Time Beyond Imagining: A "Brief" History of the Colorado Plateau

Please forgive me for filling the feeds with such a long post, but I wanted to pull together an annotated list of the blog posts of my just completed journey through the geological history of the Colorado Plateau. It turned into a massive project that lasted more than a year, and included seventy different postings and more than a hundred photos. Don't feel compelled to try reading it, but I hope you enjoy it if you do. If it lacks precise continuity and style, remember that I had no idea how it would end when I started it and I had no editor! I've been taking students on the plateau for twenty years, and it has proven to be one of the best places on the planet to learn earth history.

Time Beyond Imagining, the first post back in June of 2008 introducing the concept that would guide the entire series. I had no idea what I was getting into!

Time Beyond Imagining - An Intro to the Colorado Plateau, a first introduction to the sweep of the landscape that I would be covering through the series.

Time Beyond Imagining - The Oldest Rocks on the Colorado Plateau: The oldest rocks are exposed at only a few places, including deep in the Grand Canyon

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 2: A discussion of the 12,000 feet of sediments hidden deep in the depth of the Grand Canyon dated at around 1 billion years

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 3: LIFE!: The first appearance of complex life during the Cambrian Period

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 4: Something is Missing! Journeying up the walls of Grand Canyon through the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian periods

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 5: Seeing Red Looking at the Mississippian Redwall Limestone in Grand Canyon

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 6: Seeing Red (Really!) We rise up through the walls of the Grand Canyon to the Permian rocks of the Supai Group and Hermit Shale

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 7: Mountains Rise: Permian rocks are exposed throughout the plateau country. We leave the Grand Canyon and explore some of these other places

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Old Salt I was beginning to realize that the project would be longer than I thought. We explore the formation and effects of salt precipitation in Late Paleozoic time

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Sand! A return to the Grand Canyon and the prominent Coconino Sandstone near the rim

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: A Final Transgression Looking at the top two layers in the Grand Canyon and related rocks on other parts of the plateau.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: On to the Grand Staircase An introduction to the Mesozoic history of the plateau country, which lies outside the Grand Canyon. We start exploring the other wonderful parks out there

The Grand Staircase and the Geologic Time Scale A diagram of the Grand Staircase, the younger rocks of the Colorado Plateau

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Into the Triassic An introduction to the widespread Triassic rocks of the Plateau. It would prove to take a number of posts!

Mid-week Mystery Sample: What is it? A short departure to discuss the identity of a Triassic fossil from the plateau. A fairly long discussion followed!

Mid-week Mystery Sample: What is it? Heck if I actually know! I admit to my ignorance...

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Ash and Wood A study of the paleontology of one of our unusual parks: Petrified Forest in Arizona

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: This Yellow is NOT Mellow The Chinle also contains mineable uranium deposits; I wade into the controversy

Leetso, the Yellow Monster A continuation of the heritage of uranium on the plateau

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: The Real Jurassic Parks The Jurassic rocks of the plateau are responsible for much of the spectacular scenery in the region. This was the introduction

The Colorado Plateau Story: the real Jurassic Parks Follows the story of the Kayenta and Wingate formations, and three unique and little known parks: Capitol Reef National Park, and Colorado and Vermillion Cliffs National Monuments.

The Real Jurassic Parks: Navajo! The Navajo Sandstone forms some of the best photography opportunities: this was a discussion of Antelope Canyon, a beautiful slot canyon

Antelope Canyon, A Real Jurassic Park An excuse to show more pictures of Antelope Canyon!

Zion: A Real Jurassic Park First part of look at one of our "crown jewel" national parks

Zion: A Real Jurassic Park, Part 2 A hike to Angels Landing in Zion National Park

The Real Jurassic Parks: Capitol Reef (Oh, and Sheep Blogging) A return to Capitol Reef and an excuse to show off one of my favorite bighorn sheep pictures

The Real Jurassic Parks: The San Rafael Group An introduction to another group of Jurassic formations, including the all-important Entrada Sandstone. A busy semester had begun and posts were becoming sparser at times. I was realizing the project was going to take some time, and I stopped using the word "brief"!

The Real Jurassic Parks: Goblin Valley and the Entrada Sandstone One of Utah's unique and isolated state parks

The Real Jurassic Parks: Kodachrome Basin (and a great resource!) Another fantastic Utah State Park and a link to an e-book on the geology of Utah's parks and monuments

The Real Jurassic Parks: Arches National Park An intro to Arches National Park, one of my personal favorites

The Real Jurassic Parks: Arches National Park, continued. And an Eminent Threat. After several weeks I got back to work with a continued exploration of Arches, and discussed new threats to parks in the region

The Real Jurassic Parks: Where are the Dinosaurs? A look at wonderful Dinosaur National Monument and a rotten political situation there

The REAL Jurassic Parks were really Cretaceous I thought the Jurassic would provide the most posts in the series, and therefore had no idea how long I would spend in the Cretaceous. This was the introduction

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Cedar Mountain Formation The only dinosaur dig I ever took part in was in an early Cretaceous formation in Montana, but it was related to the Colorado Plateau. This post turned into seven part story on our adventure

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Story of a DinoDig Much of the story was trying to get there in the first place: what is geokarma?

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: Every Cloud has a Golden Lining We drive through Yellowstone and arrive at the dig site

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig What we were looking for and why it was important. What is a deinonychus?

