Vagabonding Across the 39th Parallel: A Compilation

Geology is everywhere. You can't escape it. No matter where you go it is under you and all around you. Some of the joy in my life is learning as much as I can while I can. I'm always looking for new places, or trying to see familiar places in a new way. So it was that we set out last July to explore a strip of land between California and Colorado that turned out to lie pretty close to the 39th parallel of latitude (although we didn't constrain ourselves to it). My blogs on the journey turned out to be a six month project with more than thirty posts. I've gathered them all here so I can add a new blerie (blog series) to my sidebar, along with the Other California, Time Beyond Imagining (the Colorado Plateau), a Convergence of Wonders (the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains), Underneath the Volcano (Yosemite), and the Airliner Chronicles (a little bit of everywhere).

We had a few simple rules about our journey:

...we allowed an ultimate goal of reaching Rocky Mountain National Park, but we would plan our route no more than a day or two in advance...

...we would try to visit only places we had never been before, or hadn't been since childhood...

...if we did visit familiar sites, we would search out something new about the place...

...we would come home when the time was right (not too road-weary, and not too homesick)...

...and we promised ourselves to stop any time either of us wanted to snap a picture...

So, here's what happened....

Setting out on the Road: An overview of the trip, and a definition of a vagabond ( an itinerant wanderer, basically).

Crossing the Sierra Nevada: We set out one afternoon to cross the Sierra Nevada by way of Yosemite National Park and Tioga Pass. Along the way we checked out Tenaya Lake and Tuolumne Meadows.

Mono Lake, the Barren, Worthless Wasteland: A barren salty lake that is hardly barren at all; it helps keep millions of birds healthy on their seasonal migrations. A discussion of what is really important when it comes to desert landscapes.

Crossing the "Real" Loneliest Highway: Highway 50 gets a lot of attention as the "loneliest" highway with villages every 80 miles or so. But follow Highway 6 from Benton, California to Ely, Nevada, and you will see but a single town in 250 miles.

Aliens, Area 51 and UFOs! Desert mirages play games with our imagination along a very lonely highway.
A Trip to the Moon, and a Trip to the Mantle (well, sort of...): Off of Highway 6, we explored the strange Lunar Crater Volcanic Field, finding cinder cones, maars, and fragments of the Earth's mantle.

A Park without its Namesake, and an "Oh, s**t" moment in Science: Great Basin National Park doesn't have a basin in it. But it does have a great many other things worthy of our time, including a famous bad moment in scientific research.

We Reach the Wasatch Front, Finding Geologic and Archaeological Violence: The Wasatch Front is the junction of the Basin and Range, the Rocky Mountains, and the Colorado Plateau. We explored Fremont Indian State Park, a spot that preserved ancient rhyolite caldera ash deposits, and hundreds of Fremont petroglyphs. It is also a spot where we saved a village in order to destroy it.

Who knew the hoodoo was in Castle Rock? We discovered a most unusual place to camp, Castle Rock in Fremont Indian State Park. It's a great place to see hoodoos.

Having a "Swell" Time on the Reef! We start across the Colorado Plateau by traversing the San Rafael Swell, a huge dome that is one of the largest geologic structures in Utah. The "reef' is a spectacular monocline that forms the eastern edge of the Swell.

A Canyon along the Colorado River? Really? It isn't the Grand Canyon, it's Glenwood Canyon in Colorado, and it is rather spectacular. It is a critical transportion corridor for crossing the Rocky Mountain, but the engineers tried to preserve as much of the environment as they could.

A Moment of Pure Magic: The next day we reached Rocky Mountain National Park, the only actual stated goal of our trip. We spent the afternoon exploring the Bear Lake area and had a series of stunning vistas from reflections on the absolutely still lake (the photo at the top of the page is my favorite).

A Day of Black and White in the Rocky Mountains: We get hit by the first of several fierce storms in the Rockies, in this instance while walking around Sprague Lake. It was a wet couple of days for everyone across the region (there were even a few rainfall total records set).

