Home From Back of Beyond: Images of a Harsh Country, Part Three

This first photo may recall the disasters unfolding in the American West and Hawai'i with out-of-control wildfires and volcanic eruptions, but in this case it is no disaster. It is was the sunset on the tenth day of our recent exploration of the Colorado Plateau. We had finished our explorations of Arches and Canyonlands National Park and were headed west, towards home. It's funny, the emotions that can arise on a long journey. It felt like we were nearing the end of the trip yet we still had five days and four nights to go, and there were still four national parks on the itinerary. I've put together two previous posts of my favorite shots from the trip, and this is the third and final chapter.

We had been out for a long time, so we gave the students half a day of free time in Moab, Utah to do laundry, shower, and peruse the rock shops. But first we had one other major archaeological stop to make. The sandstone walls of the Colorado River gorge downstream of Moab contain some fascinating petroglyphs. They are cleverly hidden behind a big highway sign that says "Indian Writings".

Having signs pointing to fragile petroglyphs along a busy highway might not seem to be a good preservation strategy, but in this the highway construction itself provided the protection. There was very little space along the river for road construction, so the crews removed many tons of fallen debris to make room, the same debris the original artists stood on to chip out their art. Many of the petroglyphs are now inaccessible, fifteen or twenty feet above the roadway. One of the most unique is the bear, surrounded by hunters with bows and arrows (I think the artist was bragging).

In the afternoon we headed west and south across the barren lands around Green River. The small village is the final settlement for a hundred miles west along Interstate 70. The only settlement to the south is Hanksville, around fifty miles away. We were in one of the most isolated regions of the lower 48 states. Our destination for the night was Goblin Valley State Park on the San Rafael Swell. The sunset was glorious (the first picture of today's post was also taken there).

In Jurassic time an ocean embayment extended south from Canada into the Colorado Plateau region. Called the Sundance Sea, it left behind all manner of tidal flats, delta deposits, and coastal dunes. The Entrada Sandstone displays many of these environments, and erosion has carved the rock into a variety of fascinating shapes. For one, most of the arches of Arches National Park occur in the Entrada. At Goblin Valley, the rocks were more thinly-bedded and produced small mushroom-shaped spires that gave the valley its name. If you are a fan of sci-fi flicks, you may recognize Goblin Valley as the setting for some scenes from Galaxy Quest (the one with the little purple aliens and the rock monster).

Looking south from Goblin Valley we could see the high peaks of the Henry Mountains, often described as the last mountain range in the United States to be discovered and explored (in the 1870s). Like the La Sal Mountains described in the last post, they are laccoliths, mushroom-shaped intrusions of magma. It was at the Henry Mountains that the term laccolith was first proposed by Grove Karl Gilbert, a pioneering American geologist.

Stars. Night after night of the most starlit skies I can remember. We were in the darkest corner of the continent, and our nights for the entire trip had been free of moonlight, but the following day the thinnest crescent moon I could remember ever seeing was setting in the west. I noticed later that this first appearance of the moon on June 14 was the ending of the month of Ramadan.

Our destination the following morning was Bryce Canyon National Park. The Colorado Plateau is a remarkable region because for close to a billion years it had been remarkably stable, remaining at or close to sea level throughout Paleozoic and Mesozoic time. But in the Cenozoic this began to change as the land rose above sea level for the last time. During the early Cenozoic Era (60-40 million years ago) the region around Bryce Canyon was a huge freshwater lake. The resulting pink siltstone an limestone layer is called the Claron Formation.

The rocks of the Claron Formation are cut by vertical fractures called joints, and these fractures allow water and ice to widen the cracks and forming the spires of Bryce Canyon. The rock towers are called hoodoos. Sometimes arches and natural bridges will form during this process (natural bridges cover a watercourse while arches do not). Does anyone want to guess what kind of opening this is in the picture below? (Hint: It's named Natural Bridge)

Bryce Canyon is an exceedingly popular national park. Besides the spectacular scenery, it lies in close proximity to Zion and Grand Canyon National Parks and thus makes a "grand triangle" of a tour so beloved by bus companies and tourists on a time budget. The popularity combined with the rush that most people are in to get to the most possible localities means that certain parts of the park are more impacted than others. The free trams go to the most crowded parking lots, and the entire south end of the park tends to be far less crowded and hectic (at least in my experience). If you ever visit, make every effort to go beyond Inspiration Point and see Rainbow Point and the many other pullouts. It will take you no longer to see them than it will to wait for a parking spot to open up at the more popular viewpoints.