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Dino-Digging Begins This is what grunt work is all about

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig wraps up We started finding bones!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Final Discovery We found a dinosaur that invariably is the last entry in a dinosaur dictionary...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The View is Nice but Access is a Problem... Back on the plateau, we are introduced to the remaining Cretaceous rocks and two archaeological parks, Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients National Monuments

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: Walled Cities and Tragedy More on the Canyons of the Ancients and a walled medieval-aged city...in southern Colorado!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Tragedy at Castle Rock Pueblo A haunted place...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Mancos Sea An interesting formation that some geologists curse at...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Green Table An exploration of the famous cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Black Mesa story I wade into the coal mining controversy and get more comments than any other entry in the series

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: A City in the Wilderness Life had become busy and it was a month before I returned to the plateau with a discussion of Chaco Culture National Historical Park

And The Old World Passed Away... The Geologic History of the Colorado Plateau And another month passed! I tried to find the words to describe the profound events at the end of the Cretaceous Period

Time Beyond Imagining - A not-so-brief History of the Colorado Plateau Another long gap, but I was finally talking about the last 65 million years of Colorado Plateau history with an intro to the crustal deformation that was beginning to effect the region

Time Beyond Imagining - Land of Giant Lakes A discussion of the origin of the rocks at Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks National Monument. I thought I was close to the end, but I was still wrong, after a full year!

Fire Down Below - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau Another month of blogging on other things and I returned to the Cenozoic history of the region with a discussion of the volcanic activity that started to emerge on the plateau, including Shiprock

Fire Down Below II - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau The laccolithic mountains of the plateau country

Fire Down Below III - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau I find I have almost no pictures of Navajo Mountain despite having driven around it dozens of times...

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape Cenozoic events led to a truly scrambled landscape with a mystery-of-the-day

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape in Unaweep Canyon More mysterious canyons at Unaweep and Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape in Colorado An exploration of Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a canyon that shouldn't be there

Time Beyond Imagining - A Really Scrambled Landscape on the Colorado Plateau The opening discussion of one of the great plateau mysteries: why is there a Grand Canyon?

Time Beyond Imagining - Unscrambling History and the Origin of the Grand Canyon The complicated story continues

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau I thought I was almost finished, but found that much happened in the final few million years of the story. This is the story of the San Francisco Peaks Volcanic Field

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau Part 2 A look at the volcanoes in the western Grand Canyon and how they formed massive lakes in the Grand Canyon, some 200 miles long!

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau Pt. 3 The story of a stupendous rhyolite eruption at the Jemez Caldera in New Mexico

Time Almost Beyond Imagining: Who Do the Magic that Hoodoo? My favorite title for a discussion of a unique park near the Jemez Caldera, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau and Deep Time Although I had reached the last million years of a two billion year history, I felt a need to try and describe the immensity of geologic time, using the ruins of Bandelier National Park and the Jemez Caldera

Time Beyond Imagining - Where did the Ancient Enemy Go? The "disappearance" of the Ancestral Pueblo people is explored at Bandelier National Monument

Time Beyond Imagining: Why Can't We Touch the Venus de Milo? Once again, I thought I was done, but found a series of fascinating (to me) stories about research in the limestone caverns on the plateau. I began with a rant about preserving these wonderful caves that took us to Rome and Paris, of all places

Holy Crap, Batman! The Bat Cave is Full of it! Bat Cave in western Grand Canyon, and bat-sh*t. Lots of it, sort of

Holy Smokes, Batman, that crap is on fire! I was saving my best titles to the last, I guess. A horrific crime against science at Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon

Of Rat Pee and Uranium and Scavengers...The Underground Story of the Ice Ages on the Colorado Plateau What the caves on the plateau tell us, and how.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Final Struggle for Life on the Colorado Plateau I imagine the death of the very last mammoth on the Colorado Plateau

Time Beyond Imagining: The End of the Story, or the Beginning? In the final post of the series, I discuss the arrival of humans on the plateau, and how humans change the land they occupy. I also tip my hat to Ken Burns and his series on "The National Parks: America's Greatest Idea". The parks are the laboratories in which I and my students study the history of the earth.

So there you go: 71 posts that tell a story encompassing 2 billion years as it is exposed on a very special part of the earth's surface: the Colorado Plateau, covering parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Congratulations if you ever made it through the whole thing. I never realized I was writing the equivalent of an entire book, but it was a story I truly enjoyed telling, and I also deeply appreciated the feedback that many of you provided.

Heading Out to the Back of Beyond on the Colorado Plateau!

Geotripper may go quiet for a week or two, as I will be on the road with twenty of my best students out on the Colorado Plateau, the incredible region surrounding the Four Corners. I've been dreaming of this trip for a year now, as I had to start making group camping reservations last July! It's getting crowded in some of the places like Grand Canyon and Zion, but I've learned over the years that there are some pretty quiet places out there as well. When I started blogging a decade ago, one of my first ideas was a blog series about the places we visit on our field studies journey. I am reposting the introduction both for my students, but for anyone out there who might be traveling in the region and might want to know a little more about the lands they are passing through.

From July 1, 2008:

Please forgive me for filling the feeds with such a long post, but I wanted to pull together an annotated list of the blog posts of my just completed journey through the geological history of the Colorado Plateau. It turned into a massive project that lasted more than a year, and included seventy different postings and more than a hundred photos. Don't feel compelled to try reading it, but I hope you enjoy it if you do. If it lacks precise continuity and style, remember that I had no idea how it would end when I started it and I had no editor! I've been taking students on the plateau for twenty years, and it has proven to be one of the best places on the planet to learn earth history.

Time Beyond Imagining, the first post back in June of 2008 introducing the concept that would guide the entire series. I had no idea what I was getting into!

Time Beyond Imagining - An Intro to the Colorado Plateau, a first introduction to the sweep of the landscape that I would be covering through the series.

