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

Sunset through wildfire smoke at Arches National Park, Utah

If you are familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia, you will remember the novel where the children go through the wardrobe into a magical world and live out their lives to adulthood. At the end of the story they step through the wardrobe back into our world where they are once again children. Little actual time had passed. A journey through alien lands like those of the Colorado Plateau is much the same. One can work and sleep and study and weeks will pass and little will change in one's life. Then, you are ripped away from everyday life and spend two weeks exploring corners of the world that you barely believed existed and each day, each hour is a life-changing experience. More happens in just two weeks than will happen in months or years of an everyday life.

The Rings Trail through Banshee Canyon in the Mojave National Preserve

I've been doing trips like this across the Colorado Plateau for 34 years now, and each one has been unique. There have been new insights and new discoveries every time. Sometimes there have been scary moments, and there have been moments of inspiration and beauty that border on the sacred. Our journey this year was no exception. I got to know twenty unique people, and we shared some interesting times together. I will no doubt have much to say about the geology and natural history of the places we visited in future blogs, but for the moment, I've gone through my 2,300 pictures and selected some of my favorites. It will take several posts!

The Mojave National Preserve is not actually part of the Colorado Plateau, but we needed a place to stay on the way there, and I can't think of a more interesting spot than Hole-in-the-Wall and Banshee Canyon (above). There's a trail that winds through the bizarre canyon with rings placed in strategic spots to allow access. It's not the plateau, but there is a connection: 18.5 million years ago a colossal rhyolite caldera eruption sent ash drifting across a vast region. The same ash exposed on the Rings Trail is also found on parts of the rim of the Grand Canyon near Peach Springs, Arizona.

The walls of Zion Canyon from Watchman Campground

We spent a night at Zion National Park which is crowded beyond all reason these days. Too many people want to share a very small space, and the experience of seeing the park is diminished by the crowds. The obvious answer is to make more parklands available, but our government is going the opposite direction, unfortunately. Still there are moments of peace and beauty. The red rock country is always more astounding at the beginning and the ending of each day when the canyon walls are lit by the horizon-level sun. I woke up at 5:45AM to see the sunlight on the canyon wall opposite our camp, and all was quiet. I could have been the only person there at that moment for all I could hear.

 The Transcept Trail follows the rim over the Transcept, a deep tributary to Bright Angel Creek which is itself a tributary tot he Colorado River. In any other place a canyon like this would be its own national park.

Grand Canyon National Park is another place where crowding is rampant and the atmosphere is much like Disneyland. But Grand Canyon is a much larger park, and there are many places where one can find peace. For one thing, a person can visit the North Rim, which gets a mere 10% of park visitation. And once there, walk a little bit. I spent an hour one afternoon walking the Transcept Trail, and saw only three or four people. I snapped the shot above from one of the many overlooks along the way.

The view upstream of Navajo Bridge over the Colorado River

The canyons of the Colorado River are rugged, to say the least (the Grand is just one of them). For decades Lee's Ferry was the only crossing for more than two hundred and fifty miles downstream (and almost as much upstream). In 1928 the Navajo Bridge was completed, allowing auto traffic to make the crossing unimpeded. The bridge was not designed for modern trucks and was augmented in the 1990s with a twin bridge of greater strength. The old bridge is now a walkway, and one can stand 700 feet above the Colorado River just a few miles downstream of the old ferry. California Condors soared overhead while we were there. I chose this picture because of the memories it stirred of my incredible journey down the Colorado in 2013 with my brother's family. The bridge was the last recent piece of human architecture we would see for nine or ten days. I was a tiny bit jealous of the rafters passing below, but I was on an epic journey of my own with a bunch of special people.

Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River near Page, Arizona

A short distance up the road was another imposing sight, the Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River. It's just a few miles downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, and was a local secret for a long time. Word is out now and the small dirt parking lot is often overrun with buses and tourists hiking in inappropriate shoes and without hats in the stifling (and dehydration-producing) heat. It is in the process of falling victim to "industrial tourism" as authorities are constructing a parking lot, a concrete pathway, and some fencing at the cliff edge. I guess the "improvements" are necessary, given the stupid chances I saw people taking to get their selfies on the cliff edge.

