The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau

This is a land that breaks people...

Fajada Butte on the morning of the Summer Solstice, Chaco Culture Historical National Park, New Mexico

Over and over, people come here, seeking any number of things: land, security, riches, spiritual enlightenment. And then they leave. It is a tough land, where simple survival is difficult. Sometimes a well-prepared culture will come here and stay for a few centuries. Sometimes the sojourn is measured in decades. For us, it was two weeks.

Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Culture Historical National Park

Does this sound like a condemnation of this landscape? It is most certainly not. This land, the Colorado Plateau, encompassing parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico is most precious to me, a place I return to whenever I can. It is beautiful beyond words. It is a source of inspiration, and a fountain of information about the earth itself. But to visit this land, we must extend a bubble of our more comfortable environments, in little pods of slightly cooler air contained in vehicles that can transport us hundreds of miles where our forebears had to walk, or ride horses a few miles a day. There are towns and cities in this region today only because we bring energy and resources from elsewhere.

Abandoned corral at the Acoma Pueblo

This became apparent to me these last two weeks. We had a wonderful journey, 30 students of geology and anthropology and their professors, on a trip that took us through the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and numerous other parks and monuments. As the trip continued, I was reminded over and over how ephemeral our existence is in a harsh landscape. There were abandoned cliff dwellings, abandoned towns, abandoned railways, abandoned trails and roads. It is a place that sent people packing for other places when life became unsustainable. There are of course lessons here for our current civilization.

Hoodoos and fir trees at Bryce Canyon National Park

But mostly this land is beautiful, and reveals a rich history, of 13,000+ years of human occupation, and 2 billion years of geological history. For the next few weeks I will try to let you see this beautiful landscape the way we saw it. It has been abandoned over and over, but we are part of a society that occupies the land today, giving us access to a marvelous story.

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: Coke, Ancient Ice, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

How, asks the reader, is Geotripper going to connect those subjects into a single coherent blog post? I can't speak for "coherent", but I can do it the rest. Just bear with me!

It has a lot to do with the geological richness of Colorado. Things change quickly in the space of few miles as one wanders about the state, and wandering was what we were doing back in July. I called this off-and-on blog series about the trip "vagabonding" because we made a point of not planning our nightly stops more than a day or two in advance, and we had no particular deadlines or goals other than a desire to see Rocky Mountain National Park (which we did), and to take lots and lots of pictures.

In the last post, we had found the headwaters of the Colorado River, and were witness to the appalling destruction wrought by the bark beetles that have killed practically every tree across three million acres of Colorado. We more or less followed the Colorado River downstream, including a return to beautiful Glenwood Canyon, but when we reached Glenwood Springs, we turned south on Highway 82 towards Aspen, and then turned again onto Highway 133 traveling up the Crystal River towards McClure Pass. We stopped for lunch along the river for lunch, and I started snapping pictures of flowers (As usual, I don't know what they are. I thought lupine at first, but up close they don't look like it).

The Crystal River was running high, and quite a few kayakers were having a fine day of it on the whitewater. The weather kept threatening, but for the first time in days it didn't develop into much of a storm.

We were climbing into a high range called the Elk Mountains. They had clearly been glaciated (thus the "ancient ice" in today's title), and Ragged Mountain provided us with a fine view of the upper end of a cirque. A glacier had originated where the snow banks are today, forming steep cliffs by plucking rocks from the upper end of the valley.

The shorter peak on the right is called The Cleaver, and from another angle it provides a nice example of a small cirque and an arete, a saw-toothed ridge that formed between two parallel glaciers (the left side ridge in the picture below).

One never knows what to expect on a new road, and I had not had a chance to read up on the route we were following. Thus, we were surprised to see some odd beehive-shaped ovens along the road at the little village of Redstone. We stopped for a look and found they had been used a century ago to process locally mined coal into coke, a material used in the smelting of iron and steel (you thought I was talking about soda pop in today's title, didn't you?). They had been abandoned fifty years earlier, but local people were working to preserve them, and reconstruct four of them to their original appearance.

There was a sign a short distance up the road pointing us to Hays Creek Falls, so we had to stop there, too (I was wondering how we were going to get anywhere, but that was the point of our trip anyway). Hays was the spelling my family used until the 1920s, but I doubt there was much of a connection. There was a pleasant cascade of water spilling over a series of red sandstone ledges belonging to the Maroon formation, layers that formed in deltas and floodplains around 300 million years ago.

The road started to climb towards McClure Pass, and we had a beautiful panorama of the Elk Mountains and Whitehouse Peak. The town of Marble is tucked just out of sight in the U-shaped canyon (carved by the ice age glaciers). The town got its name from the nearby outcrops of marble that have been quarried for many years. The pure white marble is free of defects, and has been used nationwide for many purposes, including the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and (you guessed it) the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Marble is a metamorphic rock derived from the baking of limestone, which is a sedimentary rock that often forms in warm tropical marine environments. Colorado is not typically a source of high quality marble, but in this instance geological conditions converged to form the beautiful rock. The Elk Mountains originally were composed of thick layers of the Leadville Limestone that formed about 330 million years ago. Much more recently, about 20-30 million years ago, the mountains were invaded by bodies of molten magma, which baked the surrounding limestone into marble.

We reached the top of McClure Pass, and looked back down the canyon we had just negotiated. The wide meadowy area at our feet was the terminus of the glaciers, and we could see the gently sloping hills and plateaus beyond. We realized we had reached the edge of the Rocky Mountain chain. The next few days would be spent on the Colorado Plateau, a region I had been missing a lot. It had been just a bit too many years since I had last explored the region. More in the next post!