Time Beyond Imagining - The Oldest Rocks on the Colorado Plateau: The oldest rocks are exposed at only a few places, including deep in the Grand Canyon

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 2: A discussion of the 12,000 feet of sediments hidden deep in the depth of the Grand Canyon dated at around 1 billion years

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 3: LIFE!: The first appearance of complex life during the Cambrian Period

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 4: Something is Missing! Journeying up the walls of Grand Canyon through the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian periods

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 5: Seeing Red Looking at the Mississippian Redwall Limestone in Grand Canyon

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 6: Seeing Red (Really!) We rise up through the walls of the Grand Canyon to the Permian rocks of the Supai Group and Hermit Shale

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 7: Mountains Rise: Permian rocks are exposed throughout the plateau country. We leave the Grand Canyon and explore some of these other places

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Old Salt I was beginning to realize that the project would be longer than I thought. We explore the formation and effects of salt precipitation in Late Paleozoic time

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Sand! A return to the Grand Canyon and the prominent Coconino Sandstone near the rim

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: A Final Transgression Looking at the top two layers in the Grand Canyon and related rocks on other parts of the plateau.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: On to the Grand Staircase An introduction to the Mesozoic history of the plateau country, which lies outside the Grand Canyon. We start exploring the other wonderful parks out there

The Grand Staircase and the Geologic Time Scale A diagram of the Grand Staircase, the younger rocks of the Colorado Plateau

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Into the Triassic An introduction to the widespread Triassic rocks of the Plateau. It would prove to take a number of posts!

Mid-week Mystery Sample: What is it? A short departure to discuss the identity of a Triassic fossil from the plateau. A fairly long discussion followed!

Mid-week Mystery Sample: What is it? Heck if I actually know! I admit to my ignorance...

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Ash and Wood A study of the paleontology of one of our unusual parks: Petrified Forest in Arizona

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: This Yellow is NOT Mellow The Chinle also contains mineable uranium deposits; I wade into the controversy

Leetso, the Yellow Monster A continuation of the heritage of uranium on the plateau

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: The Real Jurassic Parks The Jurassic rocks of the plateau are responsible for much of the spectacular scenery in the region. This was the introduction

The Colorado Plateau Story: the real Jurassic Parks Follows the story of the Kayenta and Wingate formations, and three unique and little known parks: Capitol Reef National Park, and Colorado and Vermillion Cliffs National Monuments.

The Real Jurassic Parks: Navajo! The Navajo Sandstone forms some of the best photography opportunities: this was a discussion of Antelope Canyon, a beautiful slot canyon

Antelope Canyon, A Real Jurassic Park An excuse to show more pictures of Antelope Canyon!

Zion: A Real Jurassic Park First part of look at one of our "crown jewel" national parks

Zion: A Real Jurassic Park, Part 2 A hike to Angels Landing in Zion National Park

The Real Jurassic Parks: Capitol Reef (Oh, and Sheep Blogging) A return to Capitol Reef and an excuse to show off one of my favorite bighorn sheep pictures

The Real Jurassic Parks: The San Rafael Group An introduction to another group of Jurassic formations, including the all-important Entrada Sandstone. A busy semester had begun and posts were becoming sparser at times. I was realizing the project was going to take some time, and I stopped using the word "brief"!

The Real Jurassic Parks: Goblin Valley and the Entrada Sandstone One of Utah's unique and isolated state parks

The Real Jurassic Parks: Kodachrome Basin (and a great resource!) Another fantastic Utah State Park and a link to an e-book on the geology of Utah's parks and monuments

The Real Jurassic Parks: Arches National Park An intro to Arches National Park, one of my personal favorites

The Real Jurassic Parks: Arches National Park, continued. And an Eminent Threat. After several weeks I got back to work with a continued exploration of Arches, and discussed new threats to parks in the region

The Real Jurassic Parks: Where are the Dinosaurs? A look at wonderful Dinosaur National Monument and a rotten political situation there

The REAL Jurassic Parks were really Cretaceous I thought the Jurassic would provide the most posts in the series, and therefore had no idea how long I would spend in the Cretaceous. This was the introduction

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Cedar Mountain Formation The only dinosaur dig I ever took part in was in an early Cretaceous formation in Montana, but it was related to the Colorado Plateau. This post turned into seven part story on our adventure

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Story of a DinoDig Much of the story was trying to get there in the first place: what is geokarma?

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: Every Cloud has a Golden Lining We drive through Yellowstone and arrive at the dig site

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig What we were looking for and why it was important. What is a deinonychus?

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Dino-Digging Begins This is what grunt work is all about

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig wraps up We started finding bones!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Final Discovery We found a dinosaur that invariably is the last entry in a dinosaur dictionary...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The View is Nice but Access is a Problem... Back on the plateau, we are introduced to the remaining Cretaceous rocks and two archaeological parks, Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients National Monuments

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: Walled Cities and Tragedy More on the Canyons of the Ancients and a walled medieval-aged city...in southern Colorado!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Tragedy at Castle Rock Pueblo A haunted place...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Mancos Sea An interesting formation that some geologists curse at...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Green Table An exploration of the famous cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Black Mesa story I wade into the coal mining controversy and get more comments than any other entry in the series

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: A City in the Wilderness Life had become busy and it was a month before I returned to the plateau with a discussion of Chaco Culture National Historical Park

And The Old World Passed Away... The Geologic History of the Colorado Plateau And another month passed! I tried to find the words to describe the profound events at the end of the Cretaceous Period

Time Beyond Imagining - A not-so-brief History of the Colorado Plateau Another long gap, but I was finally talking about the last 65 million years of Colorado Plateau history with an intro to the crustal deformation that was beginning to effect the region

Time Beyond Imagining - Land of Giant Lakes A discussion of the origin of the rocks at Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks National Monument. I thought I was close to the end, but I was still wrong, after a full year!

Fire Down Below - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau Another month of blogging on other things and I returned to the Cenozoic history of the region with a discussion of the volcanic activity that started to emerge on the plateau, including Shiprock

Fire Down Below II - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau The laccolithic mountains of the plateau country

Fire Down Below III - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau I find I have almost no pictures of Navajo Mountain despite having driven around it dozens of times...