House on Fire Ruin in Mule Canyon. I photographed the ruin years ago without realizing the presence of the "flames" formed from differential weathering of crossbeds in the sandstone.

My most treasured moment came the next day. We were headed to one of the important cultural sites on the entire Colorado Plateau. A thousand years ago, Cedar Mesa was one of the most critical agricultural landscapes in the entire region, being a thousand feet above the barren deserts of Monument Valley and Mexican Hat, and thousands of feet below the mountains that were coated in snow for much of the winter. It was the sweet spot for growing large yields of beans, squash and maize. For centuries thousands of the Ancestral Pueblo people made the mesa their home, building villages on the mesa top, and cliff dwellings and pithouses in the alcoves just below the rim. They left the region totally in the late 1200s leaving behind thousands of cultural sites that are still only beginning to be assessed and excavated. Five regional tribes consider the lands to be sacred.

Pictographs on sandstone near House on Fire Ruin

The region is public land, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, a chronically underfunded part of the federal government. The archaeological sites have been ravaged by the resident pothunters and grave robbers who live in the region and think that these resources are their own personal cash cow. I read somewhere that around 90% of the known sites have been attacked by pothunters, sometimes using picks and shovels, sometimes with bulldozers. They'll even charter helicopters to fly them into remote sites. With this vandalism in mind, politicians and stakeholders worked for years to propose a national monument, and when Congress failed to act, President Obama made the monument a reality. Bear's Ears National Monument was established in 2016. In an egregious betrayal of the law, the present administration shrunk the monument by 90%. The act is being challenged in court, but mining companies are already staking claims. It's a hideous shame.

Ruins in Mule Canyon

We walked up Mule Canyon listening for the ghosts of those who came before. We found House on Fire ruin, some eerie hand prints on an overhanging rock, and several other incredible ruins (a long way) up the canyon. I walked six miles in the hot sun with not enough water (I don't recommend walking with insufficient amounts of water). It had been around fifteen years since I last traveled up the canyon.

One of my special moments happened as I was waiting for two new tires to be installed after we got a series of flats. Right there in the city limits of Cortez, Colorado there was a little prairie dog town. They ducked every time a car went by.

The picture above needs explanation. That's a cloud, yes, but an unusual one. It's a pyrocumulus cloud, generated by the disastrous La Plata (416) Fire that was burning north of Durango, Colorado. Huge plumes of superheated air rise and cool in the upper atmosphere, condensing to form the gigantic clouds. Unfortunately they don't produce any significant precipitation (wouldn't it be nice if wildfires came with their own extinguishers?). But looking at the drought-induced fire burning beyond the ruins of Mesa Verde caused me to consider the "cycle of life", or more correctly the cycle of human habitation. Many hypotheses concerning the abandonment of the region by the Ancestral Puebloans involve extended droughts and overuse of the available resources. The drought in 1285 AD had lasted around 25 years.

We are currently in another drought that has now lingered for two decades. The Colorado River supplies water for cities and farms across the entire southwest, but the two giant reservoirs that store most of the water are barely half full, and if the drought continues (as predicted by some global warming scenarios), the lakes will become useless pools and cities throughout the region will be in serious trouble as a result. The Ancestral Pueblo people left for wetter climates 700 years ago. What alternatives will the current residents have?

These are my favorite pictures from the first six days of our journey. More will be coming!

Into the Great Unknown: Passing Through the Permian Period

When we pushed the rafts off the beach at Lee's Ferry, my normal sense of time disappeared. For my journey into the Great Unknown, I didn't have a watch, and my smartphone was safely ensconced in one of the vehicles. My laptop never made it beyond Phoenix. Time took on a new meaning.

There was river time. That one is controlled by the sun, mostly. There was twilight and dawn, which guided when one went to bed, or arose. There was star time, the sweep of the Milky Way that told you the stage of the nighttime you had awakened in. There was worst sun time, the baking hot part of the day that often guided the choice of lunch spots. And there was afternoon shadows time, that told us it was time to pick a campsite. 

