America's Never Never: North Rim or South Rim? It's a Grand Canyon everywhere, does it matter?

It means a lot to these guys anyway. The Kaibab Squirrel is a (sub)species of squirrel that lives only in the ponderosa forests of the North Rim of Grand Canyon. The most closely related species is the Abert Squirrel that lives on the South Rim of the canyon (and other parts of the Colorado Plateau), and never do the twain meet. The populations became separated at the end of the last ice age, and geographic isolation in different climates has led to differences between them.

We continued our exploration of America's Never Never, arriving at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park (after making our way through a herd of buffalo). I've been using the term "Never Never" after a region in Australia that is far off the beaten track, though full of fantastic geologic scenery. In a similar way, the Colorado Plateau is largely a barren wilderness, but it also encompasses some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet. And some corners can hardly be described as isolated and lonely. Grand Canyon is one of those places: it gets as many as 5 million visitors a year.

It's a grand place, and one can choose to visit the developed parts of the park on the North Rim or the South Rim. One might wonder if it makes much difference which rim to visit if one is visiting for the first time. It's an interesting choice.

It really depends what you are after. If you are after the complete "industrial tourism" experience with IMAX theatres, four-star hotels, fancy visitor centers and complete visitor services including grocery stores, curio shops, restaurants, and full cellular service, then maybe the South Rim should be your destination. It is in fact the destination for something like 90% of the people who visit the canyon.

The North Rim is the flip side of the Grand Canyon experience. It usually takes several hours more to get there, and the nearest town of any sort is more than an hour away. There is a single hotel complex offering cabins, and a simple camp store. There is a one room visitor center, a laundromat/shower house, and not much else. What is the serious tourist to do?

In my mind, there's not much of a contest. I enjoy my visits to the South Rim, but I prefer the quiet and the coolness of the North. It is as much as a thousand feet higher than the South Rim, and instead of a dry pinyon forest with occasional ponderosa groves, the North Rim has meadows with extensive forests of ponderosa, fir and aspen. The road to the viewpoints on the Walhalla Plateau is rarely crowded, and the viewpoints are stunning. Cape Royal and Angels Window offer excellent views of the Proterozoic Grand Canyon Supergroup and the famous angular unconformity that separates it from the overlying horizontal Paleozoic sediments (above).

Point Imperial offers a unique perspective on possible origins of the Grand Canyon. It looks over the edge of the Butte Fault and East Kaibab monocline into the lower country to the east. The Colorado River comes from this lowland and crosses the 8,000 foot high plateau heading west. The question that geologists have been struggling with for decades is how the river could have done it. There are many ideas, and few conclusions.

And then there are the quiet walks along the rim. The Widforss Trail goes five miles past the head of a deep gorge called the Transept, and to a beautiful view down into the Granite Gorge. The Uncle Jim Trail loops out to Uncle Jim Point at the head of Bright Angel Canyon. And if you aren't feeling particularly ambitious, follow the Transept Trail from Bright Angel Lodge to the Campground. That's what I did with my free time that day (oh, not to mention the pizza at the deli; it's not a completely savage wilderness).

Anyone on the North Rim should walk the short distance to Bright Angel Point. You'll have company, but the view is memorable. A fairly large number of people walk the Transept, but on the day I was there, I shared the trail with just four other people. It was quiet, cool and beautiful. I've never been closer to California Condors than here along the trail. They hang out, waiting for a tourist to drop I suppose.

In any other setting the 3,000 foot deep Transept would be a national park in its own right. Here it is but a tributary to Bright Angel Creek, which is a tributary to the Colorado River. The trail follows some gentle ups and downs through shallow swales and passes a modest Ancestral Puebloan ruin.

The campground is perched almost on the edge of the Transept, and the best-situated campsites offer views, but scenery is a short walk in any direction. It is a wonderful place.

This discussion of North Rim vs. South Rim leaves out a lot of other possibilities...there is the drive through the Hualapai lands to the bottom of Grand Canyon at Diamond Creek or that strange glass walkway perched on the rim of the western Canyon. There is the road that accesses Hualapai Hilltop and the isolated village of Supai. There is the road out to Toroweap and Vulcan's Throne. There is the wilderness of the Shivwits Plateau out west, a "twin" to the Kaibab Plateau with barely a road or trail anywhere. And there's that totally opposite way of seeing the canyon, from the bottom looking up rafting along the Colorado River, an adventure I am eagerly awaiting in less than two weeks.

Holy Smokes, Batman, that crap is on fire!

Those boulders littering the floor of the cave? They ain't boulders...

I've heard of the expression being up to your neck in sh$t, but this is ridiculous...

A sampling of the bone material from Rampart Cave

Sloth hair and skin from Rampart Cave.

Despite the frivolous nature of the blog title, there are few words to describe the rage I feel towards cave vandals. And it is one thing to break off things of beauty, like stalactites and other cave decorations, in the sense that centuries and millenia from now they could conceivably grow back long after we are gone. But sometimes, that which is destroyed represents knowledge that becomes lost forever, never to be recovered, not even with the passage of time.
Such is the tragedy at Rampart Cave.

