across the valley. It will probably be dry in a few short weeks, which is why it is less known.
Yosemite Falls was nothing short of spectacular. With a total drop of 2,425 feet, it is the fifth or sixth highest waterfall in the world. Its roar could be heard all over the center of Yosemite Valley.
I hiked to the lower falls as well. At 320 feet, it is dwarfed by the others, but a trail ascends quite close to the base, and it both wet and exhilarating to draw close. I had chosen to walk to the upper end of the valley, realizing that I could get there almost as fast as the tramways (lots of tram stops getting from one end of the valley to the other).
 The dogwoods were starting to bloom out too. It's one of the nicest signs of spring.
There aren't many other flowers on the valley floor yet, but our drive through the foothills afforded a great deal of color. There were white lupines....
 And a small magenta flower I didn't recognize. Can anyone identify it?
 Blue lupine could be seen all over the place...
And finally, a robin posed for me.
And that's how it was today.
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Thoughts for Earth Day 2013: There is a price to pay

April 22, 2013, 1:58 pm
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Andrew Alden at About Geology notes today that he hosted an Accretionary Wedge on Earth Day in 2008. I had only been blogging a few months at the time, but I contributed, and in reading over my post from back then, I see that things haven't changed all that much. In just two months, I'll have the chance to return to my favorite spot on the planet at Cedar Mesa, and hopefully it will look as pristine as it did five years ago. Thanks, Andrew, for the reminder!

Here is my post from April, 2008:

This month's Accretionary Wedge (Accretionary Wedge #8 ) is hosted by Andrew Alden at About Geology, and the entries involve our responses to Earth Day. Mine is a bit late in coming; I reward myself with a blog entry if I get my other work done, and this has been finals week. It's been a bit hectic!

I offer today a picture of my most sacred spot on the planet (so far): the edge of Cedar Mesa at Muley Point. The cliff below the rocks drops 800 feet straight down to a flat plain which is then carved by the San Juan River into intricate canyons some 1,200 feet deeper still. Monument Valley and the Raplee Anticline lie in the distance, as well as the towns of Cortez CO and Farmington NM. It is a precious place to me, full of mystery, beauty and solitude. Ghosts of the Ancestral Pueblo people lurk here, and the fossils of Permian reptiles as well.

But...hidden in the bottom of the deep canyon is the greatest upstream extent of the artifical evaporation pond of Lake Powell. On a 1964 topographic map of the National Recreational Area, there is a notation at Muley Point: "slated for development". In the distance, at Mexican Hat, oil wells pump the black liquid from the ground, and around Farmington, a GoogleEarth view reveals hundreds or thousands of gas wells. Coal is mined from Black Mesa, off to the south, and evaporite minerals are torn from the ground to the north of Canyonlands National Park. Power lines criss-cross the region. My favorite place is under siege.

Of course, we need all these things to live, but the point of my entry today is this: there is a price to be paid. The price takes many forms, from high prices on commodities, in foul air, polluted rivers, extinct plants and animals, and in the almost never recognized loss of the wild places of our planet, the gauntlet in which our ancestors survived and thrived. We have lost touch with the earth that gave us our birth, and which continues to nurture us, despite our abuse. And our abusive ways are about to come to an end, one way or another: we will finally destroy the last of the wild places, drill the last drops of oil and shovel the last lumps of coal, we will melt the last glaciers, and deplete the last soils. Or, we will choose not to do these things, and exist on our planet in a new way: a sustainable existence that finds a way to give something back to our planet.

The environmental movement on our planet has been demonized, trivialized, and marginalized, because, I suppose, it has always threatened the perceived profits of somebody. What have environmental groups tried to do since the hey-day of the 1970's and the first Earth Day? A short list might include:
  • Increase mileage standards and encourage the use of mass-transit
  • Encourage the development of alternative energy resources
  • Decrease emissions from our vehicles, including greenhouse gases and ozone destroying compounds
  • Encouraged laws to protect our water, air and soil
  • Protect the wild places that still remain on our planet
Environmentalists have been the visionaries and the prophets for our planet. They have seen the things we do today to abuse our planet, and offer an alternative path for the future, one based on sustainability. Such ideas run counter to the profit motive of particular industries, and thus environmentalists are attacked as elitists and flakes, while the money continues to flow into the coffers of the energy companies and the developers. But the bills for all of us are coming due...

The oil is running out, and thus the price spikes. We will never see cheap oil again. The mass conversion of agricultural fields to the growth of biofuels is causing grain prices to spike, and we are becoming less and less able to feed the hungriest people on the planet (Malthus is in the air; "Running Out of Planet to Exploit," ). The prices of metals are climbing.

Change is possible, and I sometimes see hopeful signs, and part of my optimism comes from Earth Day, and the works of good people to bring awareness to those who are waking up to the spectre of high prices and resource limits. We have a choice though...we can let the decisions about the future to be made by energy companies and their political lackeys, or we can demand a future based on sustainability. It will take education, and an end to the corporate media's obsession with Britney and Paris, and kidnapped white women, and American Flag Lapels. People, when given the right information, can make the right choices.

Those are my thoughts this week. You are welcome to comment!
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The Other California: Springtime along the Great Western Divide

April 26, 2013, 12:03 pm
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Lupines along the Kaweah River gorge (Moro Rock and Alta Peak in the distance)
The Great Western Divide? Where's that?

My off and on blog series on the Other California is an exploration of the little-known places in my fair state with interesting, even fascinating geological features. Sequoia National Park might seem too familiar a place to be included as part of the "Other California", given that my own definition of the series is that it should include those places that don't normally show up on postcards, and Sequoia National Park certainly does.

So why include Sequoia? The primary reason is that it actually is less known than other parts of the Sierra Nevada. Ask folks where they go in the Sierra, and Yosemite Valley or Lake Tahoe are often the first places mentioned. And people often come to the park not so much for the geology, but for the biology, mainly to see the trees after which the park is named. But the park has a rich geological heritage as well.
Moro Rock from the Kaweah River gorge
The shape of the Sierra Nevada is often described as a tilted block of granitic rock and metamorphic rocks. That's true in the Sierra Nevada north of Sequoia. Driving to Yosemite National Park from the west involves a gradual climb up the western slope that continues to the Sierra Crest before dropping precipitously into the Owens Valley or Mono Lake on the east. Sequoia and the Southern Sierra Nevada is quite different. When one arrives from the west (which actually is the only way in which the park can be approached by roads), the road climbs steeply to a plateau, and the slope continues to a high crest. But not of the Sierra Nevada. It's an entirely separate mountain ridge called the Great Western Divide. The actual crest of the Sierra Nevada lies farther east, across the deep gorge of the Big Arroyo and the Kern River.

The Great Western Divide is a spectacular mountain range. It rises nearly to the height of the actual Sierra Crest, with several peaks exceeding 12,000 feet in elevation (A dozen or so peaks on the Sierra Crest reach 14,000 feet). Despite being far to the south, the peaks were high enough to be scoured by the glaciers of the Pleistocene Ice Ages.

