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Is There Ever a Boring Sunset at Grand Canyon?
The Grand Canyon is the place. It is perhaps the most stunning exposure of raw geology in the world (although I know there will be some who have their own candidates in this matter). What sets the...
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Little Mysteries in Big Canyons: The Faulty View from Yavapai Point, Grand...
The Grand Canyon certainly has its faults. Loads of them actually. For a place that is famous for having relatively unbroken strata for tens of miles, the number of fault lines is kind of staggering. A...
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It's Not What's There in Grand Canyon That's Incredible, It's What's Missing
Our trip last week started in Las Vegas, Nevada, where we paid a visit to an exposure of the "Great Unconformity" which is also seen in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. A participant noted that he had...
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We Interrupt This Geology Blog to Bring You a Turkey's Version of the "Circle...
Okay, there's just not a lot I can say about this. I've not spent enough time around wild turkeys to say whether this is normally seen behavior, but it was cute. I was trying to think of puns involving...
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Unsafe Rock Area, and Unspeakable Sadness
Photo by Mrs. GeotripperA bit of whimsy, but also a moment of unspeakable sadness. I was in Southern California for family matters, and we nailed a campsite, the last one available, at Doheny State...
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How Did the Grand Canyon Happen? It's a Mystery, a Delightful Mystery!
And that's something that I really love about science and geology: the acknowledgement that there are things we don't know...yet. No matter how ingenious our technology becomes, no matter how much data...
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A Rock Outcrop, a River, and Sand flow into a Point Bar...
And the bartender said "is this some kind of joke?"But it's not a joke of course, it's a simply stunning example of what happens when water flows over stone for a long time. What you are seeing here...
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Tse' bighanilini and Hasdestwazi, "the place where water runs through rocks",...
Glen Canyon was a beautiful, magical place that was unceremoniously flooded under the waters of Lake Powell (and I'm pretty sure John Wesley Powell would have been appalled that his name was given to...
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Too Much Dam Hubris...Lake Powell and the Future of the Colorado River
The Colorado River is a wonder of nature. Starting from glacial cirques high in the Rocky Mountains, the river flows through one canyon after another, culminating in the grandest canyon of them all,...
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A Land of Strange Standing Stones, and an Odd Connection to the Grand Canyon
There are a lot of strange landscapes on the Colorado Plateau and otherworldly scenes. Some are famous enough as to not surprise first time visitors, such as the spires and hoodoos at Bryce Canyon...
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A Land of Strange Standing Stones, Part 2: Kodachrome Basin State Park
There was a time not all that long ago when there was a part of the United States mainland that was still considered terra incognito. It was in 1948 that National Geographic explored this region and...
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The Superlative Land of Strange Standing Stones (Part III): Bryce Canyon...
One of the mysteries of the origin of the Grand Canyon involves the fact that early rivers flowed in the opposite direction of the Colorado River that exists today. Some of those early rivers ended in...
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This is One Really Big Underground Cavern...The Miao Room in Gebihe Cave
Maybe you've noticed, but I'm not commonly known to promote commercial enterprises here at Geotripper. Spam comments get immediately squashed, and book reviews and commercial links are very rare. But...
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Seeing Actual Daylight at Emerald Pools in Zion National Park
There is a somewhat odd relationship between me and Zion National Park. I love the place, I've been there probably 20 times in the last two decades, but I haven't seen a whole lot of the park. The...
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Want a Wilderness Experience in Zion Canyon? Go Where the Trams Go.
Not where they stop, mind you, but where the trams go. Zion National Park underwent a huge change in 1997 when the park service closed the upper canyon of Zion to private vehicles and instituted a...
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Volcanoes, Lava Flows, Fault Zones: What Park is This? You Might Be Surprised...
...unless you've been following my latest blog entries, anyway. The beautiful exposures of the crossbedding in the Navajo Sandstone (above) provides another clue; we are in Zion National Park, but in a...
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The "Fingers" of Zion: Another Quiet Corner of a Crowded National Park
My last few posts have been about finding some quiet corners in one of our busier national parks, the one at Zion Canyon. Sometimes one finds solitude by following popular trails at less popular hours,...
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How to Hide a 14,000 Foot Peak in California? Make it Red, Call it White...
And then put a mountain right next to it that is actually white. Seriously.So, quick, what's the name of the third highest mountain in California? And for a bonus point, what is the name of the second...
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My Home Town Takes Another Hit: The Parasites Strike Again
It gets discouraging sometimes. According to yet another report, Modesto is the worst place in the country, in this instance, the worst place to start a career. As usual, two California cities only a...
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Out of the Desert and Back to the Green Hills of Home
Today wraps up the story of a week-long journey through the deserts of the southwest. I've been telling the story as if in real time, so it sounds like I'm just now arriving home, but actually we...
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