A Maybe Not So Hard Quiz...Where Are We?

We are in a national park...it is perhaps the most geological park in the entire National Park System. The park contains rocks from every major era, ranging in age from as much as 2.3 billion years ago, including perhaps the most complete Paleozoic sequence of rocks found anywhere (something like 20,000 feet of Paleozoic rocks, including formations from each period), rocks from the Mesozoic (including plutonic granitic rocks), and a sequence of early Cenozoic sediments known for their mammalian fossils. The youngest rocks in the park may be only a few hundred years old.

The park includes gorges 3,000 feet deep that cross mountain ranges, and a waterfall (I know "waterfall" in a national park might seem not unusual, but it is unusual in this park). The relief of the park (the difference between the highest and lowest points) is more than 11,000 feet.

The park is so extensive and intricate, one could explore it for years and continue to find new treasures. So where are we? And what is giving away the answer?

Up a Creek in Yosemite Valley, and a Wee Mystery For You......

I was in Yosemite Valley yesterday, and it was just gorgeous. I was conducting a field trip for my earth science class (oh, the torture; a required field trip...to Yosemite!), but had a few moments as the class was making their way from one end of the valley to the other to see the effects of the 1996 Happy Isles rock fall. I decided to do something new, and follow the Merced River as much as I could from Sentinel Bridge to Happy Isles.

Following the banks of the river is not as easy as it might seem. Not so much from inaccessibility, since the valley is flat, but because decades of overuse has severely impacted the bank vegetation, and the national park service is trying to limit the trampling of grasses and saplings by closing off parts of the river to foot traffic. The problem isn't as severe in the river channel itself (the gravel and rocks are rearranged every time the river floods), so I was able to see quite a bit of new territory by staying next to the water. And...I practically had the river to myself. There were only a few photographers about.

It's not like I was exploring a virgin wilderness, mind you. The picture above was the wide beach in front of the Curry Village canvas tent village. Had this been a summer day, this spot would have resembled a crowd on southern California beach. But today it was deserted; the village is closed down, either for the season or for the hantavirus scare.

The beach is not so much sandy as it is pebbly. I enjoyed getting on hands and knees to see the plutonic rocks up close and personal. Although the rocks of the Sierra Nevada are described as "granite", it would be more correct to say that they are "granitic". A look at a geologic map of the region shows a variety of rocks that formed the same way that granite does (magma cooling slowly deep in the crust), but which have a variety of names based on the proportions of feldspar, quartz and dark iron-bearing minerals like biotite mica: diorite, quartz monzonite, granodiorite, tonalite, and gabbro. The "average" Sierra rock is more like granodiorite than granite. The area upstream of Curry Village is dominated by the Half Dome granodiorite, which at 86-88 million years is one of the younger intrusive rocks of the Sierra Nevada.

I promised a wee mystery. And it is "wee"...

What is wrong with the following two images???

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: A Little Mystery on the North Rim

A little mystery question for the day...

Last July Mrs. Geotripper and I embarked on a vagabonding adventure across the 39th parallel through a number of southwestern states, and we made our rule to not make plans more than a day or two in advance. That meant we often ended up in places that were full of unexpected surprises and delightful scenery. Sometimes there was sadness, as when we saw mile after mile of exfoliated forests in central Colorado.

On this particular day we reached a road and a place that I had never before been. It was the North Rim of a national park, and at this particular national park, the North Rim receives far fewer visitors than the South Rim. It's a really deep canyon, the interior of which contains some of the oldest rocks to be found anywhere in the southwest. Those older rocks are overlain by horizontal sequence of much younger sedimentary rocks. The boundary between the two is a profound unconformity representing the passage of more than a billion years.

So the mystery of the day is: Where in the world were we?

Here is your clue, a path leading to the edge of the precipice.