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape Cenozoic events led to a truly scrambled landscape with a mystery-of-the-day

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape in Unaweep Canyon More mysterious canyons at Unaweep and Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape in Colorado An exploration of Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a canyon that shouldn't be there

Time Beyond Imagining - A Really Scrambled Landscape on the Colorado Plateau The opening discussion of one of the great plateau mysteries: why is there a Grand Canyon?

Time Beyond Imagining - Unscrambling History and the Origin of the Grand Canyon The complicated story continues

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau I thought I was almost finished, but found that much happened in the final few million years of the story. This is the story of the San Francisco Peaks Volcanic Field

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau Part 2 A look at the volcanoes in the western Grand Canyon and how they formed massive lakes in the Grand Canyon, some 200 miles long!

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau Pt. 3 The story of a stupendous rhyolite eruption at the Jemez Caldera in New Mexico

Time Almost Beyond Imagining: Who Do the Magic that Hoodoo? My favorite title for a discussion of a unique park near the Jemez Caldera, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau and Deep Time Although I had reached the last million years of a two billion year history, I felt a need to try and describe the immensity of geologic time, using the ruins of Bandelier National Park and the Jemez Caldera

Time Beyond Imagining - Where did the Ancient Enemy Go? The "disappearance" of the Ancestral Pueblo people is explored at Bandelier National Monument

Time Beyond Imagining: Why Can't We Touch the Venus de Milo? Once again, I thought I was done, but found a series of fascinating (to me) stories about research in the limestone caverns on the plateau. I began with a rant about preserving these wonderful caves that took us to Rome and Paris, of all places

Holy Crap, Batman! The Bat Cave is Full of it! Bat Cave in western Grand Canyon, and bat-sh*t. Lots of it, sort of

Holy Smokes, Batman, that crap is on fire! I was saving my best titles to the last, I guess. A horrific crime against science at Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon

Of Rat Pee and Uranium and Scavengers...The Underground Story of the Ice Ages on the Colorado Plateau What the caves on the plateau tell us, and how.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Final Struggle for Life on the Colorado Plateau I imagine the death of the very last mammoth on the Colorado Plateau

Time Beyond Imagining: The End of the Story, or the Beginning? In the final post of the series, I discuss the arrival of humans on the plateau, and how humans change the land they occupy. I also tip my hat to Ken Burns and his series on "The National Parks: America's Greatest Idea". The parks are the laboratories in which I and my students study the history of the earth.

So there you go: 71 posts that tell a story encompassing 2 billion years as it is exposed on a very special part of the earth's surface: the Colorado Plateau, covering parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Congratulations if you ever made it through the whole thing. I never realized I was writing the equivalent of an entire book, but it was a story I truly enjoyed telling, and I also deeply appreciated the feedback that many of you provided.

A Look Back at Ten Years of Geotripping: Time Beyond Imagining

I had no idea!

Almost ten years ago, on January 7, 2008, I posted the first entry on Geotripper. I had no idea where it would go, or how long it would last. A century, I guess, in blog years. I had not done a lot of writing before starting the blog, but I had a great many digital images to share, and some occasional stories to go with them. We will reach a couple of milestones this year, the 2,000th post, and possibly 3 million total hits, depending on how accurate Google counter is (Stat counter says 1.8 million). It's also been a wonderful opportunity to meet so many people from all over the world as they respond to posts. 

So...this week I am dredging through some of the archives to find some of my favorite posts from over the years. I'm starting with my first organized blog series on the geologic history of the Colorado Plateau, "Time Beyond Imagining". I began the series in July of 2008, and finished much later in October of 2009. There was enough material that I eventually compiled the story into a field guide I produced for the AAPG.

In any case, if you have any interest at all in the geology of the Four Corners region, and want to learn more about this fascinating landscape, check out the story below...


From July 1, 2008:

Please forgive me for filling the feeds with such a long post, but I wanted to pull together an annotated list of the blog posts of my just completed journey through the geological history of the Colorado Plateau. It turned into a massive project that lasted more than a year, and included seventy different postings and more than a hundred photos. Don't feel compelled to try reading it, but I hope you enjoy it if you do. If it lacks precise continuity and style, remember that I had no idea how it would end when I started it and I had no editor! I've been taking students on the plateau for twenty years, and it has proven to be one of the best places on the planet to learn earth history.

Time Beyond Imagining, the first post back in June of 2008 introducing the concept that would guide the entire series. I had no idea what I was getting into!

Time Beyond Imagining - An Intro to the Colorado Plateau, a first introduction to the sweep of the landscape that I would be covering through the series.

Time Beyond Imagining - The Oldest Rocks on the Colorado Plateau: The oldest rocks are exposed at only a few places, including deep in the Grand Canyon

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 2: A discussion of the 12,000 feet of sediments hidden deep in the depth of the Grand Canyon dated at around 1 billion years

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 3: LIFE!: The first appearance of complex life during the Cambrian Period

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 4: Something is Missing! Journeying up the walls of Grand Canyon through the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian periods

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 5: Seeing Red Looking at the Mississippian Redwall Limestone in Grand Canyon

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 6: Seeing Red (Really!) We rise up through the walls of the Grand Canyon to the Permian rocks of the Supai Group and Hermit Shale

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 7: Mountains Rise: Permian rocks are exposed throughout the plateau country. We leave the Grand Canyon and explore some of these other places

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Old Salt I was beginning to realize that the project would be longer than I thought. We explore the formation and effects of salt precipitation in Late Paleozoic time

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Sand! A return to the Grand Canyon and the prominent Coconino Sandstone near the rim

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: A Final Transgression Looking at the top two layers in the Grand Canyon and related rocks on other parts of the plateau.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: On to the Grand Staircase An introduction to the Mesozoic history of the plateau country, which lies outside the Grand Canyon. We start exploring the other wonderful parks out there

The Grand Staircase and the Geologic Time Scale A diagram of the Grand Staircase, the younger rocks of the Colorado Plateau

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Into the Triassic An introduction to the widespread Triassic rocks of the Plateau. It would prove to take a number of posts!