Then there was geology time. As we descended through the first 80 miles of our river journey, we weren't just following the flow of the river downhill, but were also making our way back in geologic time. As the canyon deepened (or as the cliffs rose higher around us), we were encountering a sequence of successively older and older rocks. The youngest rocks, about 250 million years old, were exposed at Lee's Ferry, and at Mile 80 we would encounter some of the oldest rocks in the canyon, at 1.7-1.8 billion years.

As we started down the river, there were still small waterfalls tumbling off the cliffs, courtesy of the just-ended cloudburst. I was especially entranced by the double fall at Mile 4, which was trickling over ledges of the Kaibab and Toroweap formations. The Kaibab, which is familiar to all visitors at Grand Canyon National Park, forms the rim of the Grand Canyon. It is a sandy limestone that formed in a tropical shallow marine environment that developed at a time when the supercontinent Pangea had come together. The Toroweap Formation is broadly similar to the Kaibab, but is a limey sandstone. The difference might not mean much to non-geologists, but it means much to geologists who are interpreting the environment in which the rock formed. Where the Kaibab formed in offshore shoals and reefs, the Toroweap formed along the sandy coastline. Both formations are highly variable and the Kaibab especially has a rich fossil record, including corals, bryozoans, sponges, clams, gastropods (snails), and the occasional shark tooth.

Within a few million years, 90% or more of the species found as fossils in these rocks (and all other rocks worldwide) would be gone in the greatest extinction event of all geologic history. This event did not involve the dinosaurs; instead, it quite possibly made it possible for the dinosaurs to evolve and rise to dominance in terrestrial environments.

We would see the Kaibab and Toroweap formations at river level for less than 4 miles. They would be visible at times during the rest of the trip, but only as remote cliffs as much as a mile above us. At Mile 4, under another trickling waterfall (below), we crossed the contact between the Toroweap Formation, and dropped into exposures of the Coconino Sandstone. We passed beneath the Navajo Bridges at Mile 4.5, and I knew suddenly that we were indeed beyond all parts of the Colorado River with which I had any familiarity.

The Coconino Sandstone is an extraordinary rock unit. It has a distinctive pattern of crossbedding, a sort of diagonal layer formed as sand cascaded down the slipface of a sand dune. The crossbedding can be seen above just over the river vegetation. It formed in early Permian time as sand dune “sea” in a desert that extended across northern Arizona, New Mexico and southern Utah and extending north as far as present-day Montana. The Coconino preserves more than two dozen kinds of tracks, from large amphibians or reptiles to scorpions or spiders. We didn't see any of them because the Coconino was exposed along the river for only about a mile, and we weren't ready to stop yet.

By Mile 5, we had reached the contact of the Coconino with the underlying Hermit Formation (or Hermit Shale as I learned it). The Hermit is a bright red-brown formation composed primarily of silt and shale that formed in the coastal floodplains of an extensive river system. The rivers were coming from somewhere geologically special, but I'll have to save that for our next post. The Hermit was just the tail end of an important geological event in the region during late Paleozoic time.

People can be forgiven for thinking that the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon. That's true in one sense, but a river can generally only cut downwards, and it cannot account of the vast breadth of the tributaries and side canyons. Once a steep gorge has been carved, instabilities are introduced (i.e. oversteepening of slopes) that leads to mass wasting, in other words, landsliding. Much of the canyon has been produced by a combination of landslides and debris flows/flash floods. We passed numerous examples in the first days of the trip, including the spectacular rockfall consisting of Kaibab, Toroweap and Coconino rocks in the picture below (to the right).

The storm damage was catching up to us as well. Not a tree was visible from Lee's Ferry or on the surrounding cliffs, but as the day progressed, the river became nearly choked with branches, cones and seeds from juniper, pinyon and other trees that grew at the upper end of the Paria River and other tributaries. We didn't have to bail the self-bailing rafts, but I often had to grab handfuls of debris from the boat after getting splashed in a few rapids.