In the Former Realm of Glaciers: We take a delightful hike to Nymph and Dream Lakes, and take in a variety of glacial features and some of the oldest rocks to be found anywhere in the American West. And then we got hit with an even worse storm than the day before!

In the Former Realm of Glaciers...Part II, on Trail Ridge: We turn towards home and cross the Continental Divide by way of Trail Ridge. We find the headwaters of the Colorado River, and an ominous dead forest.

The Birth of the Colorado River and Arboreal Apocalypse: Exploring the headwaters of the Colorado River in Kawuneeche Valley and the Never Summer Range. A river is flooding in front of us, and the forest is dying behind us.

Coke, Ancient Ice, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: Heading home through central Colorado. See if you can figure out what this title means!

A Little Mystery on the North Rim: And that is what this short post is; a mystery question.

A Canyon Where Cameras Stand Sideways: Black Canyon of the Gunnison in western Colorado is one of the most rugged 9and scenic) places a person can imagine. In some places it is deeper than it is wide. It exposes some of the Proterozoic crustal rocks that are not all that easy to find in this part of the country.

A Problem With Vagabonding: Yellow Line Fever  We follow a long, lonely highway through the Paradox Valley, and find the town of Bedrock. Fred and Wilma weren't home...and then we were in Utah!

Sun and Rock in Arches National Park: A hot day and a beautiful evening in Arches National Park.

Sun (and Moon) and Rock Revisited in Arches National Park We spend a morning exploring one of the most beautiful national parks in the world. And it's not just arches to be seen there.

Whispers of the Past in Stone: The story of past beings is told in stone in a couple of ways...on this day we saw two of them: petroglyphs and footprints. And a murder of crows.

A Magical Evening in the Mesozoic: A late evening exploration of Capitol Reef National Park, which protects a giant monocline, the Waterpocket Fold.

Crossing Through the Escalante River Country: We follow Highway 12 through what once was one of the most isolated and rugged corners of the country. It's still a challenging landscape and spectacular drive.

A Hoodoo Homily in Three Parts: We explore parts of Bryce Canyon we've never seen before, and at times we've never been there. In part one we check out the southern end of the park.

A Hoodoo Homily, Part Two: A late evening exploration of Fairyland Point and understanding the Aquarius Plateau. Hoodoos in pastel colors...

Hoodoo Homily, A Land of Glowing Rocks: Bryce Canyon without the summer crowds. How did we do it? We got up early! And the rocks were glowing, too.

A Hoodoo Homily Postscript: Red Canyon  There is another aspect of the Claron Formation that one doesn't see in Bryce Canyon National Park. We explore Red Canyon in the Sevier River country.

A Heavenly Canyon of Sand - Mukuntuweap: We arrive in Zion National Park on a scorching hot day. Where do you go? The Narrows of the Virgin River.

A Bit of Mukuntuweap in the Morning (it was one in a trillion): The impending ending of our journey gets me thinking about time and mortality. We explore Zion National Park in the early morning.

Playing "Where's Waldo" with Bighorn Sheep in Zion National Park: An earlier post about our discovery of a herd of bighorn sheep near the Zion Tunnel.

Leaving Behind the Colorado Plateau (almost): Zion National Park has a higher and more verdant section: the Kolob Canyons. We take a look before setting out across the Basin and Range Province. Would the aliens get us???  

More Hooved Animals on the Road...and a Quick Quiz Question  Another earlier post about the herd of wild horses we saw near Tonopah, Nevada. The answer to the quiz question can be found here.

Clicking My Heels, Because.... well, there's no place like home. At all. No matter where you go, the geological story will be different. We cross the last great barrier between we, the vagabonds, and our home in the Central Valley. And the Sierra Nevada is a beautiful mountain range, even after all the wonders of our journey across the 39th.