Rampart Cave, like Bat Cave, lies near the western end of the Grand Canyon. The cave was unlike many others in the region, because it was accessible to large animals who took shelter inside. For something like 40,000 years, that's what a particularly strange animal did. And it pooped. A lot.

Nothrotheriops shastensis, the Shasta Ground Sloth (picture in the previous post) would never be mistaken for its diminutive Brazilian cousin, nor for that matter, Sid, the abrasive little sloth in the animated movie "Ice Age". It was 8 or 9 feet long, and weighed a quarter ton (some of its relatives were even bigger, reaching two tons). It lived on these lower slopes of the Grand Canyon, consuming a wide variety of different plants and shrubs. Carbon dating of the deposits of the cave show it was occupied from at least 50,000 years ago up until around 11,000 years ago when all of the sloths of North America went extinct. Studying animal droppings may seem, well, a bit dirty, but think what can be learned from the practice: pollen, seeds, and plant fragments from an animal that seemed to eat just about anything provides a picture of changing environments in the late stages of the last ice age.

Equally valuable and equally disgusting are packrat middens, which were also found in the cave. Packrats are kleptomaniacal rodents who carry all manner of things into their nests, and they pee on them. The urine is highly viscous and the midden becomes a solid mass from the work of thousands of generations of animals.

Other animals either found their way into the cave, or their carcasses were dragged there by predators or scavengers. 14 total mammal species and 5 bird species have been recorded in the cave deposits, including the California Condor, which has just been reintroduced to the region.

Excavations took place in the 1930's and 1940's, and the entrance was gated to protect the resources. Around 1975, persons unknown broke through the gate, and started a fire in the cave. It defied efforts at control, and burned for months. Something like 70% of the precious resource (how strange to think of dung that way) was lost forever to science.

I am appalled that there are people this moronic and stupid. Of course they haven't gone away, either. I am hearing that the disastrous Station Fire that is burning up my childhood hiking destinations in Angeles National Forest was the result of arson, too.

Today's pictures are from the National Park Service archives.

International Vulture Awareness Day: A Salute to Some Ice Age Survivors

Several geoblogosphere associates have already chipped into today's big event, an appreciation of vultures. We do need to appreciate the scavengers and cleaners of our world (kind of like appreciating Dirty Jobs), but my appreciation goes a little deeper, more like admiration. My favorite member of the vulture family is a real survivor, despite our worst abuses, and great changes in their world: the California Condor.

California Condors are one of the few direct links we have to a world that disappeared 11,000 years ago. At that time, California and the American West played host to a diverse and fascinating megafauna that included mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, giant elk, bison, horses, camels, short-faced bears (bigger than grizzlies), and a frightening array of predators, including dire wolves, American lions, and saber-tooth cats. All gone now, lost to an extinction event that is still not understood: it could have been predation by humans, climate change, even an unfortunately-aimed asteroid impact. The condor, one of the largest of birds, was the clean-up crew when the giant predators of the giant grazers were done eating. When the megafauna disappeared, the condors went into a decline, and the largest species of condors went extinct. Their near-extinction was not necessarily the fault of humans; there may have been only 300 or so when the Spaniards first explored California. Still, we in the modern era didn't help matters. We shot them, or poisoned them with lead buckshot to the point that there were only about two dozen left in the 1970's.

Wildlife biologists stepped in at that point and captured the last remaining wild birds, and began a program of captive breeding. It has been a reasonable success, with 322 birds alive today. 172 of them have been released into the wild, with populations in Grand Canyon (top picture), the Zion Park region, the Coast Ranges of California (second photo), and part of northern Mexico.

Take a moment to thank the scavengers of our world!

Grand Canyon's North Rim - The Transept

How many places are there in the world where a 3,000 foot deep canyon with walls so steep that one cannot see the bottom from the rim is an afterthought? The Transept is one of those special places on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It lies west of the Bright Angel Lodge on the rim, and is a large tributary to Bright Angel Canyon. You can look down into the canyon from the Transept Trail, a short stroll between the campground and the resort, or you can get a particularly spectacular view by walking about two miles out the Widforss Trail. The Widforss circles the rim of the canyon, providing the view down the gorge seen in the picture above.

The prominent cliffs in the lower part of the canyon are the Mississippian aged Redwall Limestone. The cliffs are about 500 feet high. The overlying redbeds are the Pennsylvanian-Permian beds of the Supai Group and the Hermit Shale. They are delta and floodplain deposits eroded from the Ancestral Rocky Mountains which existed at the time to the northwest in Colorado.

I had the privilege of seeing one of the last free-flying California Condors back in the 1980's in the hills north of Santa Barbara. When the population dropped to about 28 individuals, they were all captured and they started raising captive birds. As more and more of them matured, and the total number slowly rose, they began releasing the birds in the wild in a number of widely isolated locations in California, and in their old range of Arizona. A small population inhabits the North Rim at times. At the time of my last visit, I wasn't aware of the presence of these grand birds. But I did see some monstrously huge turkey buzzards flying around and finally realized that NOBODY was identifying turkey buzzards with number tags. These were condors, in range of my camera! It was a neat moment, although I kept trying to get a picture without the number tag, but getting a picture of a Condor with the Grand Canyon as a backdrop was thrilling enough.