A few weeks back we had the chance to pay an early springtime visit to Sequoia National Park. We came in from the west, up Highway 198 along the Kaweah River through the town of Three Rivers, and then up the Generals Highway to the Sequoia groves for which the park is justly famous. The road is notably curvy, and climbs through a rugged canyon choked with giant boulders that have tumbled from the cliffs above.

We soon passed one of those kitschy things that Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s seemed especially fond of constructing: a drive-through rock (to go along with "drive-through" trees). They enlarged the opening under the immense boulder, and put the road through it.
If one wonders why the road today circumvents the rock tunnel, one need only look at the underside of the boulder. People driving in scenic national parks are not known for paying close attention to their driving, and in a time of massive recreational vehicles, this kind of thing just doesn't cut it anymore.
A hat tip to the arrival of spring in the Sierra Nevada...the redbuds were in full bloom up the canyon, providing a splash of vivid color on the dark green slopes.
Although not as colorful as redbud, the ceanothus shrubs added a wonderful fragrance to the air. The bees and other pollinating insects were in heaven.
As we went further up the canyon, Moro Rock loomed ever higher above us. The granite rock of the dome expanded as the rock was exposed at the surface. The plutonic rock tended to fracture parallel to the surface, which had the effect of removing corners and edges from the rock outcrop, eventually leading to the formation of the dramatic dome. The process is called exfoliation. It would be so cool to climb the dome, but we knew that most of the park access roads would be closed because of the winter snowpack.
Except that they weren't. When we reached Giant Forest, there were a few snow patches here and there, but the snowpack is currently at half the normal level. All the roads were open, so we headed over to the Moro Rock trailhead. As dramatic as the dome is, trail access is easy because the CCC put in a stairwell to the summit. Easy that is, if you don't have problems climbing 300-400 steps. The views in the clear spring air were stunning.

Immediately across the Kaweah Gorge were the Castle Rocks (9,000+). The spires and towers of granitic rock exhibit the other result of rock expansion: jointing. When the fractures that result from pressure release are vertical, they allow water to get into the narrow spaces. If the water freezes it expands, wedging the rock apart. The water also aids in the chemical weathering of the rock, so as time goes on the cracks widen, forming the prominent spires.
Moro Rock is best known for the wonderful perspective it provides on the Great Western Divide. The mountains are often hidden from view by other high ridges or thick forest, but Moro Rock stands out from the mountainside, and the view is tremendous.

With the covering of winter snow, one can imagine the glaciers that carved the horns, aretes, and cirques that are so well exposed here. Cirques are the bowl shaped basins on upper ridges where the glaciers accumulated. Aretes are the knife-edged ridges that divide glacially carved valley, and horns are the sharp pointed peaks that result when glaciers pluck rocks from the base of the cliffs in the cirques and aretes. The Matterhorn in the Alps is a familiar example, but there are many horns to choose from on the Great Western Divide.
I have not yet had the privilege, but the High Sierra Trail winds its way from Crescent Meadow in Sequoia to the summit of Mt. Whitney and the Whitney Portal trailhead. It is 60+ miles long, and crosses two major passes, and it must be a marvelous adventure. It is second only to the John Muir/Pacific Crest Trail in popularity.

The picture below illustrates the difference between glacial erosion (the cirques and horns in the upper part of the photo), and the weathering and exfoliation that happens at the lower elevations (the domes both right and left of center).
Moro Rock also provides a wonderful view west towards the Sierra Nevada foothills and the usually invisible Central Valley. You are looking at the most polluted air in the United States: Bakersfield and Fresno. It's not entirely their fault, as they don't necessarily produce more pollution per capita, but the towns are surrounded by high mountains, so they can't blow their pollution into someone else's area the way other municipalities are able to. The photo below is as clear as I've ever seen it from Moro Rock.

Next, we took a look at some trees with a unique geologic history...
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The Other California: The Biggest Living Things and the Deepest Canyon in the U.S. (maybe, almost, perhaps)

April 27, 2013, 2:32 pm
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Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks were established 50 years apart (1890 and 1940), and they preserve different aspects of the Sierra Nevada, but they are adjacent and as such are jointly administered by the Park Service. My Other California blog series is an attempt to spotlight the lesser known parts of our state that don't always show up on the postcards that tourists buy, but which have incredible geological features. As a pair of national parks, Sequoia and Kings Canyon don't seem to fit the bill, but I include them because the two parks are less visited, and yet have some of the most spectacular geological scenery to be seen anywhere. How many places can boast the highest peaks, the deepest canyons and the biggest living things in the world?

A bit of perspective on my claims, though. Sequoia National Park includes the highest peak in the lower 48 states, with Mt. Whitney (14,505 feet; 4,421 meters). Denali in Alaska is much higher, and Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii are the tallest mountains in the world (if you measure from the seafloor). Kings Canyon has a reasonably valid claim to being the deepest canyon in North America, but the deepest part of the canyon lies a few miles downstream of the park boundary (though it is partly protected as Giant Sequoia National Monument). But the biggest living things? Absolutely.
There has always been a bit of confusion about the Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron gigantea), because California has two gigantic tree species. The other is the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), which grows in a narrow coastal corridor between Big Sur and the Oregon state line. The Coast Redwood grows to immense heights (nearly 400 feet), but is usually slimmer. The tallest Sequoia trees usually don't exceed 300 feet (the tallest is 311 feet), but the trunk is more robust to a high level, so the shorter trees have the greater bulk, making them the largest living thing on the planet. The state legislature was confused certainly, as they made the "native redwood" into the state tree without realizing the two trees were distinct. The attorney general of the state eventually got involved, making a final ruling declaring both species to be the state tree. Both tree species live for thousands of years, but neither is the oldest living thing in existence. That honor goes to the 5,000 year old Bristlecone Pine, also a California resident species.
The trees are tremendous. They occur in about 60 groves between about 4,600 and 7,000 feet along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Such giant trees would seem irresistible to loggers, and many were cut, but the wood was actually of low quality for most purposes and was usually made into pencils, shingles or grapevine stakes. Today nearly all the groves are protected in the national parks (Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon), a national monument (Giant Sequoia), and a state park (Calaveras Big Trees).

The trees have a geological story. They once thrived across the northern hemisphere, and in North America fossils of the trees are preserved in Yellowstone and Petrified Forest National Parks (the direct ancestors are preserved in Nevada). The petrified trees in Yellowstone are several tens of millions of years old, but the trees in Petrified Forest are several hundred million years old! Ancestors to the Sequoia date at least to the Jurassic Period, so the trees were witness to the evolution of the dinosaurs and their extinction. Climate change seems to have been the tree's nemesis, and the Pleistocene ice ages probably eliminated them from most of their former range. The trees were able to survive in the Sierra Nevada in part because they could propagate downslope and upslope in response to the advancing and receding glaciers (see this National Park Service article for the details on the origin and distribution of the Sequoia trees).
I'm opening a can of worms by discussing the deepest canyon in North America. Hells Canyon on the Snake River along the Idaho-Oregon border is usually described as the deepest, but measurements vary, as well as the precise definition of canyon. I won't make a judgement other than to say that the two canyons are very close to being the deepest, only a few tens of feet apart, and that both of them are 2,000-3,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon (The Grand really is grand, though. According to the park service, with a volume of 4.17 trillion cubic meters, it is the largest canyon in the world). Spanish Peak, at just over 10,000 feet (in the photo below), looms 8,000 feet over the canyon bottom at Rough Creek.