By the time we left Bryce that afternoon we were making serious mileage towards home. We crossed the deserts of western Utah and arrived at one of my favorite national parks of all: Great Basin. The park is not a basin, it's a mountain range, the Snake Range. It was established in 1986, although a small portion, Lehman Caves, was made a national monument in 1922. The political journey leading to the establishment of the park was different than most. As I came to understand it (and please, provide some insight in the comments if I have this wrong), there was a desire to have a national park representing the best of the Basin and Range geologic province, but promoters were split between three possible locales! There was the Toiyabe Range in central Nevada, the Ruby Range/East Humboldt Range in the northwest part of the state, and the Snake Range, which got the eventual nod. Purists supported the Toiyabe Range because it best exemplified the unique ecosystems of the Great Basin whereas the other two showed more affinities for Rocky Mountain flora. It was an interesting problem because the Ruby Mountains and Snake Range offered more "normal" mountain scenery along with glacial lakes. They really are a bit more like the Rockies. I suspect that the Snake Range got the nod because it already had the infrastructure for a national park (an extant visitor center, for instance), it had Lehman Cave as a centerpiece, but it also had Nevada's only glacier, and a forest of Bristlecone Pines, the oldest living organisms on the planet.

The park also protects Wheeler Peak (13,063 feet), which is the highest peak entirely within the boundaries of the state of Nevada (the actual high point, Boundary Peak, is a spur on the ridge of a higher peak in California, and it is only about 50 feet higher than Wheeler). There is a spectacular ridge-hugging paved road that reaches the main trailheads at over 10,000 feet.

Great Basin is one of my favorites because it still retains the character of what most national parks once were: havens of serenity and wilderness. The park is generally uncrowded (except for the lines at the visitor center for cavern tour tickets), and mostly undeveloped. There are roads and campgrounds, for instance, but many of the roads are unpaved, and the campgrounds are old style: vault toilets, and no hook-ups. The last time I checked, the campfire programs were actually done around campfires, without screens and PowerPoint presentations. I hesitate to even tell you about this because you might want to go and see it, and it will get crowded like all the rest. Just kidding, go see it. It's beautiful, and the caverns are wonderful too.

The next day was a long drive across Nevada, and we had one more night, staying at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. It's a fascinating place and I would describe it in detail, but I took few pictures, and this post is all about my favorite shots from the trip (you can read some details in this post from a previous trip). The next morning we were homebound and quickly crossed the western desert hills of Nevada. We crossed Anchorite Pass and rolled into our home state of California  In a matter of minutes Mono Lake came into view. We took a break at the Interagency Visitor Center at Lee Vining.

Mono Lake is a singular ecosystem in California, like no other place in the state. It occupies a large tectonic basin, meaning it has no (current) natural outlet. Lots of water flows into the lake via streams from the adjacent Sierra Nevada, but the only way water can leave is by way of evaporation. Because of this, the salt content of the lake is three times that of seawater. Few organisms can survive such conditions, so the ecosystem is pretty straightforward: some algae, trillions of brine shrimp, trillions of brine flies, and millions of migratory and resident bird species. Mono Lake is one of the most important stops on the Pacific migratory flyway.

Unfortunately humans always find a way to muck things up, and Los Angeles worked really hard to mess up this system. It involved building a 200 mile-long aqueduct and an eleven mile-long tunnel under a series of volcanoes to siphon off water from the tributaries that drain into Mono Lake. When the city closed off the streams in 1941 Mono Lake began drying up and lost 45 feet of elevation. The salinity drastically increased, threatening to kill off the shrimp. Lawsuits dragged on for years, but now an agreement is in place to raise the lake to a sustainable level. If only the California drought would cooperate...