A bit further down the river we saw another recent rockfall...

And at the ten mile mark, we passed the imaginatively named Tenmile Rock, a huge slab of Coconino Sandstone that broke away from the cliff, tumbled down the slope, and landed in the river without quite falling over flat.

It was huge!

The rapids the first day were an introduction to a pattern that would continue throughout the trip. The river flowed placidly through the canyon until we reached a tributary drainage. Debris flows emanating from these side canyons burst into the main channel, partly damming the channel, and pushing the main flow of the Colorado River to one side or another. With the constriction, the river would speed up, and smooth undulations would develop in the top of the rapid, forming a "vee" pointing downstream. The vee was bounded by lateral waves, and at some point the rower would either punch through the laterals (especially in the biggest rapids), or follow through the roller coaster of big waves in the center of the channel.

A series of eddies would form at the base of the rapid (literally a large whirlpool flowing partly upstream), allowing the first boats down a chance to take position in anticipation of assisting anyone ejected from a boat in the midst of the rapid.

The seriously big rapids had special problems, including pour-overs, holes, and exposed boulders that needed to be avoided at all costs. When approaching such rapids, the rowers would pull out, and climb to a vantage point that offered a chance to scout the rapid. A discussion of the best possible run would ensue, and the bigger the rapid, the longer the discussion (and for the rookies, increasing apprehension). An order was picked for the boats and off we would go.

Our first day included two riffles, Paria and Brown, rated 1 or 2 out of 10 on the Colorado Rapids classification system. We also were baptized by two class 5 rapids, Badger and Soap Creek. One thing became abundantly clear: don't take a Colorado River rafting trip if you hate getting wet. Literally every rapid would find a way to douse the passengers in the front of the raft. Mind you, when the temperatures were high, it was a welcome relief, and I generally looked forward to getting soaked! Even the smallest rapids could surprise; we found out later on that a boat flipped in the Paria Riffles a day or two after we came through.

You will also notice that I have few pictures of the rapids. My camera and silty, muddy water don't mix well, so when I heard the roar of a rapid coming up, I would snap a shot or two of rafts going over the edge, and when we got safely to the bottom I would pull the camera out and try to snap a shot or two looking back upstream, such as in the picture above at Soap Creek Rapid.

Our first day, we managed (after the late start) a modest 12.4 miles. We stayed that night at 12.4 Mile Camp (where do they come up with these creative names?). It was a cool evening because of the cloud cover. We knew hotter days would come, so we enjoyed the moderate temperatures. I set up camp, and after a dinner of fresh shrimp and linguini, I hit the sack.

Coming up next: the Roaring Twenties!

Out in America's Never Never: Barriers and the Thin Line of Civilization

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

In math, getting from Point A to Point B is hardly a problem. It's a straight line most of the time, or an arc, determined by some kind of equation. Getting from point A to point B can be a problem in a city, since buildings are often in the way, yet a good map or a vocal GPS unit gives you plenty of routes and choices to avoid traffic and delays.

Out in America's Never Never, the vast desert encompassing the Colorado Plateau and Basin and Range provinces, getting from Point A to Point B becomes a true challenge. Mountains may block the route, as the Forty-Niners found during the California Gold Rush (and earlier settlers like my ancestors, the Donners). There might be flat, open ground between one point and the other, but there might be no water. In a pre-automobile era, that was a serious problem. But out of all these examples the Colorado Plateau has one really impressive barrier: the Colorado River.

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

What's the problem? It's a fair sized river as such things go, the biggest of the American Southwest, but it is hardly a trickle compared to many rivers back east and in the Pacific Northwest. Those rivers were barriers to travel, but numerous ferries and bridges soon solved access problems a long time ago (and numerous boats used the rivers themselves as a highway). The Colorado, though, is a geologically young river. It is rapidly cutting downward through the sedimentary and metamorphic rocks of the recently uplifted continental crust, and the consequence of this is an unnavigable rapid-filled river ensconced in a deep vertical gorge along its entire pathway through the plateau country. Until the Navajo Bridge (above, left) was constructed in 1928 the only place to cross the river between Moab, Utah and Needles, CA, a river distance of 600 miles, was at Lee's Ferry, about five miles upstream of Navajo Bridge (the completion of which put Lee's Ferry out of business). The ferry was the only spot on the river whose approach was not overly complicated by vertical cliffs.