Mid-week Mystery Sample: What is it? A short departure to discuss the identity of a Triassic fossil from the plateau. A fairly long discussion followed!

Mid-week Mystery Sample: What is it? Heck if I actually know! I admit to my ignorance...

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Ash and Wood A study of the paleontology of one of our unusual parks: Petrified Forest in Arizona

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: This Yellow is NOT Mellow The Chinle also contains mineable uranium deposits; I wade into the controversy

Leetso, the Yellow Monster A continuation of the heritage of uranium on the plateau

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: The Real Jurassic Parks The Jurassic rocks of the plateau are responsible for much of the spectacular scenery in the region. This was the introduction

The Colorado Plateau Story: the real Jurassic Parks Follows the story of the Kayenta and Wingate formations, and three unique and little known parks: Capitol Reef National Park, and Colorado and Vermillion Cliffs National Monuments.

The Real Jurassic Parks: Navajo! The Navajo Sandstone forms some of the best photography opportunities: this was a discussion of Antelope Canyon, a beautiful slot canyon

Antelope Canyon, A Real Jurassic Park An excuse to show more pictures of Antelope Canyon!

Zion: A Real Jurassic Park First part of look at one of our "crown jewel" national parks

Zion: A Real Jurassic Park, Part 2 A hike to Angels Landing in Zion National Park

The Real Jurassic Parks: Capitol Reef (Oh, and Sheep Blogging) A return to Capitol Reef and an excuse to show off one of my favorite bighorn sheep pictures

The Real Jurassic Parks: The San Rafael Group An introduction to another group of Jurassic formations, including the all-important Entrada Sandstone. A busy semester had begun and posts were becoming sparser at times. I was realizing the project was going to take some time, and I stopped using the word "brief"!

The Real Jurassic Parks: Goblin Valley and the Entrada Sandstone One of Utah's unique and isolated state parks

The Real Jurassic Parks: Kodachrome Basin (and a great resource!) Another fantastic Utah State Park and a link to an e-book on the geology of Utah's parks and monuments

The Real Jurassic Parks: Arches National Park An intro to Arches National Park, one of my personal favorites

The Real Jurassic Parks: Arches National Park, continued. And an Eminent Threat. After several weeks I got back to work with a continued exploration of Arches, and discussed new threats to parks in the region

The Real Jurassic Parks: Where are the Dinosaurs? A look at wonderful Dinosaur National Monument and a rotten political situation there

The REAL Jurassic Parks were really Cretaceous I thought the Jurassic would provide the most posts in the series, and therefore had no idea how long I would spend in the Cretaceous. This was the introduction

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Cedar Mountain Formation The only dinosaur dig I ever took part in was in an early Cretaceous formation in Montana, but it was related to the Colorado Plateau. This post turned into seven part story on our adventure

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Story of a DinoDig Much of the story was trying to get there in the first place: what is geokarma?

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: Every Cloud has a Golden Lining We drive through Yellowstone and arrive at the dig site

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig What we were looking for and why it was important. What is a deinonychus?

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Dino-Digging Begins This is what grunt work is all about

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig wraps up We started finding bones!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Final Discovery We found a dinosaur that invariably is the last entry in a dinosaur dictionary...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The View is Nice but Access is a Problem... Back on the plateau, we are introduced to the remaining Cretaceous rocks and two archaeological parks, Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients National Monuments

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: Walled Cities and Tragedy More on the Canyons of the Ancients and a walled medieval-aged city...in southern Colorado!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Tragedy at Castle Rock Pueblo A haunted place...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Mancos Sea An interesting formation that some geologists curse at...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Green Table An exploration of the famous cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Black Mesa story I wade into the coal mining controversy and get more comments than any other entry in the series

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: A City in the Wilderness Life had become busy and it was a month before I returned to the plateau with a discussion of Chaco Culture National Historical Park

And The Old World Passed Away... The Geologic History of the Colorado Plateau And another month passed! I tried to find the words to describe the profound events at the end of the Cretaceous Period

Time Beyond Imagining - A not-so-brief History of the Colorado Plateau Another long gap, but I was finally talking about the last 65 million years of Colorado Plateau history with an intro to the crustal deformation that was beginning to effect the region

Time Beyond Imagining - Land of Giant Lakes A discussion of the origin of the rocks at Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks National Monument. I thought I was close to the end, but I was still wrong, after a full year!

Fire Down Below - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau Another month of blogging on other things and I returned to the Cenozoic history of the region with a discussion of the volcanic activity that started to emerge on the plateau, including Shiprock

Fire Down Below II - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau The laccolithic mountains of the plateau country

Fire Down Below III - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau I find I have almost no pictures of Navajo Mountain despite having driven around it dozens of times...

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape Cenozoic events led to a truly scrambled landscape with a mystery-of-the-day

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape in Unaweep Canyon More mysterious canyons at Unaweep and Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape in Colorado An exploration of Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a canyon that shouldn't be there

Time Beyond Imagining - A Really Scrambled Landscape on the Colorado Plateau The opening discussion of one of the great plateau mysteries: why is there a Grand Canyon?

Time Beyond Imagining - Unscrambling History and the Origin of the Grand Canyon The complicated story continues

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau I thought I was almost finished, but found that much happened in the final few million years of the story. This is the story of the San Francisco Peaks Volcanic Field

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau Part 2 A look at the volcanoes in the western Grand Canyon and how they formed massive lakes in the Grand Canyon, some 200 miles long!