The day we arrived the lake was (for me) an unusual shade of turquoise. The clouds were a sight as well. There had been not a great many clouds during our trip. The lack of rain was nice, but the entire route of our trip has been in the grip of an exceptionally severe drought. We wouldn't have minded a drencher if it could have helped.

Our final national park of the trip was in some ways the most familiar, but we didn't see it from a normal angle. Something like 90% of the people who visit Yosemite National Park go to the iconic valley, but the valley makes up only 7 square miles of a 1,000 square mile park. We entered the park at Tioga Pass (9,945 feet) and drove through the alpine meadows of the upper Tuolumne River. After more than 3,000 miles of barren desert environments, the greenery was stunning. We made a final lecture stop at Olmsted Point, which provided a unique view of Half Dome, from upstream.

But that was it. Once everyone realized that we had crossed the headwaters of the river that flows through our community, there was no slowing down. Homesickness is a powerful emotion and it was almost as if our vans took on a life of their own as we rolled down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada to the end of our journey. Like crazed tourists, we had visited 10 national parks, 9 national monuments and recreation areas, and maybe a dozen state parks. We had traversed a geological history encompassing 1.7 billion years of geological events and thousands of years of human history. All it took was 15 days, 3,700 miles, and a great group of students and volunteers!

Come join us some time in the future. We're headed to the Cascades this fall with a five day trip to Mt. Shasta, Lava Beds National Monument, Lassen Volcanic National Park, and McArthur-Burney Falls State Park. Contact me for details...

Leaving the Abandoned Lands for Greener Pastures: Wrapping up a Tour of the Colorado Plateau

We'd been on the road for a while, back in June of 2012. Our tour of the Abandoned Lands had taken us on a grand loop that included Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, the pueblos of New Mexico, the Jemez Caldera, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Arches, Canyonlands, and Bryce Canyon National Park. 35 of us had been living as a slightly dysfunctional family for the last 15 days, with all the excitement and frustration that such expeditions entail. We were now leaving the Colorado Plateau and making a three day journey home through a part of the country that has been, if anything, even more abandoned than the Plateau: the Basin and Range Province.

After our day of exploring Bryce Canyon, we moved down the highway to Zion National Park for our last evening in Utah. In the morning, we learned about some of the spectacular geology of the wonderful park, and our students were given several hours of free time to hike in the upper canyon. I'd like to show you an entire album of beautiful pictures of one of our most beautiful national parks, but to tell the unvarnished truth...I was tired and worn out! I had explored Zion four weeks earlier, and on this particular morning, I really wanted a...normal breakfast. Mrs. Geotripper and I went down to Springdale, and while the others were struggling up Angel's Landing, or slogging up the river in the Virgin Narrows, we sat sipping mocha and luxuriating our way through a couple of delicious breaksfast burritos at the Cafe Soleil. We were also doing something that had been well nigh impossible for most of the last two weeks: we went online. I even managed a short post that day.

Things were going well enough, and we were just a bit behind schedule after visiting the very cool Dinosaur Trackway museum in St. George. Then things kind of fell apart...

2012 had been a horrific drought year, and for much of our trip, brushfires had been a companion, either in plain sight on the distant hills, or far beyond the horizon. On this day, the fires were a lot closer. It was burning next to I-15 between St. George and Cedar City. And it brought traffic to a dead standstill in the 105 degree heat. Ultimately one of our vans stalled (the food van!), and one of our party ended up in the emergency room with smoke inhalation problems. We were three hours away from our destination and the sun was setting. Ultimately, we left the van and several of our party in Cedar City for the night, and the rest of us headed to Great Basin National Park, arriving at our campsite around midnight.

A new sunrise is a wonderful thing, bringing as it does the promise of a different day. We were in Great Basin National Park, a park with no basin, but with lots of other neat things. The park was established in 1986 to preserve a representative part of the Basin and Range province. It includes Nevada's highest entire mountain (sure, Boundary Peak is a bit higher, but it's mostly in California), a forest that included the oldest living thing on the planet (a bristlecone pine), Nevada's only glacier, and a marvelous limestone cavern: Lehman Cave.