There are more bridges today, but there is still a 300-plus mile stretch between Navajo Bridge and Lake Mead at Hoover Dam where there are no crossings (except the footbridge in Grand Canyon near Phantom Ranch). Travel through the Colorado Plateau country is still complicated by this fact (and frankly, it should remain so).

The paved highways give us a somewhat false sense of easy access, as they must also surmount or circumvent barriers in the landscape formed by river canyons and vertical cliffs. As long as there is gas in the tank, a working air conditioner, and properly tuned engine, we give little thought to how tenuous our control is over our localized environment. A flat tire on a deserted road on a blazing hot day can be life-threatening. And small geological events can have far-ranging consequences.

The original plan for our trip (conceived a year earlier) was to leave the North Rim of Grand Canyon and scoot down the slopes of the East Kaibab Monocline into the Navajo Section of the plateau country. We would cross the Colorado River at Navajo Bridge, turn at Bitter Water onto Highway 89 to Page, Arizona, where we would have a slow-paced tour of Horseshoe Bend, Glen Canyon Dam, and the incredible Antelope Canyon. From there it would be a fairly quick drive to Navajo National Monument, where we would be camping for the night. It was meant to be the most leisurely day of the trip.

Oh well....

The picture above gives a hint about how geology made our day a constant exhausting race against time. The Vermilion Cliffs are a prominent part of the Grand Staircase, revealing early Mesozoic formations, including the Chinle, Wingate and Kayenta. The Chinle, at the base, is composed of easily eroded shale and siltstone, and is subject to slope failure. In the picture above, looking across House Rock Valley, the lower slopes look tilted because they are part of a huge rotational slide.

If you take a big group through this region, you will need to make the camping reservations five or six months in advance, and even at that I nearly missed getting reservations for Arches National Park and the North Rim of Grand Canyon. As such, once the schedule has been established, it can't be easily changed.

But geology can change. Highway 89 from Bitter Water to Page starts out in spectacular fashion, climbing a slope of Chinle to a big cut through the Echo Cliffs, composed of the Wingate, Kayenta and Navajo formations. The view from the upper highway is a stunning panorama of Marble Canyon, the Vermilion Cliffs, and the East Kaibab Monocline that forms the margin of the Kaibab Plateau and Grand Canyon.

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

The problem for the road engineers was getting across the Chinle slopes. The Chinle doesn't like highways on the flatlands (swelling and settling of the clays turns the best planned highways into roller-coasters), but it especially doesn't like roads on slopes.

Ultimately they chose to put the road across an ancient landslide not unlike the one in the Vermilion Cliffs above. It is especially visible in Google earth images, where a white outcrop of Navajo Sandstone can be seen well out of place next to the highway (below).

Source: GoogleEarth

In February, a portion of the old slide gave way, destroying a significant stretch of the highway. This wasn't the kind of slide that could be fixed easily, and the road will be out of service for a long time. The Echo Cliffs constitute a significant barrier to east-west travel, and between Bitter Water and Tuba City, only one dirt road crosses it. The state is in the process of paving the track, but it was nowhere near done when we passed through.

Source: Lee Allison, at http://arizonageology.blogspot.com/2013/03/adot-estimates-35-million-to-repair.html

If we were going to see the Navajo Bridge and the Colorado River, we would need to make a 140 mile detour to get to Page and our other objectives. And then backtrack around 70 miles.We barely made it to our tour appointment at Antelope Canyon at 3 PM. We got to see Horseshoe Bend, but the visit to Glen Canyon was cut very very short, and we didn't reach camp until well after dark.

Source: Arizona Department of Transportation

It was a long day...but spectacular, just the same. More later!

For more information about progress with Highway 89, check out http://www.azdot.gov/us89/