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Into the Great Unknown: We Run the Big Rapids, Sometimes in Rafts
The sun rose on day nine of our journey down the Colorado River, into the Great Unknown, as John Wesley Powell had called it. Powell and his men had a terrifying couple of days following their...
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Into the Great Unknown: The Aftermath of Chaos...Finding Beauty in the Oldest...
If you've been following the story so far, you will know that we reached day nine on our rafting journey through the Grand Canyon, and that day nine was a bit of a disaster for yours truly. Our raft...
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Into the Great Unknown: The Hidden Places, and Putting a Hand Across 1.2...
It's so hard to imagine the tourist who drives for hours and hours, arrives at the rim of the Grand Canyon, looks down and simply leaves. A person can be impressed with the huge gorge, the beautiful...
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Into the Great Unknown: Crossing the Great Unconformity Again; But Which One?
Every day is new. Every day the Canyon is different...I look back over the notes of my journey down into the Great Unknown, the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and I am struck by the number of...
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Into the Great Unknown: A Gigantic Failure Produces One of the Most Beautiful...
We continued down the Colorado River, the "Great Unknown" as it was called by John Wesley Powell during the first boat trip through the Grand Canyon in 1869. In the last post, I mentioned that we...
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Into the Great Unknown: Mad Cats and Amoebas? Trying to Keep Names Straight...
Morning dawned on our crew at Doris Camp on Mile 138 of our rafting journey through the Grand Canyon, a trip I've been calling "Into the Great Unknown". The river was known well enough to our boatmen,...
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Into the Great Unknown: "Disaster" in National Canyon and the Volcanoes of...
Yeah, I was not feeling all that comfortable. It was day 13 on our journey into the Great Unknown, the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Day 13, and Lava Falls Rapid, the worst rated rapid on...
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Into the Great Unknown: Zero Hour at Lava Falls Rapid
I was going to title this post about our trip into the Great Unknown "Courage, Redemption, and the Triumph of the Human Spirit at Lava Falls: Geotripper Rides the Big Rapid", but I knew my fellow...
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Into the Great Unknown: Vulcan the Fire God says "You Call That Little Piece...
Dam engineers sure love their dam creations. The Colorado River, being the only river of note draining the Colorado Plateau, was a target of their fevered dreams, and major projects have "tamed" the...
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Into the Great Unknown: Heat...and All Things Beautiful
It was our last full day on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, the Great Unknown as John Wesley Powell called it in 1869. One full day, and one more night on the life-giving stream of water...
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Into the Great Unknown: The Last Day...An Elegy for a Journey, and for a River
Elegy (from the Greek word for "lament") is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.How many ways can I describe the last day of our trip? The word...
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Hitting the Road: California's Volcanic Lands
There are lots of volcanoes in California, in the deserts, the eastern Sierra Nevada, even in the Coast Ranges, but the most recent and most diverse volcanoes are in the north state, in the Cascades...
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Exploring the Cascades: Home from the Road
 It's always hectic in the week or two after a major field trip, and this week is no exception, so it's a bit more difficult to post detailed explanations. I want to spend some time exploring the...
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Into the Great Unknown: A Journey Down the Colorado River Through the Grand...
As many of you know, I recently ended a rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I just finished a blog series on the journey, and what I've done here is to list the posts in...
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This is as Un-American as it gets.
Yeah, it might be your park, but Republican leaders are throwing a tantrum. You shall not pass.It's funny how the little things can be so irritating. Because of the government shutdown, I cannot take...
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Hitting the Road, Going to Unexpected Places
Thanks to the obstructionist party in the House of Representatives, we've had to completely retool our last overnight field studies trip of 2013. We had planned to explore Sequoia and Kings Canyon, but...
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Otters and Others, Plus "What's That Whale?"
 We were off studying the geology of the California coastline between Big Sur and Bodega Bay this weekend, but just like always, furry and feathery things provided distractions. I thought I'd get these...
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A Haunted Place: The Land Where a People Lost Their Culture
When you've been to a place a few times, it becomes possible to concentrate on the subtle changes that can happen at different parts of the day and under changing weather conditions. We arrived at Lava...
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Want to see classic volcano features in California? Check out Lava Beds...
At least when the Republicans come to their senses and reopen the government. The park is closed right now.Lava Beds National Monument was one of the central locales for our exploration of the northern...
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Exploring a Volcanoe's Insides: The Tubes of Lava Beds National Monument
Lava Beds National Monument is a special place, one of my favorite spots to visit in California. It's so different than what people expect of a California park: where are the beaches, the mountains,...
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