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau Pt. 3 The story of a stupendous rhyolite eruption at the Jemez Caldera in New Mexico

Time Almost Beyond Imagining: Who Do the Magic that Hoodoo? My favorite title for a discussion of a unique park near the Jemez Caldera, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau and Deep Time Although I had reached the last million years of a two billion year history, I felt a need to try and describe the immensity of geologic time, using the ruins of Bandelier National Park and the Jemez Caldera

Time Beyond Imagining - Where did the Ancient Enemy Go? The "disappearance" of the Ancestral Pueblo people is explored at Bandelier National Monument

Time Beyond Imagining: Why Can't We Touch the Venus de Milo? Once again, I thought I was done, but found a series of fascinating (to me) stories about research in the limestone caverns on the plateau. I began with a rant about preserving these wonderful caves that took us to Rome and Paris, of all places

Holy Crap, Batman! The Bat Cave is Full of it! Bat Cave in western Grand Canyon, and bat-sh*t. Lots of it, sort of

Holy Smokes, Batman, that crap is on fire! I was saving my best titles to the last, I guess. A horrific crime against science at Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon

Of Rat Pee and Uranium and Scavengers...The Underground Story of the Ice Ages on the Colorado Plateau What the caves on the plateau tell us, and how.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Final Struggle for Life on the Colorado Plateau I imagine the death of the very last mammoth on the Colorado Plateau

Time Beyond Imagining: The End of the Story, or the Beginning? In the final post of the series, I discuss the arrival of humans on the plateau, and how humans change the land they occupy. I also tip my hat to Ken Burns and his series on "The National Parks: America's Greatest Idea". The parks are the laboratories in which I and my students study the history of the earth.

So there you go: 71 posts that tell a story encompassing 2 billion years as it is exposed on a very special part of the earth's surface: the Colorado Plateau, covering parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Congratulations if you ever made it through the whole thing. I never realized I was writing the equivalent of an entire book, but it was a story I truly enjoyed telling, and I also deeply appreciated the feedback that many of you provided.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: The Real Jurassic Parks

As we move forward in time, we reach the geologic period called the Jurassic, one of the few units of the geologic time scale that is familiar to many laypeople. We have Steven Speilberg and Michael Crichton to thank for that, and yes, dinosaurs rose to prominence in the terrestrial landscape, but lots more was going on as well, including a lot of interesting non-dinosaurs, including our own small furry predecessors creeping about in the underbrush (the mammals first appeared in the late Triassic, about the same time as the first dinosaurs).

So what are the real Jurassic Parks? In the movies, the park was an island populated by reconstituted dinosaurs that ate people and each other. The Jurassic Parks of the Colorado Plateau are the ones in which the most dramatic scenery is provided by Jurassic-aged rocks, which include the Wingate, Kayenta, Navajo, Carmel, Entrada, Summerville, and Morrison formations. The parks include the familiar Zion, Arches, Capitol Reef, and Canyonlands national parks, and the less familiar Grand Staircase-Escalante, Navajo, Rainbow Bridge, Vermilion Cliffs, and Colorado national monuments. Notable state parks include Kodachrome, Goblin Valley and Dead Horse Point, all in Utah. Many of the dramatic cliffs included within the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area are also made of Jurassic rocks. And let us not forget the actual Dinosaur National Monument, the one that actually has dinosaurs (although at last report, they did not eat park visitors).

Today's photos include a parting shot of the Chinle Formation at Petrified Forest National Park, simply because I came across it in a lost file and liked it, and a picture from near the head of the Schafer Trail in Canyonlands National Park, which is cutting across ledges of the Kayenta Formation as it prepares to plunge down the Wingate cliffs to the White Rim, discussed in a previous post.

The Schafer Trail leads to the White Rim Trail, which winds for a hundred miles or so through the heart of Canyonlands National Park. It is one of the life-list goals that I haven't accomplished yet. It pretty much requires at least two days to travel, and three or four days by bike. The Schafer Trail was originally carved by cattlemen and improved by uranium miners (they worked pretty hard...).

So, why the dramatic colorful cliffs? Something important had changed, causing the Triassic floodplains to disappear. The silts and clays and river channels were replaced by desert dune sands, which quite often form prominent cliffs when hardened into solid rock. The deserts formed because Pangea had begun to break apart, and North America was now moving northwest, into the subtropics where the prevailing air circulation results in dry conditions. We see a similar situation in the Middle East and Sahara Deserts today.

The Real Jurassic Parks: Kodachrome Basin (and a great resource!)

Back on the (virtual) road with our exploration of the geology of the Colorado Plateau, and the current series on the REAL Jurassic Parks. In our last post we were chasing "Galaxy Quest" rock monsters through Goblin Valley. Today, we are seeing another of the little-known gems of the Plateau country, Kodachrome Basin State Park in southern Utah. Kodachrome is another park that puts the Entrada Sandstone on prominent display along with something like four dozen unusual formations called clastic pipes.

These enigmatic features jut through the Entrada Sandstone, and being better cemented than the surrounding rock, they tend to stand out as towers tens of feet high (the highest are more than 100 feet). They are mostly composed of breccia and sandstone. Their origin is unclear, although there are plenty of well-considered hypotheses including cold and hot springs, earthquakes, overburden pressure, and UFO's (they always have something to do with weird things out here). I have no particular expertise to judge, but I have to note the presence of several major fault zones in the immediate vicinity, and can easily imagine an origin rooted in liquefaction effects (this statement acknowledges the fact that we can see the things we know about and can miss evidence favoring things we know nothing about...).

Some of the pipes are exposed in their original matrix of Entrada, as can be seen in the second photograph. Notice how the strata form a graben or syncline in the area adjacent to the pipe.