We took the tour of the cavern, which is in good shape for a cave that has been known and explored for more than a century. Some areas were damaged by the early visitors, but most rooms are decorated with a fine variety of speleothems (an overall term for stalactites, stalagmites, columns and all the other features found in caverns).

Those who vandalize caverns usually concentrate on stalactites and soda straws, the speleothems which hang from the ceiling of the cave. Stalagmites, which grow from the floor upwards are sometimes passed over in the less visited caves by souvenir hunters. There are some fine ones in the depths of Lehman (below).

Columns are harder to break apart, and don't look as "cool" in a cave vandal's collection. Some fantastic columns remain in pristine condition at Lehman Cave. Don't get me wrong...people who vandalize and steal from caves are criminals, plain and simple. It's just that in the earlier days, tourists were encouraged to collect a souvenir of their trip. There were so many stalactites in newly discovered caves that it hardly seemed to hurt anything to break off a few. Until they were gone, that is, and a great many holes exist today that were once beautiful caverns in the past.

Lehman Cave is especially noted for the number (300+) of shields. The origin of these disc-shaped speleothems is somewhat enigmatic, and they are not present in most caves. Shields actually usually include two shields with a flat open surface between them (kind of like cymbals).

After our tour, we set out across the Great Basin, on America's so-called "Loneliest Highway". We detoured briefly to look for garnets at the imaginatively named Garnet Hill near Ely, Nevada. We spent a night at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park outside of Gabbs, Nevada, and the next day we were home, via Mono Lake and Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park (see here for a description of the sights along that highway; we passed this way in 2011 and I wrote all about it).

And so it was that we too abandoned the Abandoned Lands, but not without developing an understanding of the why the land drew people, and why they left it. There are plenty of lessons for us today in this country, both in the 2 billion year geological history, and in the 12,000 year human history. People inhabit this landscape today, but most can only do so because of the importation of food and energy from elsewhere. What happens when the fuel runs short?  What happens when the years-long drought becomes a decades-long drought? What happens when the water, especially in the Colorado River, is down to a relative trickle? It's beyond ironic that the most precious resource in this arid land is the most important export, slaking the thirst of cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles and the farms of the Imperial Valley of California. So many questions...

I hope you've enjoyed this blog series! I'll be trying to get all the posts compiled in one place if you are at all interested in catching the flow of the journey.

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 Park without its Namesake, and an "Oh, s**t" moment in Science

What is it that this park is missing?

Our next destination, as we went vagabonding across the 39th parallel, was one of our country's more unusual national parks. Unusual? We have lots of unusual national parks; they preserve unique natural and historical landmarks all over the place. But what about a park that doesn't preserve what it is named after? A park that sort of won a lottery to get chosen as a park in the first place? Great Basin National Park has an unusual history. Click on the picture above, and the one below (click a second time to magnify the panorama) to get a sweeping view of one of our newer national parks.

The answer is in this picture somewhere...

My first paragraph is not meant to disparage the park; it is actually one of my favorites, and the park and I go back pretty far in time. I visited the area in 1984, two years before the national park designation was passed by Congress and affirmed by Ronald Reagan (that by itself is a surprise). I've been back 15 or 20 times since then. It has some things that many other national parks lack: solitude and crystal-clear skies. The number of visitors at Yosemite Valley during just three days this last June equals the number of visitors in an entire year at Great Basin. At the beginning, there were more cows in the park on a daily basis than people (that aspect has thankfully changed, however). The park has some intense geology, too.

The centerpiece of the park, and the destination for the vast majority of visitors is Lehman Cave. I discussed Lehman a few weeks back, and the self-imposed rules of our trip required us to do different things than normal. One choice would have been to explore one of the other 25 caves in the park but we definitely were not prepared for such an undertaking. There is also a spectacular limestone arch in the southern part of the park, but we just didn't have the time this trip. We headed up to the end of the road beneath the cliffs of Wheeler Peak.

On the way up, we had a marvelous view of the northern part of the Snake Range and Mt. Moriah (12,072 feet). An impressive detachment fault system is exposed on the flanks of the mountain, and is the destination for numerous geology field camp mapping expeditions.