How can this canyon be so deep? If you saw my last post, you would recall that the southern Sierra Nevada is topographically different than the northern Sierra. It is more a high plateau than a westward tilting block. The adjacent Central Valley is different as well. It's been sinking, so much so that some of the sedimentary fill has buried portions of the Sierra foothills. Strange things are happening in the southern Sierra, and it may be related to a process called delamination. The Sierra may have had a dense root of mantle material that was out of equilibrium with the surrounding hotter and slightly fluid mantle. The large mass broke away and sank deeper into the mantle. The overlying crustal rock, the Sierra, popped upwards like a ship losing an anchor. The Kings River, with an increased gradient, started cutting rapidly downwards within the last few million years. Spanish Mountain can be thought of a high secondary ridge like the Great Western Divide, but it was breached by the erosion of the Kings River.

What's ironic? The river that carved the deepest (or second deepest) canyon in North America doesn't flow into the sea. The Kings River historically flowed mostly into a large lake in the southern Central Valley (Tulare Lake) and evaporated away. Some distributary channels delivered water to the San Joaquin River (and then onto the Pacific Ocean), but today the river is fully utilized for irrigation, and even the lake is gone, replaced by agricultural fields.

When we visited a few weeks ago, the road into Kings Canyon was still closed. The problem isn't snow (there wasn't any to speak of). The canyon slopes are so steep and rocky that rockfalls are a continuing hazard when the ground is still saturated and subject to freezing conditions. We had to take a pass this time around, but we'll be back in the fall for a field studies class. Look for pictures around early October!

Oh, and there were some cute dogs hanging out at Grant Grove....

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Some Resources on Yosemite Valley and the Mother Lode of the Sierra Nevada

April 30, 2013, 12:01 am
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Because we all know I almost NEVER mention Yosemite or the Mother Lode on Geotripper....
It's been quite a long time since I first ventured onto the Internet, about 15 years ago. I quite clumsily put together a web page for my geology department, which included a couple of resources on the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode and Yosemite Valley. It turns out that my original web pages are due to disappear into the mists of time as the school has taken up a different web platform. If you want to see my messy first effort at a web presence, it will be around until May 6 at this site: (http://virtual.yosemite.cc.ca.us/ghayes/). Two of the pages that I thought most useful were a virtual roadside geology tour of Yosemite Valley, and a review of the Mining History and Geology of the Mother Lode.

The virtual roadside tour of Yosemite Valley has been updated and posted at Geotripper Images (see it by clicking here). I've added more than 100 photos to the tour, and noted some of the changes that have taken place in the last fifteen years since I first published the guide (a dam has been removed, and there have been a few serious rockfalls). If you are headed to Yosemite this summer, give it a look!

The Mining History and Geology of the Mother Lode (click here to see the new version) still needs work. I found out the website was slated to disappear right in the middle of the last week of school, right in the midst of a move to our new Science Community Center, and just weeks before leaving on a total of three weeks in the field, part of which involves writing a field guide for Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks. So I don't have too much on my plate or anything like that.

In any case the Mother Lode history needs some serious updating and I didn't have much time this week to do anything about it (I put it up in a hurry in 1998 and didn't update it all that much over the years). If you see some inaccuracies in the descriptions of mining, I'd appreciate some constructive criticism. There is plenty of history about the Gold Rush out there, but not so much in the way of geology. 
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Science Community Center at Modesto Junior College: Ribbon Cutting on May 21st! Come and have a look...

May 2, 2013, 11:42 pm
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If I've been blogging less of late, it has something to do with the end of the semester, finals week, and the big move to the new building that is the end of a 10 year long journey from the original sketches on paper. The Science Community Center at Modesto Junior College, a facility built with funds from our own local community, is set to open for tours and observations on May 21st at 10 AM (ribbon cutting at 10 AM, tours to follow). The first classes are being taught this summer session.

I feel that this may be the finest facility for teaching science at any community college in the state (yes, I am biased). It includes a planetarium with the most advanced star projector in North America, a state-of-the-art observatory, and a vastly expanded Great Valley Museum including Science on a Sphere. We expect in the next year to install an adjacent outdoor nature laboratory as well. The facility includes laboratories and smart classrooms for Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Earth Science, and of course, Geology.
If you are anywhere near Modesto (easy freeway access), I encourage you to stop by. I'll be giving tours on the third floor with our new geology displays all day. It has been a long hard road reaching this day, with thousands of hours logged by our staff people making sure that we have the finest facility possible (and we did it within budget!). I deeply appreciate the efforts of the staff and faculty members of our division who put their heart and soul into this incredible project.

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A Bit of Blue Gemstone for a Friday

May 3, 2013, 10:37 pm
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As I've mentioned a few times, our new Science Community Center at Modesto Junior College is opening soon. Most of the first floor will be devoted to the vastly enlarged Great Valley Museum along with a planetarium and an observatory. One of the aspects of my involvement has been in developing an exhibit of California's state symbols. What today is a few pictures on a wall in the present museum will in a few weeks be a complete display with a full skeleton of a sabertooth cat (our state fossil), a gold specimen (our state mineral), a big chunk of beautifully glossy serpentine (our state rock; yes I know it's called serpentinite, but the legislature was unaware of this) and some of others like our state grass, bird, and flower.

Today I got to take a really close look at our state gemstone, which is one of the most obscure such designations in the United States! Can you say what this beautiful blue mineral is called?
The first Europeans to discover it thought it was sapphire. It's so rare that it was only described for the first time in 1907. And gem-quality specimens are found in abundance at only one mine in the entire world. It is a barium titanium silicate mineral called benitoite (after San Benito County, where it was found).

Benitoite crystallizes in the hexagonal crystal class, but forms a rare triangular type of crystal within the class. It is a beautiful blue color, but is a bit on the soft side (6-6.5) for extensive use in jewelry. It is also known for fluorescing in ultraviolet light. The matrix in which it is found is called natrolite, and sometimes elongated crystals of neptunite are associated with the benitoite.

It's a beautiful specimen that we'll have on display. Don't miss it if you are ever in Modesto!

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Is There a Golden Age of Teaching? Ruminations on Moving and Great Students

May 5, 2013, 11:40 pm
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It's a busy week to say the least. There was the hectic rush through finals and the posting of grades, and the deadline, only three days later, of having an entire Science Building packed and ready to move to another building. That's happening tomorrow. I am happy to say I had a lot of help from more than a dozen students who helped us get everything into the moving boxes.