Why the unusual name? Aren't there trademark restrictions or something on such blatant commercialism? Actually, the name was given to the basin in 1949 by the National Geographic Society following an expedition in the region. Yes, an expedition. Even today, the area remains one of the most isolated corners of the lower 48 states. They were using the newfangled color film, and were inspired by the intense coloration of the rock (for those of us too young to remember, there was a time before digital cameras....). The basin became a state park in 1962, and was called Chimney Rocks for fear of trademark infringement or something, but Kodak recognized good PR, and happily let the state keep the name. They have even sponsored park brochures (in color, of course).

If you are leading a field trip through the region, and find nearby Bryce Canyon too crowded and noisy, consider Kodachrome as an overnight stop. There are two nice group campsites, and a good shower facility (we of the long trip persuasion have to remember the basics....). A network of short trails explores the park, and a short drive east reveals the spectacular Grosvenor Arch. A longer gravel road (Cottonwood Canyon Road) travels south along the Cockscomb Monocline, emerging near Page and Glen Canyon Dam. It's a great drive...in dry weather. Don't try it after storms! The Utah State Parks website for Kodachrome can be found at http://stateparks.utah.gov/parks/kodachrome/.

BTW, geology road guides for all state and national parks in Utah can be accessed at http://www.utahgeology.org/uga29Titles.htm. These are PDF's of the first edition of the truly excellent book Geologic Road, Trail, and Lake guides to Utah’s Parks and Monuments, P.B. Anderson and D.A. Sprinkel, editors (Utah Geological Association-29 Second Edition, , 2004, CD-ROM, $14.99. Available at the DNR Map and Bookstore, http://mapstore.utah.gov/ ). The roadguides are a companion to the very comprehensive Geology of Utah's Parks and Monuments, also available from the Utah Geological Association.

The Colorado Plateau Story: the real Jurassic Parks

Today we make a return to our series on the geologic story of the Colorado Plateau. The Mesozoic Era left a stunning variety of rocks across the region. The Triassic story, with the Moenkopi and Chinle formations has been told, but today we explore a few of the real Jurassic Parks, the ones in which the scenery is formed by rocks laid down during the Jurassic Period. The scenery makers today are the Wingate Sandstone and the Kayenta Formation, which can be seen especially well in three parks: Capitol Reef National Park, Colorado National Monument, and Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. The Wingate appears in a prior post involving Canyonlands National Park. I notice that Geology Happens is a fan of the Wingate as well.



The Wingate Sandstone formed in early Jurassic time as sand dunes migrated across the increasingly arid region. The layer tends to be bright orange-red, and has the crossbedded structure typical of rocks formed from dunes. Dune environments are not generally conducive to the preservation of fossil material, but reptile trackways are occasionally discovered.

The Kayenta Formation lies above the Wingate and is most often exposed as a series of colorful ledges and slopes. It formed as a series of rivers flowed across the dune fields from the Wingate deserts. It contains numerous trackways of dinosaurs and other reptiles. Fairly easy to erode, it is not well-known as a scenery-former but it plays a critical part in the dramatic scenery at Zion National Park (to be covered in a near-future post).

Colorado National Monument lies just south of Grand Junction and Fruita, Colorado (the top picture, and this one from a previous post). It is one of our lesser-known parks, but is well worth a visit if you travel through the region. The park preserves a spectacular eroded monocline, which is a folded sequence of rocks where the layers are horizontal at either side of the flexure, much like a rug thrown over a stairstep. A marvelous paved road snakes in and out of canyons, mostly within the Kayenta Formation just above the Wingate cliffs. And the Wingate cliffs are incredible, a sheer drop just a few steps beyond the edge of the road. Although such roads are not being built in national parks today as a matter of preservation policy, I have to appreciate the effort that went into the construction of this one. There are many, many wonderful overlooks, a modest campground, and a decent visitor center. Lots of services are available in the nearby towns. Some very important dinosaur discoveries were made just outside the park (in younger formations), and signs point to the quarry sites.



Capitol Reef National Park is illustrated in the second picture above, and in the uranium post a few days ago. The park lies in the practically unhabited region of south-central Utah (Torrey and Hanksville are the main urban centers with a combined population of about 500). The park preserves another spectacular monocline, the Waterpocket Fold, that runs nearly 100 miles in a north-south direction. The "reef"of the park name refers to the difficulty settlers had in crossing the rugged eroded rocks of the monocline. Even today, a single paved highway crosses the structure, and a few unpaved gravel roads. A Mormon settlement (Fruita) was established here in the 1800's, and the fruit orchards are still maintained by the park service and volunteers. A favorite park activity is picking cherries and other fruits in season. The region was utilized in earlier times by the Fremont people, a lesser known culture than the Ancestral Puebloans of Mesa Verde and other areas to the south.


Vermilion Cliffs National Monument is at the same time one of the more familiar and least-visited monuments in the United States. The interior of the park is rarely visited, and there are few facilities of any sort for tourists; a true wilderness park. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people drive past the park on Highway 89 from Jacob Lake to Lees Ferry and Navajo Bridge, where the Vermilion Cliffs cannot be missed or ignored. The sheer cliffs rise 3,000 feet above the highway, and are just beautiful. California Condors have been re-introduced into the region, and the lucky traveler might just catch a glimpse.


Even with my more or less yearly visits to the region, I have never been in the monument, with one huge exception. Most of the park is a vast high plateau, but the northeast portion of the monument is dissected by an incredible gorge carved by the Paria River. The headwaters of the Paria lie to the north at Bryce Canyon National Park. Where the river reaches the Navajo Sandstone, it has cut an extremely deep canyon, the Narrows, with a major tributary, Buckskin Gulch, which is one of the longest deepest slot canyons in all of the Colorado Plateau.