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: A Magical Evening in the Mesozoic

Ah, winter solstice! The longest nights, the shortest days, and although we don't get snow and hyperfreezing temperatures, there are mornings when I consider putting on a jacket before going for the newspaper. Yup, living in California can be tough. I admit, though, to really hating our tule fogs that occur this time of year. So what to do? Obviously, I need to go back and finish up my vagabonding series. We were exploring the geology of a swath of land between California and Colorado that happened to lie close to the 39th parallel last July. We were drifting along, not rushing, not planning more than a day or two in advance, and we were now on the homeward road. We had spent the morning and early afternoon exploring Arches National Park, and looking at petroglyphs, pictographs and dinosaur footprints, but now we had a bit of a distance to go, hoping to find a place to stay at Capitol Reef National Park.

Capitol Reef? In the desert? Being a geological blog, one might think that 'reef' refers to an ancient coral reef preserved in a limestone layer somewhere, but that is not the case here. Settlers in the region referred to cliffs and ridges that were barriers to travel as reefs. That was certainly the case here: Capitol Reef National Park preserves much of the Waterpocket Fold, a monocline fold that runs for more than 100 miles in a north-south direction. The fold defies travel; few of the canyons that cut across the fold are wide enough for trails, much less highways. The first paved highway wasn't constructed until 1962.

A monocline isn't like other folds. Anticlines are flexed upwards, while synclines are flexed downwards. Monoclines are neither; the sedimentary layers in a monocline can be thought of as a rug draped over a step. The layers are horizontal on both sides of the fold, but higher on one side. These features are most often caused when faults at great depth lift the overlying rocks, but without fracturing the softer sedimentary layers. A number of monoclines cross the Colorado Plateau; one forms the eastern edge of the Grand Canyon. But few monoclines are as dramatic as the Waterpocket Fold at Capitol Reef.

Erosion has cut deep into the fold, exposing thousands of feet of colorful sediments deposited during the Mesozoic era, the age of the dinosaurs. The layers tell a story of the giant supercontinent Pangea. In this part of the world, conditions changed from river floodplains to desert dune fields to rivers, to dunes again, and then the region was inundated by shallow seas several times. The story is readily discerned by carefully observing the rocks while exploring Highway 24 running east-west across the park. On the west side, the cliff-forming Wingate Sandstone protects the underlying soft layers from erosion, forming a tall escarpment that is nicely situated to capture the rays of the setting sun.

We arrived very late in the afternoon, just in time to see the setting sun lighting the cliffs. The roads were empty as people were settling in for the night. We weren't quite ready to turn in, so we headed south on the park's Scenic Road. I had told Mrs. Geotripper that the road was nicely paved, but when we arrived, we found that all the asphalt was torn out for construction. It was a bit bumpy and dusty, but I realized we were kind of reliving what it was like to explore the region half a century ago.

Capitol Gorge was the route of the old "highway" through the reef. In the narrows there is barely room for a car to squeeze through, and the watercourse was always subject to flooding and closure. In the daytime, one can walk through the gorge and see Fremont petroglyphs and pictographs, as well as more recent inscriptions from travelers in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

This evening, it was dark and lonely and I found myself imagining what it was like to travel this road decades ago, or centuries ago. Even today the population of the region is only a few thousand people scattered over thousands of square miles. A mistake, an accident, a flood, and one could be in real trouble. It is a harsh land, and it was a hard life for those who lived here: the Fremont and other Native Americans, the Mormon pioneers who settled nearby in Fruita, and those who make a life there now.

It was dark. We slowly made our way out the gorge and headed back to camp. The next day we would drive one of the most spectacular roads that no one knows about...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Mancos Sea

Ah, the Mancos Shale. Woe unto anyone who tries to foolishly drive across it after a rainstorm. Deep disappointment faces fools who try to build a highway or dwelling on the black clay. Frustration to anyone who tries to grow anything on it. And poor health to those who must drink of water that emanates from or passes through it, with its load of poisonous metals. A former colleague who had worked in the region during the uranium boom could only call it the "d----d Mancos Shale".