Sifting through the detritus of twenty-five years of community college teaching is bound to reveal a few surprises, and I wasn't disappointed. Forgive me if I ruminate a little on what's gone on through those many years. To start with, I have a messy office. Not the messiest, it only achieved honorary mention the last time anyone judged. But more than messy enough.

I'll leave the reasons to the psychologists, about whether this is revealing something chaotic in the organization of my mind, but I can say that as messy as it always has been, I've always known where to find the items I was looking for (I only found two misplaced ungraded papers, for instance). I prefer to think that my office is messy because I subscribe to a corollary to the Peter Principle. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the principle states that in a hierarchical organization, people rise to the level of their own incompetence. This means that as long as you are successful at what you do, you get promoted, until you reach a position where you are incapable of successfully executing your duties. Since you are no longer successful, you receive no more promotions, and everyone above you and below is unhappy and dissatisfied with you.
There are only a few ways to escape the trap of the Peter Principle, and one of them is to get to a position where you are happy and don't want further promotions, so you find a way to be incompetent in insignificant ways so you can't be promoted, but can remain happy and successful at what you are doing. Hence, I maintain an office that would be unacceptable as a dean's office, but is tolerable in a professor.  And no one has ever asked me to be a dean (probably for many reasons).

Join me on a tour through the office that is soon to be stripped clean of twenty-five years of memories and experiences. The new office is very nice, with a view out the windows and clean walls, and directives about how and where we are to put our personal items on the walls. It will never be quite the cubbyhole I finished cleaning up today....
For me, a desk was never a place where work was accomplished, except for the writing that took place on the computer. For a geologist, a desk is a collecting place for the specimens of significant events and localities, much like the point bar on the inside of a river meander. What deskcrops are found up there? Beautiful crystals of azurite, topaz, quartz, calcite, rhodochrosite, and garnet. Fossils of ammonites, trilobites, eurypterids, and Green River fish. Samples of serpentinite, orbicular granite, xenoliths, and Mariposa slate. Some of them I found. Some were given to me. A few were in the school collection long before I came here.

The walls are covered with drawings by my son (the ammonites), a 40 year old painting of the Sierra Nevada done by a dear family friend when I graduated from high school, pictures of the family, and some of my accomplished students, and a Murphy's Law poster that I found when I started here in 1988. It went onto the wall back then and has always been a cherished message to meditate on (the favorites: "If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what's going on" and "Nature always sides with the hidden flaw"). There is a sign of my Star Trek geekiness (hanging over the monitor). There's a shot of me standing next to a lava flow on the Big Island.
 On the wall by the door is a tsunami warning poster from Washington, a 1912 vintage geologic map of the Owens Valley and southern Sierra Nevada, some political stuff, and a couple of those certificates of appreciation that sometimes come one's way.

My office and adjacent lab preparation area were always a little cramped because the building's reinforcement columns had to go right through them. They made great bulletin boards and memory walls. For instance, in my office, the column supports pictures, signs from field trip vans (the "Chicks of Death"), drawings by associates (that beautiful chalk rendition of Half Dome), pictures of my kids (at all stages of their lives from childhood to their current business cards), the most outrageous of the creation science papers that crossed my desk, and a torn up picture of George Bush composed of the pixels of soldiers who died in Iraq. I had that picture on the outside of my door for the duration of the war, and it prompted a great many angry responses, including the vandalism that hung there until this week. And comics. Lots of comics with a geological theme.
The column in the lab prep area was reserved for pictures of favorite moments with my students. There is a shot of me trying to lecture while a deer was making faces behind me, a fist pump after something good happened at a gas station in Grand Tetons (I don't remember what), and the incredible Walter's Wiggles on the way up Angels Landing in Zion Canyon.
The other side has pics of sunsets, cool rock discoveries, makeshift comics, and antics with a fake hand that we enjoyed putting under boulders and the like. Pictures of shrines that developed in the back seat of vans during particularly long trips (the plastic rats were kind of creepy).
And then there is the chalkboard. I'm not sure how a chalkboard ended up in the lab prep area, but inscriptions soon appeared and were never erased. The "cake is a lie" was a relatively recent addition, but some of those lines are 15 years old.

The flood of memories got me thinking. Is there a golden age in the arc of one's teaching career? Is there a time when you've got just enough experience to be half decent at teaching, and still energetic enough to keep up with the demands? I could still recall some of my very first students, one of whom actually came back to help pack this week, and another who commented on my facebook page about watching my job interview lecture 25 years ago (she now teaches earth science in Nevada). I thought about our two year internment in a warehouse just off-campus while our building was seismically retrofitted. The students from those years formed the Geology Club, many became geologists, and some of them organized a dino-dig that resulted in the discovery of a rare Zephyrosaur in Montana in the late 1990s. There was a bunker mentality in that group that was marvelous to behold.

But thinking it through, I realized there are always some incredible students, there are always enthusiastic ones, and there are always those who you can't forget. There have been tough periods when budgets were slashed, and recessions caused big cutbacks. But the students have always been there, and they have always inspired me to do whatever I could to assist them in achieving their goals. I've had no end of frustrations with inconsistent and ever changing regulations sent to us from above, but I have never become tired of dealing with students, even the ones that I wanted to shake  and say "this is your big chance in life, and you are screwing it up for sheer laziness?".

This almost sounds like the ruminations of someone on the verge of retirement, but that isn't the case. This week I am literally beginning a new career, that of a professor teaching geology in a new building on a different campus in another part of the city. Everything will be different, but no less exciting. As long as I can come to school in the morning and teach with enthusiasm, I'll be here.

But it ain't gonna happen until all this crap gets moved from this building to the new Science Community Center on west campus...

Tomorrow will be an interesting day...
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Science on Screen: Jurassic Park at the State Theatre! Sunday, May 12

May 11, 2013, 7:13 pm
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The final film in our State Theatre "Science on Screen" series is happening this Sunday, May 12 at 2:00 PM. I'm looking forward to this one especially because I will be serving as the speaker before the film. We will have some bone specimens in the lobby, and will be raffling off a few samples of bone to lucky kids (or their parents...). If you live in the Modesto area, I hope to see you there!

The following is an announcement from the State Theatre...

What better way to celebrate Mom's special day than treating her to one of the best adventure films of all time?  That's right, there is no better way than bringing her to The State for Jurassic Park  -- the old-school version NOT the 3D version because we're assuming Mom is old-school, like us! We're so honored to have Mom spend her day with us, that we're going to admit her for free. That's right, bring Mom to the May presentation of Science On Screen and Mom gets in at no charge. She'll love the interactive activities before the film and the presentation too. Be sure and check out the fossils and talk with the MJC geology club, or enter a drawing to win a HUGE, inflatable dinosaur. There will be lots more to do and experience so come early and stay late -- for the Q&A with Garry Hayes following the film.

Film:Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster in which a theme park suffers a major power breakdown that allows its dinosaur exhibits, cloned from prehistoric DNA, to run amok. Starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough.
 