Mt. Moriah and the Northern Snake Range

There were numerous prickly pear cacti growing along the roadside. The ecosystem of Great Basin National Park is changing. For more than a century, cattle grazing took place within the area that would become the park. The political compromise that led to the formation of the park included a provision that grazing would continue unimpeded, but eventually an agreement was reached with the grazing leaseholders that removed cows from the park (and gave the ranchers allotments elsewhere). This was a nice change. The first few years, camping was smelly, and one had watch where one stepped.

The removal of cows from the park has meant that riparian habitats have begun to recover, and the vegetation cover on the mountain slopes has been changing. Eventually, the deer, and perhaps bighorn and elk, will become the dominant grazers. I don't know how the cacti will do; they usually thrive in cow landscapes, but I don't know if they compete well in other situations. They sure are pretty when they are blooming!

Prickly Pear Cactus

Great Basin has a diverse collection of trees, including spruce, fir and ponderosa that indicate connections with the Rocky Mountains. The Great Basin has other trees that are more characteristic, such as Pinyon Pine, Utah Juniper, and a personal favorite, Mountain Mahogany. Mahogany is barely a tree, really, more like a very woody and tall shrub. But when I am high on a mountainside in the Great Basin, the odor of the mahogany is distinctive, and invariably brings back pleasant memories.

Mountain Mahogany

The road ends at a small campground and trailhead at about 10,000 feet. We wandered along the nature trail beneath the high glaciated limestone cliffs and enjoyed the late spring. Snowbanks were still melting and little rivulets were flowing everywhere.

Wheeler Peak (13,063 feet) is the second highest peak in Nevada. Unlike Boundary Peak, which I discussed in the last post, Wheeler is entirely within Nevada, and it is a dominating presence in the region. I think Nevada should just trade Boundary Peak to California for another casino somewhere and celebrate Wheeler as their distinctive mountain. It has a lot of geological personality.

Wheeler Peak

There was a beautiful collection of Shooting Stars in the meadow along the trail...

Shooting Star

We started back down the road, and stopped for a moment at Mather Overlook, at just over 9,000 feet. Mather provides a wonderful perspective of the cirque containing Nevada's only glacier/rock glacier/permanent ice field, depending on how you want to define such things.

Wheeler Peak from Mather Overlook

The glacier, the cave, the prominent peak, the arch, they all add up to a unique park that nicely represents Nevada's Basin and Range Province. The only thing it seems to lack one thing: a basin. Why call it Great Basin National Park, if it doesn't have a basin? The answer is mildly convoluted, so bear with me.

First of all, the "Great Basin" refers to the hydrologic province that covers practically all of Nevada, in which no water flows into the Pacific Ocean. The water from the three hundred or so mountain ranges in the state flows into the adjacent basins and either sinks into the ground or evaporates. There is no "great basin" as such; Nevada is probably the most mountainous state in the union. The Basin and Range Province covers some of the same territory, but is a much larger landscape that spills over into Utah and Arizona.

There was a movement decades ago to designate a park that could represent Nevada's unique landscape. Death Valley National Monument (a monument at the time; today it is a national park) preserved the driest and lowest parts of the province, but Death Valley is in California, and one could not mistake the barren peaks and valleys as being similar to the typical mountains of Nevada. At first, they couldn't quite decide which mountain range should be preserved. As I understand it, three ranges were finalists: the Toiyabe Range near Austin, the Ruby-East Humbold Range near Wells, and the Snake Range, which was eventually chosen. I think any of these would have been a great choice, and I would even ask: Why not all three?

The Ruby-East Humboldt is a high glaciated range with some lakes, and a wildlife refuge on the adjacent lake on the valley floor. The Toiyabes are more typical of the Basin and Range, in that while very high, there was little in the way of glaciation, and little connection with the Rocky Mountains or Sierra; the forests are primarily pinyon, juniper and mahogany. Both of these mountains are rugged and beautiful. But the Snake Range won out in the end, perhaps because the National Park Service already had a presence with Lehman Cave National Monument.