When the Cretaceous Seaway expanded from the north and south, it inundated the central part of the North American continent, dividing it in two. To the west, high mountains and volcanoes produced vast amounts of mud and silt that drifted into the open water beyond the shoreline sands (represented by the Dakota Sandstone). The organic-rich sediments ultimately accumulated to depths of thousands of feet. Numerous creatures lived in the waters, including the usual snails, clams and oysters, numerous kinds of fish and sharks, but the most interesting fossils include the billions of ammonites (best thought of as octopi with shells; the Pearly Nautilus is a modern relative), and giant mosasaurs, the sea-going varanid lizards (think of a Komodo Dragon with fins).

The clay-rich sediment absorbs water to an extraordinary degree, and swells when wet. It thus gets mucky, and roads cut through it become impassable. Buildings settle and crack on the unstable surface. The clay contains all manner of nasty metals like selenium, arsenic and mercury, which can be absorbed by crops, and contaminate water supplies. And yet, in the right circumstance, the Mancos is a beautiful rock to behold (as Silver Fox can attest).

At Capitol Reef National Park, the Mancos is revealed in cliffs and badlands as an intricate maze of gullies and slopes. In the pictures above, tilted layers of Mancos are found along the eastern boundary region of the park. Factory Butte is one of the premier landmarks in the Bureau of Land Management lands east of the park (and is the site of a controversy over land-use policies and off-road-vehicle use).

Mesa Verde National Park, famous for the Ancestral Pueblo Cliff Dwellings, is also a place where the Mancos is a prominent part of the scenery. More in future posts!

Oh, my former colleague? Many years ago, we convinced him to join us on a field trip that included stops in the Mancos. He was reluctant, but came along. At some point, the students found a nice slope of the clay, and they started climbing and then running down (we aren't necessarily describing mature behaviour, but we've all done it...). We thought it would contribute to Will's healing of his hatred of the Mancos if he actually had some fun on it, so we egged him on, and he climbed the slope and came barreling down at a high rate of speed. He lost his footing, and tumbled down, cutting up his leg.

Oh well....

The Real Jurassic Parks: Capitol Reef (Oh, and Sheep Blogging)

Capitol Reef National Park was mentioned in an earlier post discussing the Wingate Sandstone, but the Navajo Sandstone is also a major contributor to the scenery of the region. The Capitol Dome is an eroded outcrop of Navajo that looks, well, kinda like the capitol dome. These distinctive knobby peaks are a characteristic erosional pattern of the Navajo Sandstone, and can be appreciated during a stroll through Capitol Gorge.

Prior to the construction of the present-day paved highway 24 along the Fremont River (in the 1960's), the only way through the "Reef" was the dirt and gravel road through the narrows of the Capitol Gorge. Like the Virgin Narrows at Zion, canyons carved only in Navajo tend to be deep and narrow. When the river erodes to the level of the underlying Kayenta Formation, the easily eroded shale layers cause slope retreat and rockfalls that widen the canyon. The road was narrow and winding, and was flooded constantly; the streambed and the road were one and the same. I have no doubt that cars and people were constantly trapped and carried away before the new highway was built. Today, the narrows is a pleasant scenic stroll.

The Fremont People were the first inhabitants of the region, and their petroglyphs are a constant reminder of their former presence. At Capitol Gorge, a badly vandalized panel still preserves some of the hallucinogenic figures. The urge to write on stone did not end with the rise of modern civilization. The rocks of the gorge contain hundreds of inscriptions from travelers from the 1880's to the present day (unfortunate, in the latter case). Some of the carvings are on apparently inaccessible cliffs; I wonder if it was worth it to hang from a rope to leave a sign of your existence for future generations. Some people certainly thought so (I guess I am blogging, instead of carving).

I have wondered at times why bighorn sheep seem to be the predominate choice of petroglyphs when animals are the subject matter. I rarely see deer or bear or lions, but there always seem to be sheep. Are the horns a "guy" thing? In any case, I sent my students down the gorge in 2005 and took off to see the trail to the Capitol Dome. I rounded a corner in an alcove cut into the Kayenta shales, and came face to face with a big ram. He seemed supremely unconcerned with my presence, and allowed me to take quite a few telephoto images. So, I can't help but notice that I am posting a picture of a bighorn, but not one of a deer or a jackrabbit. Maybe I understand the Fremont better than I think...

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!