Speaker: Garry Hayes, M.S. -- Dinosaurs: From Fossils to Film
Mr. Hayes is a geologist, local scientist and popular geology instructor at Modesto Junior College where he's taught and shared his passion -- and popularized paleontology -- with thousands of students since 1988.
 
Doors at 2 p.m.; presentation and film 3 p.m.
 
(Q&A following the film)
 
These programs are made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
A pioneering program pairing Hollywood films with presentations by notable experts from the world of science, technology, mathematics and medicine.


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It's Like a Disaster Movie...sort of. Put Aside May 21st!

May 18, 2013, 10:49 am
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You all know how the plot of a disaster movie plays out...amid the destruction of the city, the world, the solar system, a small plucky group of survivors goes about surviving, the concerns of the few outweighing the needs of the many, so to speak. That is how I felt this week as I come up for air (briefly) to explain my absence from any kind of blogging for the last week. We moved our science division, a gargantuan task involving dozens and dozens of people working under a strict deadline. But like the disaster movie concentrating on a small plucky group, I offer a view of the move from the point of view of our little geology department. I'm not saying it was a disaster, by the way, it was quite the opposite. It is a great triumph for our community.

Read to the end for an invitation!

The Science Community Center is the realization of a vision developed by the faculty and staff of the Science, Math and Engineering Division at Modesto Junior College thirteen years ago. Like a disaster movie, it looked at times like it would never happen, or if it did, it would never resemble the original vision. But it did happen, and it happened because our community, the towns of Stanislaus County, decided to pass a bond issue to renovate the college campus, including the construction of the SCC. There were losses...because of the recession we don't even have an engineering department anymore despite the name of our division. But in the end, the project was completed, and the vision was largely intact. We now have one of the finest science teaching facilities to be found at any community college in the state of California. We have a planetarium, an observatory, a new museum, and classrooms and labs for biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, earth science, and geology. And all because of the support of our community!

So here is how things played out with our plucky group of geologists! More than a dozen geology students volunteered their time to make this happen (it just couldn't have happened without them).
The old department had to be packed up. It was an astoundingly complicated task with the accumulation of a quarter-century of books, rocks, minerals, fossils, and paper. Lots and lots of paper. We let lots of stuff go, but we still ended up with 200 boxes, and dozens of wood trays filled with big rocks.
And then last Monday, it disappeared as the moving crew picked it all up and transported it to West Campus at the other end of town. It was a shock to see an empty room where I had been teaching for the last 15 years or so.
All of the boxes magically appeared in the new facility, and the work began of unpacking them and organizing the new laboratory. The geology students once again proved their worth!
For a time the geology lab looked as chaotic as the old one did, but a week of spit and polish fixed it up nicely!
Almost there...
And by Friday, the new lab was ready for the fall semester!
I even found a few minutes to put up some preliminary exhibits in the display cabinets on the third floor landing outside the geology department. We want the department to look good this week, because...
...Tuesday, May 21st is our long-awaited Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony! If you are in the Modesto area, come out at 10 AM and take a tour, and see what can happen when a community chooses to support education!


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There IS Hope for Science Education in the Central Valley

May 21, 2013, 10:46 pm
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It was quiet this morning in the Science Community Center at Modesto Junior College. I walked up to the roof to have a look around and there was a beautiful cloud pattern and the Diablo Range rose in the distance. It was a peaceful start to the day. But what a day it was!

It was the Ribbon Cutting event for the Science Community Center. It was a decade-long-plus journey for the science faculty at MJC who were tasked with envisioning and designing a facility for teaching science that could carry our campus through the next century. How in the world can you plan for a century? We can't possibly know the kinds of changes that face our community and society over the next century, but we can do our best to prepare our children for the incredible journey. We came together and produced a vision: a teaching facility that could house the biology, chemistry, physics and earth science programs, but which would also house our community outreach in the form of the Great Valley Museum, a fully functional observatory, and a state-of-the-art planetarium. And an outdoor nature laboratory. We saw a place that would give the best possible educational opportunity to our students, and inspiration to generations of children who might not otherwise ever be exposed to science.

As I've noted before, the vision was challenged. It was too expensive. It was so grandiose. It was too ambitious for a community that has consistently high unemployment, and too many low-paying jobs. Attempts were made to cut back the project, but the faculty and staff persisted, and aided by a very unfortunate Great Recession that drastically cut construction costs, the Science Community Center has become a reality with the vision largely intact. And millions of dollars under budget.

Unlike many projects at public educational institutions, this project (and dozens of others across our campus) was funded by the local community, not the state. It was the fruit of Measure E, a bond issue in our district and county. The community supported the concept of giving our students and our children the best possible education as the best way of out of our economic malaise. They gave us the mandate, and I think we achieved the aims. The only piece now missing is the Outdoor Nature Laboratory, and it may be just a year away from construction.

But we still wondered. Would the public show up for a ribbon-cutting ceremony? Was the community still behind us? I felt they would be there, but I'm not sure what the organizers of the event were expecting. They only put out 70 chairs (but they did provide a live musical act and food). Twenty minutes before the event, the chairs were mostly filled...
And then more than filled. Dozens of people were standing behind the chairs. And more were arriving by the minute...
There were at least 150 gathered around the seating area by the time the dignitaries started their speeches. And still more people were arriving.
And then I looked behind me, and realized the entire foyer was filled with hundreds more people. They couldn't even see the speakers or the ribbon, but they pressed in. It was a wonderful affirmation of years of hard work on the part of our faculty and staff people.

We spent the next few hours leading tours through the facility. It was delightful to experience the enthusiasm our community members had for the center. There were seniors who had served on this site during World War II when this property was a military barracks, or a few years later when it was a mental health facility (I'm inclined to still think of this place as an asylum). Some of my first students from the early 1990s were there. Some of my current students were there. And there were kids. Kids enthralled at the opportunity to touch a genuine dinosaur bone, and excited to realize that our region was the first place in California where a dinosaur was discovered. And that even more exciting creatures once dwelt here, including sabertooth cats and wooly mammoths. And menacing 30 foot long mosasaurs!
There is hope when a community can come together and support a project as ambitious as the Science Community Center. I have come to truly feel that the people of our region have collectively decided that education is a valuable tool in the effort to produce a better economy and society.

My day ended more quietly with what to me was an equally exciting event: I conducted the first ever class in the new Geology Laboratory in the Science Community Center. It was the first class meeting for our summer field studies class. As you can tell, I was happy to be there.
You don't get many days like this...
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Time Beyond Imagining Becomes a "Book" (or: "Where I've Been Hiding These Last Few Weeks)!