But the new park ended up not having a 'basin' in it. An appropriate park designation would have included the adjacent valley floors and even another mountain range (the Schell Creek range, perhaps) to preserve a complete example of the province. The central focus of Death Valley, for instance, is the valley floor. The original boundaries were much larger, in fact. Because of political realities (an anti-environment president was in office, and the "Sagebrush Rebellion" was in full swing), the proposed boundaries shrank until they were palatable to the Republican legislators (the compromise included the grazing exception as well). Wouldn't it have been nice to see what at least one major valley in Nevada looked like without cattle grazing? Imagine, for instance, what other animals visitors could enjoy. The valley floor would also preserve more cultural features. The remains of the westernmost known Fremont Culture village is found close to Great Basin National Park (the Baker Archaeological Site).

Why isn't this valley part of Great Basin National Park?

We were done with our exploration of Great Basin, and we set out on Utah 21 to Milford. In a matter of minutes, we could see a herd of non-cow animals in the distance. We stopped and pulled out the zoom lens. They were pronghorns!

It would be so nice if this were part of Great Basin National Park. There is value in the barren arid landscape, too. It's part of the complete ecosystem that makes up the Basin and Range Province, and a portion should be preserved.

Picture by Mrs. Geotripper

Oh yeah...my title alluded to an "Oh s**t moment in science (I'm still striving, hard, to keep my blog family friendly, but the word is so appropriate here). Another wonderful and distinctive aspect to Great Basin National Park are the Bristlecone Pines. These trees cling to life on the highest slopes of Wheeler Peak and other mountains in Basin and Range. They are small trees, and live up here because they can't compete well in lower, warmer climates. But if you want to talk about persistence and tenacity, these trees stand alone. They can live for thousands of years, and a tree in the White Mountains of California has survived for 4,700 years, the oldest non-clonal life form on the planet.

The bad moment? Back in the 1960's Donald Curry (a graduate student who went on to a very distinguished academic career) was working on efforts at tree-ring dating and determining the timing of the "Little Ice Age". He was coring bristlecones in what would later become Great Basin National Park. His coring tool broke, and he asked permission to cut down the tree to retrieve the data from the tree rings. The forest service decided the tree was not significant and gave him permission to do so. They cut down the tree, and analyzed the rings. To their abject horror, they discovered they had just killed the oldest living organism on the planet, perhaps several hundred years older than the Methuselah Tree in the White Mountains.

What a thing to be remembered for. To his credit, Curry advocated for the establishment of Great Basin National Park.

A bristlecone snag in the White Mountains. Even after death, the wood may resist decay for thousands of years.

Another geoblogger who spends time at Great Basin National Park is Silver Fox over at Looking for Detachment. Check out some of her posts; there's some excellent writing there...

A Convergence of Wonders: A Compilation

The trip I called the Convergence of Wonders was a combined geology and archaeology course that we conducted on June 15-30, 2011, in which we explored the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains. Our students and volunteers traveled more than 4,500 miles through regions that have been influenced by convergence along the Cascadia and related subduction zones, as well as a hot spot and continental divergence. Each day revealed stunning geological features and insights into the human occupation of the region over the last 13,000 years or more. This is a compilation of all of the blog entries I posted about the trip.



"Journeys in the Pacific Northwest" was the introductory post about the series, and provided some background about why we did the trip we did, and what our goals were. 





"Journeys in the Pacific Northwest, Day 1" was the story of the trip from home to our first camp at Lava Beds National Monument on the night of the full moon. En route, we explored the flanks of Mt. Shasta, the largest stratovolcano in the Cascades, and found out that a record snowpack and late spring was going to be a problem on this trip.

"Day 2, Lava Beds and Newberry Caldera" includes our exploration of Lava Beds National Monument, including the extensive lava tube system, an incredible panel of petroglyphs, and the site of the last war between the federal government and Native Americans in California. Late in the day, we visited an obsidian dome in Newberry caldera.

"Day 3, Crossing the Subduction Zone" chronicled our passage across the Cascades to the Washington coast at the mouth of the Columbia River at Cape Disappointment State Park. Smith Rock State Park in Oregon was an incredibly scenic view into the heart of a rhyolite caldera eruption, and our day ended looking pillow basalts from the floor of the Pacific Ocean floor. In between, we checked out an excavation taking place at Fort Vancouver.