I was in the Boy Scouts, and one of the last trips I took as a scout was a six-day backpack down the Paria River to Lees Ferry. It was one of the greatest adventures of my life, and probably had a lot to do with my eventual choice to become a geologist. Just the same, I knew little of geology at the time, and I would dearly love to repeat the adventure one day. I will search for my pictures of the event, but I had a camera I had no idea how to use, so the pictures that came out at all were over- and under-exposed. Plus, I dropped the camera in quicksand, and it was never the same after that (i.e. it never worked again at all).


Have you ever been in real quicksand? It's not very much like Hollywood quicksand, but it was an invigorating experience sinking to my knees most unexpectedly. I had walked across about 50 feet of it before actually breaking through, and it was lots of fun getting back out!

The REAL Jurassic Parks were really Cretaceous

As any knowledgeable fifth-grader could tell you, few of the dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park had anything to do with the Jurassic Period. Most of the species in the movie lived during the Cretaceous Period, many millions of years later, including the velociraptors, tyrannosaurs, triceratops, and the ornithomimus herd. Offhand the only Jurassic dinosaurs I can recall from the movie were the massive brachiosaurs that occupied just a few scenes. The premise (from the sequels anyway) of the animals living in some kind of ecologically balanced paradise would be unlikely at best. The mixing of predator and prey species from long separated periods would lead to disaster, as most of the species would have no evolved defenses to predator attack methods. And of course, the whole "reconstitute a dinosaur" from old dinosaur DNA mixed with frog DNA idea is a real stretch anyway, although interesting results are coming from research with wooly mammoth DNA.

In any case, we continue onwards on our march through the geology of the Colorado Plateau. Cretaceous sediments are an important part of the Colorado Plateau sequence, and they reveal a changing world, including new plants (the angiosperms), a host of diverse new dinosaur species and many other animals. At the end of the period, the dinosaurs (and many other species) disappeared forever and a new world emerged in the Plateau country. A final transgression and regression of a shallow sea was followed by widespread deformation of the crust, and the rise of the region above sea level. The most recent era, the Cenozoic, our own time period, was beginning.

The Cretaceous formations of the Colorado Plateau are not as colorful as the Jurassic and Triassic sediments, but several national parks and monuments have been established in areas containing Cretaceous sediments, and in some cases the scenery is quite spectacular. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Capitol Reef National Park are two of the more striking examples, but other parks that are not really known for their rocks are also notable, including Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Hovenweep National Monument, and Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Important formations include the Cedar Mountain Formation, the Dakota Sandstone, the Mancos Shale, and the Mesa Verde Group.

Today's photograph is a sunset view of Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, one of the eeriest (but not in the scary sense) parks I've ever visited on the Plateau. The rocks are part of the Mesa Verde Group.

More soon!

A Present-Day Gondwanaland Forest

I am using today's post as a bridge back to my continuing story of the real Jurassic Parks (and Cretaceous Parks) on the Colorado Plateau in the southwestern United States. But those parks are in mostly desert environments today, and it can sometimes take a lot of imagination to see the tropical forests that existed in the region during Jurassic or Cretaceous time (of course, imagination is not a bad thing). On the other hand, there is a place in the world that has been detached from any other continent for more than 80 million years, thus preserving some elements of the Mesozoic ecosystems that existed at the time. There was a lot more to see just an achingly short time in the past, only a few hundred years ago.

I am speaking of New Zealand, land of kiwis and hobbits (thank you Peter Jackson, I enjoyed the movies a lot)

New Zealand consists mainly of two major islands, divided from each other across the narrow Cook Strait. The North Island includes Auckland, a city built on dozens of volcanoes, Rotorua, a geyser wonderland sitting in the midst of a huge caldera complex, and the big active volcanoes including Ruapahu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro. The South Island includes the city of Christchurch, and a series of spectacular mountain ranges including the Southern Alps (remember the spectacular opening sequence of "The Two Towers"?), and the Kaikoura Range that drops 9,000 feet right into the Pacific Ocean (sort of like Big Sur, but three times higher).

Because the island mass separated from other continents prior to the mass extinctions of the late Cretaceous, mammals were present, but never evolved to dominate the ecosystems as they did elsewhere in the world, and eventually went extinct, except for some bat species. With the loss of the dinosaurs, the only vertebrates in position to take over the terrestrial habitat were the birds. With no reptilian or mammalian predators, the birds were able to evolve a flightless existence (flight is an expensive energy proposition if it is not necessary for survival). Eventually a number of very large birds evolved, including ten species of moas. The largest stood over 9 feet tall. They were mainly plant-eaters, but an extremely large eagle lived on the island as the top predator.

Unfortunately, the arrival of humans on the islands around 700 years ago spelled doom for the moas, and when they were gone the large raptors lost a main food source and went extinct as well. Only the kiwi, the small forest dwelling bird, survives today.

The trees on the island provide the other link to the past. I have included some of the huge tree ferns that evoke Jurassic forests in the pictures above (the moas aren't real. Really). The ferns in the third photo line the opening of a 75-foot deep explosion pit at Orakei Korako Geothermal Area on the North Island. I really would not have been surprised if we had been attacked by a few velociraptors in the forest there...

The ancient tree that captured my imagination the most was the Kauri tree (second photo), one of the bulkiest trees on the planet, rivaling even the Sequoia trees in my own backyard of the Sierra Nevada. The most mature trees are not quite 200 feet high, but their trunks remain thick practically to the crown. Their history extends back into Jurassic time. They once covered much of the islands, but unfortunately their wood is strong, mostly knot-free, and attractive. Something like 95% of the original forests have been cut down, and old-growth forests are exceedingly rare and precious. The trees are now protected by law, but ironically, dead trees in swamps are not, and the wood is durable enough that some of the trees from the swamps are still utilized legally, despite having been dead for hudreds or thousands of years.