May 29, 2013, 12:58 am
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A best-seller if there ever was one! In fact, I think the first run will sell out (15 copies in the first printing, so not really a surprise). If you've been following Geotripper for very long, you will maybe have seen that one of my first blog series was called Time Beyond Imagining (link is here), and that it was a series that introduced the history of the Colorado Plateau over the course of around 70 posts. I always felt that all that writing should be rounded up into a single narrative some day, and that day kind of arrived when I decided to lead a trip through the plateau country with some geologists and their families from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. I started on the project 18 months ago and made a lot of progress, but the first trip in 2012 was cancelled, and I so let the project simmer for awhile.
We scheduled the course again this year, and by May we realized we had enough participants to run the trip, which meant I had a strict deadline...which unfortunately coincided with the end of the semester, AND the big move into our new Science Community Center. So I disappeared more or less for the last few weeks furiously writing and rewriting a narrative and field guide for the trip. It felt a lot like finishing my thesis way back when, but back then I was taking care of an infant. This time I had a son who is an expert anthropologist who wrote an extensive section for the book on the cultural history of the region. The book and guide went to the printer this evening, and we leave for Las Vegas on Friday.
The guidebook is imaginatively called "The Geology and Cultural History of the Western Colorado Plateau, with a geological road guide to Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks". It currently includes a section outlining the chronology of geological events and descriptions of the rock units on the Plateau, another on the cultural history of the different people groups in the western part of the plateau, and road guide for a six-day trip looping out of Las Vegas through the three national parks, and a lot of places in-between.

And there are some truly fascinating places in between! Our trip includes a journey to the bottom of the Grand Canyon on the Diamond Creek Road out of Peach Springs on the Hualapai Reservation. It will also include a visit at Antelope Canyon, a surreal labyrinth on the Navajo Reservation near Page, Arizona (picture below).
We will also explore a portion of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by following the forty-plus mile long Cottonwood Wash Road along the Cockscomb Monocline, a truly spectacular drive through some really distorted rocks.
The monument also includes the beautiful Grosvenor Arches in one of the most isolated corners of the country. As recently as 1949, the National Geographic Society called their visit to the region an "expedition" (which probably elicited a laugh from the local ranchers...).
Our trip will include a visit to one of the gems of the Utah State Parks system, Kodachrome Basin State Park. It contains extensive exposures of Entrada Sandstone with dozens of strange clastic pipes that tower over the trails and campground. The trip wraps up with a tour of Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, though with a twist. We intend to take the road to Lava Point, which gets missed by the vast majority of Zion National Park visitors. When Zion Canyon proper is sizzling hot and dry, there are cool meadows and pine forests among the sandstone cliffs, and a lot of fairly recent lava flows and cinder cones.
In general, I've written the narrative portions at a fairly basic level (I included a "geology basics" at the beginning), and the road guides as to be understood by anyone with a geology class or two under their belt.

I would hope that there would be some interest in the book and road guide, but I know I'll need to do some serious fact-checking and mileage confirmations (the numbers never quite add up right, which has been true for every guide I've written) while on the trip next week. And I also need to find a cheap way to print it, because the 160 page guide ran $30 apiece at Kinkos (I know they call it something else now, but I can't remember what!). I would love any ideas you might have!

Despite the long nights and all, I've been having a lot of fun revisiting one of my favorite corners of the planet, and I'm thrilled to be hitting the road in a couple of days (one week with AAPG, and then two weeks with my students). I'll try to post some pics from the road, and not be quite as invisible as I have been the last few weeks.

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On the Road Again, To the Mysterious Realm of the Colorado River!

May 31, 2013, 1:09 am
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This summer is all about the Colorado River, one of the most geologically mysterious rivers on planet Earth. Most rivers start in some mountains, flow onto a coastal plain, and hence into the sea. The Colorado can only be said to do the first. It starts in the Rocky Mountains, but then it follows all sorts of strange pathways, cutting through mountain ranges here, abandoning channels there, forming entrenched meanders that make the river look tens of millions of years old (which it is, in places), but then historically ending in a sea that has existed for only four million years. But it doesn't end there anymore, because humans have grabbed onto every last drop of the river, using it over and over until it dies in the desert sands, many miles from the original delta.

I have a lot to learn about this river and the landscape it flows through. I leave in about five hours on the first of three journeys this summer to explore and learn about the canyons and gorges of the river. I'm joining geologists and their families on a week long trip from Las Vegas to Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, and all of the fascinating places in between. If there aren't too many mistakes to correct, I'll have the guidebook available in a month or two for anyone interested in the journey.
I'll be home for a week, and in the last half of June, it will be the turn of my students at MJC to see this incredible landscape. More on that later. Then, in July and August, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream of floating down the Colorado River from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek through almost all the Grand Canyon. My incredible brother won a slot in the private trips lottery, and is letting me come along. I can barely wait.

So the adventures start in the morning. I'll try to put up a post now and then to share in the sights.
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From a Land of Riches to the Barrens: The Basin and Range

May 31, 2013, 10:51 pm
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We set off early today on our journey of exploration on the Colorado Plateau, but to get to the plateau we needed to travel nearly 500 miles from California's Great Valley to Las Vegas, passing through some of the loneliest landscapes to be found in the United States. I couldn't help but notice how we also passed from a land flowing literally with milk and honey (dairy farms and beekeepers among the thousands of farms) to a barren landscape where life must be grasped and fought for. We crossed Tioga Pass, which despite the frighteningly dry year was still mantled with some snowfields, and into the Basin and Range Province east of the Sierra Nevada. The difference was striking.
The Basin and Range Province happened because a high plateau-like region with rivers extending from at least central Nevada to the Pacific was stretched to the breaking point. About 29 million years ago, the subduction zone that had dominated the tectonic history of the Western United States for nearly 180 million years was destroyed by a process that resulted in the formation of the San Andreas fault. The crusted extended and broke into numerous fault block mountains (horsts) and deep fault valleys (grabens). The Sierra Nevada was the largest and highest of these fault blocks and as a consequence, the mountains prevent most of the rain and snow from ever reaching the lands to the east.

The Sierra Nevada is the realm of the cool dark forests and the high glaciated peaks. The Basin and Range is a place where sagebrush reigns, and practically the only trees are dumpy little pinyon pines and juniper. It's a hard dry land. We crossed Montgomery Pass into Nevada and had a close look at Boundary Peak, which at 13,147 feet (4,007 m), is the highest point in Nevada. Ironically it is not the highest peak in the mountain range in which it is situated. Adjacent Montgomery Peak is 13,441 feet (4,097 m) tall, but as the name suggests, the state boundary falls between the two. A bit farther south, White Mountain Peak soars to 14,252 ft (4,344 m), the third highest peak in California.
It's a hard land, but that doesn't mean that life doesn't thrive. We were lucky to see some members of the Montgomery Pass herd of wild horses right next to the highway. Horses came to America with the Spaniards in the 1500s and escapees over the centuries formed naturalized herds across the west. In a sense though, these horses are returnees to a long-lost homeland. The horses evolved in North America, and migrated to Asia over the Bering Land Strait, but about 12,000 years ago they became extinct in the land of their origin.
I took a new road today, the highway through Dyer and Fish Lake Valley. It is a beautiful place, and few hundred ranchers and farmers make a living off the small streams that flow off the White Mountains and from the copious amounts of Pleistocene groundwater that lies hidden beneath the valley floor (a nonrenewable resource though; they're using up the water that arrived there during the Ice Ages).
Others tried to wrest life from the land, but in a different way. When the California Gold Rush petered out in the 1850s, hungry miners scoured the lands to the east for the next great Mother Lode. Their searches were most often futile, but a few rich mines were discovered (such as the Comstock Lode), and other towns were built on dreams of avarice, but not much more. Such was the fate of Palmetto in western Nevada. There are only a few structures remaining, carved out of the rhyolite tuff that covers much of the region. For a time, several hundred miners pitched camp here, looking for plays of valuable minerals in the rocks, but they found little and quickly abandoned the site.
The desert has reclaimed much of the old town, except a few buildings which stand only because...well, I don't know how the wall below is still standing.
The miners could look out a window and see the sometimes snow-capped summit of White Mountain Peak in the distance, dreaming of water and riches, but having neither. A barren land, yes, but rich in other ways. The geology exposed in these barren mountains is fascinating, and volcanoes and earthquakes show that the crust here is still very active.