"Day 4: Cape Disappointment and Real Disappointments" was the story of weather-related disappointments. The skies opened up throughout the day, including along the flanks of Mt. St. Helens, which was to be the centerpiece of our exploration. The mountain remained invisible in the clouds. The sun emerged, of course, but not until we were far beyond the crest of the Cascades and almost to our camp in Yakima.

"Day 5: In the Land of the Great Flood" was a narrative of our passage across the wastelands produced by a series of catastrophic floods that defy human imagination. At Dry Falls, we looked at canyons (the coulees) that were carved in a few days or weeks of remarkable "river" flows hundreds of feet deep. We also had a chance to see the Wenas Creek Mammoth at Central Washington University.

"Day 6: In the Land of the Great Draining" was an exploration of the lands where the floodwaters originated: glacial Lake Missoula. We traversed a barren valley (the Camas Prairie) where ripplemarks thirty feet high convinced many geologists of the occurrence of the Spokane Floods. We arrived in beautiful Glacier National Park at the end of the day, and were greeted with an incredible rainbow.

"Day 7: Of Time and Pressure in Glacier National Park" found us at the Canadian border where we started an exploration of Glacier National Park, at least the parts that were not still snowbound. We checked out the Lewis Overthrust, and examined the Proterozoic sedimentary rocks that make up much of the park.

"Day 8: Of Time, Pressure, and the Plain Truth" found us out on the Great Plains east of Glacier. We toured the Museum of the Plains Indians in Browning, and worked our way past numerous thrust sheets in Sun Canyon, where convergence pushed numerous fault slices over one another. We also checked out some exhibits on some of the most famous discoveries concerning dinosaurs at Choteau, Montana.

"Day 9: Into the Depths of the Crust, and of Time" discusses one of the most spectacular roads in America, the Beartooth Highway from Red Lodge to Yellowstone National Park. We also checked out the Stillwater Mine, where platinum and other rare minerals are produced. The outcrops we were traversing including some of the most ancient rocks on the continent.

"Day 10: Explorations of a Real Hot Spot" was just that...a tour of Yellowstone National Park, one of the crown jewels of the National Park System. We explored Yellowstone Falls, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Mammoth Hot Springs, and Norris Geyser Basin. The highlight for many of us was the witnessing of a wolf competing with a raven at a kill site.

"Day 11: The Orange Steam is OK, but the Blue Stuff Will Kill You" was a further exploration of Yellowstone, with visits to Grand Prismatic Hot Spring, and the famous geysers in Upper Basin (yeah, Old Faithful was spouting off, but I was watching Beehive). We ended the day in Grand Teton National Park.

"Day 12: A Richness of Geological Drama at Grand Teton (and Pelicans)" was a beautiful day of exploration in the Grand Tetons. We also checked out the Gros Ventre Slide, one of the most famous slope failures in the United States.

"Day 13: Hidden Treasures and Hazards on the Road in Western Wyoming" saw us beginning the long journey home. We checked out the Game Creek Archaeological Site and Fossil Butte National Monument, and saw a lot of sagebrush as we made our way south into Utah...

"Day 14: Treasures Discovered and Lost in Nine Mile Canyon" chronicles an expedition through seventy-mile long Nine Mile Canyon, a showcase of Fremont Culture artwork and archaeological sites. The canyon is also a site of controversy, as heavy industry is mining natural gas in the area, with profound effects in the canyon itself. Later in the day, we saw the Dinosaur Museum in Price, and ended the day searching for Topaz crystals in the western Utah desert.

"Day 15: We Go Underground in Great Basin" saw us making a 500 mile journey across the Basin and Range Province, with a stop at Great Basin National Park for a tour of Lehman Cave, and a stop at Garnet Hill, for, eh, garnets. A motorcycle accident caused us to arrive in a spooky camp at 11:00 PM.

"Day 16: Our Home Mountains, Giant Swimming Reptiles, and a Bunny" was our last day on the road. We checked out the bizarre Mesozoic creatures at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada, Mono Lake in eastern California, and Yosemite National Park in our backyard before arriving at the end our journey.