This is one of my favorite regions on the planet...
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Seeing Things Upside Down in the Red Rocks: What To Do When You Get Bored With Las Vegas

June 1, 2013, 11:31 pm
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Bored in Las Vegas? Really? Okay, the town is such an aberration in the desert that one can hardly get bored, but my attention was really elsewhere as we tried to get ready to meet the people traveling with us through the western Colorado Plateau. It took only three hours to get our rental vehicles, and it took some wrangling to get the last person to the hotel from the airport, but by 4:30 we had everyone, and most of them were ready and willing to check out some geological sights west of town. We headed to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

I made an appropriate first impression by missing the turnoff to the park, and taking the crew on an impromptu crossing of the Spring Mountains. But good ole Captain Eagle-Eye Wrong-Way eventually got us back to the road we wanted, and we headed towards one of the more stunning sights in the Basin and Range Province.
The Keystone Thrust was a Cretaceous structure that developed during the Sevier Orogeny, involving a section of the Earth's crust being compressed and pushed over the adjoining rocks. Rocks brought up from the depths are often older, so at Red Rock Canyon NCA, 500+ million year old Cambrian Bonanza King Limestone got pushed up and over the younger Jurassic sediments called the Aztec Sandstone. The site pretty much defines the term "contrast". Dark limestone forms the high Wilson Cliffs, while bright colored sandstone livens up the Calico Hills
There was also a lot of green. For some reason lots of flowers were evident (despite the desert environment, we were at well over 4,000 feet in elevation). The plants had attracted all manner of bugs and beautiful hummingbirds (top picture).
From the high point on the park loop, we were treated to an awesome view of the imposing cliffs of the Spring Mountains and the Keystone Thrust.
 The rocks maybe weren't really upside down so much as out of order. But the lizard climbing on the big boulder of sandstone was definitely upside down. I wish I could climb rocks that way!

I also wish for an eventful trip this week (in a good way) as we make our way tomorrow to Peach Springs and a drive to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. More later!
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Picture of Peach Springs Tuff (with Big Bird Bonus)

June 2, 2013, 10:42 pm
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The Internet connection at our hinterlands location is slow and undependable, so tonight is just a picture of the Peach Springs Tuff, an 18.5 million year old rhyolite tuff that covered a vast area between Peach Springs Arizona and the Mojave Desert near Barstow. It is nicely exposed along the old Route 66 in Kingman Arizona, which was one of our stops today. There also seems to be a large fledgling bird sitting on the rock and partly blocking the view, but I found it interesting. I am assuming it is a Red Tailed Hawk fledgling. Is there anyone who can confirm or correct?
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A Dam Big Dam and a Dam Big Bridge...And a Dam Frightening Problem

June 3, 2013, 11:31 pm
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Oh, how mighty are the works of man...and how arrogant we sometimes get when contemplating our great works. Our first stop on our tour of the western Colorado Plateau was a visit  to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, the gigantic tower of concrete that blocks the Colorado River, and holds back 30 million acre-feet of water. It's the biggest dam reservoir in the United States. How much is 30 million acre feet? More than two years of "average" Colorado River flows for one. The largest dam in our region back home, Don Pedro on the Tuolumne, holds a paltry 2 million acre-feet.

The dam was built during the height of the Great Depression between 1930 and 1935, and just two years after the catastrophic failure of St. Francis Dam in California that killed around 600 people. Lessons learned from the failure of St. Francis led to modifications of Hoover Dam which presumably make it more or less indestructable.

Just the same, it is amazing how many faults are exposed in the canyon walls adjacent to the dam. The rocks forming the abutments are Miocene volcanic tuff, which doesn't dissolve or crumble in water (a major factor in the St. Francis event). But the rock is highly faulted, and it is a great place to explain slickensides, the scratch marks that occur when blocks of rock slide past each other. The rock is literally polished.
The visitor center is guarded by giant copper art-deco angels that made me feel like I was entering the walls of Minas Tirith in Lord of the Rings.
The thing is dam big. It's more than 700 feet high, which was the highest in the world when it was built (now it is 18th). One can drive or walk across the dam thing, but it is no longer the main highway between Kingman and Las Vegas.
In 2010, work was completed on the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge just downstream. It towers 880 feet above the river, and more than 200 feet above the level of the dam. Walking across the top allows the incredible perspective of the dam and lake in the top photo of this post.
 Looking down the dam face is disorienting, but it looks like a great slide (although one's pants would surely catch fire from the friction...). The white thing is part of the power generating complex.
The bridge really is a stunning piece of work, although it is a bit disconcerting to feel it vibrate as the big trucks pass by...
Looking down the other face of the dam is disconcerting too. It's been a long time since the dam was full (1983 to be exact). The water level looks to be only a hundred or so feet low, but that represents perhaps half the storage capacity of the reservoir. A decade long drought has brought down the reservoir to perilous levels (13 million acre-feet), and some forecasts suggest it may never fill again. 30 million people in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and in many agricultural areas depend on the supply of water, but it just isn't there.

And that's dam frightening.


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Where They Almost Damned the Grand Canyon...

June 5, 2013, 12:21 am
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 Is there a limit to the destruction that humans can do? Yesterday's post concerned our desire to control the natural world around us, which in the case of the Colorado River meant the building of mega-dams, giant piles of concrete that pretend to hold back the floods, and dole out the riches of gravitationally produced electricity. Unfortunately such mega-dams were built with a priority of utility over beauty.
Of course, hardly anyone can profit from beauty, and if only a few people know of a place or have ever seen it, it can be easy to subvert a place to the profit of a few. After visiting one of the mega-dams, we explored a little-known road that actually reaches the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It follows Peach Springs Canyon and Diamond Creek to the Colorado River in about 20 bumpy dirt road miles. It is well known to river-runners, as the road serves as a take out point for river trips.
As we cooled our feet in the water, we had to contemplate that sixty years ago, this place was slated to become the next big dam on the river. The reservoir would have inundated miles of national park land upstream. It was unthinkable, and in the fashion of the thinking of the time, the dam was built instead in a place that only a few hundred people had ever seen: Glen Canyon.

It's hard to contemplate what was lost.  And only slightly a relief to know that at least one place was saved.
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What to do? Playing the Slots (Canyons, that is)

June 6, 2013, 9:16 pm
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One of the most beautiful sights you will ever see is a slot canyon on the Colorado Plateau. Formations like the Navajo Sandstone are good cliff-forming rock layers, and yet they are easily eroded under the right circumstances. Flash floods carry a lot of abrasive sediment, and they work quickly to turn the slightest crevice into an intricately winding maze that can be dozens, even hundreds of feet deep and only a few feet wide.
Add to the maze-like labyrinth the glow of the fierce desert sun, and the rock seems to glow. Exploring a slot canyon can be an exercise in spiritual awareness.

Antelope Canyon near Page, Arizona on the lands of the Navajo Nation is regarded by many to be one of the finest slot canyons in existence. The gulch that formed it drains a region of many square miles, and flash floods can deliver tons of sand in a matter of minutes in water/mud twenty feet deep.

 We traveled through it yesterday, and I wanted to share some of the photographic results....
Antelope Canyon embodies a sort of perfection of form and light...the crossbedding structure of the ancient sand dunes adds wonderfully to the texture.
 And the darkness contrasting with the light presents a wonderful challenge to the photographer.
As our visit continued, the sun rose higher, casting more beams of light in the greatest depths of the gorge.


It was just as perfect a moment of spiritual peace and recognition of the paradox of chaos and order in the Universe that one can imagine. Except for one thing. One really important thing...we had to pay a pretty penny for the privilege, and we were conducted through the canyon like cows being herded onto a cattle train...and thus comes the paradoxical question: What to do about it? How to find some way of centering the spirit and finding the peace and solitude so many of us covet?
Well, I suppose you seek out the ragged little sibling canyon that isn't so perfect. Maybe a part of the Navajo Sandstone that has been broken and jointed by the compression of the Earth's crust. Maybe a canyon carved not by mushes of sand and mud, but battered by boulders of solid chunks of rock. A canyon with unstable walls that can collapse and fall without warning.
Maybe you seek out a canyon like Cottonwood Wash in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument...no admission fee, no guides, no people, just quiet.
 And a different kind of beauty: a hard edged beauty. Not as colorful, but full of character.
So, really: how do you choose? Perfection, but with crowds and cattle prods? Or a roughhewn rugged beauty with intense solitude and serenity?
 For me it is no contest...solitude wins out every time. But there is the other solution to the quandary...
 You do both! And that is why yesterday was a great day....
I know of lots of other slot canyons out there. What are your favorites?
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A Dam Big Shame, and Things Lost and Gamed...

June 8, 2013, 11:10 pm
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A different "Paradise Lost"...


It just doesn't get much better than this, to stand on the brink of a high cliff in the barren desert, and to see a stream of life-giving water in the depths below. Of course, if you are in trouble and dying of thirst, you are pretty well screwed, since the cliffs are pretty much unclimbable! There is a story behind the dramatic appearance of the river in the photo. It not a genuine river anymore, not exactly. It is a blunt instrument, wielded badly.

Glen Canyon Dam was built between 1957-1964 after a contentious environmental battle over whether national parks (Grand Canyon – Bridge Canyon dam) or National Monuments (Echo Park dam-Dinosaur National Monument) should have reservoirs extending into their boundaries. Glen Canyon was at the time protected by neither designation. The dam is 710 feet high (216 m) and 1,560 feet (475 m) wide, with a volume of 5,370,000 cubic yards (4,110,000 cubic meters) of concrete. It is anchored in Navajo Sandstone. When full the lake is 186 miles (299 km) long, with 1,960 miles (3,150 km) of shoreline, and a total capacity of 26.2 million acre feet (equivalent of two years of the average flow of the Colorado River). The lake is a popular national recreational site today, but Glen Canyon was once one of the most beautiful valleys along the Colorado River. Unfortunately, when the dam was completed, only a few hundred people had floated down the river to see the stunning canyon (and therefore explaining my title of things "lost and gamed"; the dam was built here by threatening to put dams elsewhere).

After construction was completed in 1964, the lake slowly filled (since water use downstream did not cease, only surplus water was used to fill the lake) and did not reach capacity until 1980. In 1983, the dam came perilously close to failing due to a major flood and design errors. Instead of using floodgates and spillways at the top of the dam for emergency drainage, designers utilized the diversion tunnels used to channel the Colorado River around the dam site during construction. They proved woefully inadequate to the task in 1983 as cavitation caused the walls of the diversion tunnels to rip out. In places the powerful flow of water cut 32 feet (10 meters) into the soft Navajo Sandstone and threatened the structural integrity of the dam itself. The diversion tunnels had to be shut down, and the lake threatened to flow over the crest of the dam in an uncontrolled fashion. This could have led to catastrophe, as such uncontrolled flow could have eroded and weakened the sandstone abutments of the dam. Failure of Glen Canyon dam would have led to the domino-like destruction of other large dams downstream, and the decimation of the water-supply infrastructure of some thirty million people. The disaster was averted by the construction of an 8 foot high dam of wood flashboards that held back the water long enough for the flood to subside. The structural integrity and survival of the dam came down to about one inch...the distance between the water level and the top of the flashboard dam in 1983.

Dam engineers are confident that modifications to the spillway tunnels will allow the dam to withstand future flooding events, but other concerns have become prominent. The southwest has been suffering an extended drought, and lake levels in recent years have become perilously low, threatening to turn Lake Powell into a “dead pool” incapable of producing electrical energy. In 2013 the lake was filled to less than 50% of capacity. Some water experts suggest that the lake may never be able to fill to capacity again, in part from drought, climate change, and upstream diversions of water.

Back to that photo at the top of the page...it isn't the whole story. The spot is called Horseshoe Bend, and it lies just a couple of miles downstream of Glen Canyon Dam. It is an entrenched meander, which developed when the land was uplifted, while the originally sluggish winding river started cutting downward instead of laterally. The rainbow-like pattern of red rock and green-blue water is an artifice of the reservoir. Unlike the olden days when copious amounts of silt caused the river to flow red, the water draining from the lake today is transparent and cold, in the 40-50 degree range. For a river in a hot desert, this is extraordinary. The ecosystem of the river evolved in different conditions than this, and species are sensitive to the new regime. Natural species of fish, amphibians and insects are in a difficult situation. For we humans it is ironic that river rafters have look out for hypothermia in their crews if people get dumped in the river on a day when the temperature is over 110 degrees.

So the view is just stupendous, but sobering at the same time. It can be reached by a short 3/4 mile long sandy trail from a parking lot on Highway 89 just 4-5 miles south of Page, Arizona. The highway is closed because of a serious landslide farther south but is open to the parking lot. It is well worth your time if you are ever in the region.
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