Airliner Chronicles: Stuck on a Plane with a Proselytizer...

And really, I felt sorry for the poor guy who was stuck sitting with me on the plane flight from St. Louis to LAX. Oh, I wasn't trying to convert the poor guy into some religion. No, he got the full-court press from me about the importance of understanding what was going on 35,000 feet below us on the ground. He was being proselytized into the world of geology.

People who fly a lot for whatever region may be forgiven for not paying attention to the grand panorama unfolding below them, but to a geologist, the extra dimension is pure gold. Seeing a large swath of the Earth's surface grants a whole new perspective to understanding geological processes.

I didn't have a working GPS on the flight, so I had to guess our location for the first two hours of the flight, somewhere over Missouri, Oklahoma, or Texas. But it was unmistakable that we were over oil and gas country. The drilling rigs and their connecting roads could not be missed. Some politicians once described the "footprint" of oil and gas drilling on a landscape as just a few acres being torn up. Seeing the scene from above suggests that the footprint is "small" in the sense that a spider web is a few strings of dragline silk.

I was lost until the mesas and plateaus appeared. I knew at that point that we were in New Mexico, and I correctly figured out that we passed Sante Fe and Las Vegas, New Mexico. My seatmate, a Pittsburgh resident, got a bit confused about the Las Vegas part; "We're in Nevada already?". I crushed his hopes (that is NOT the way to proselytize, by the way).

The landscape turned into a rainbow of color, and I suddenly knew our precise location better than a GPS unit. We had reached the Painted Desert area of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. A plateau covered by basalt flows was breached by erosion, exposing the brightly colored layers of the Triassic Chinle Formation. The Triassic rocks reveal the beginnings of the dinosaur domination of our planet, and the floodplain and river deposits contain some of the earliest dinosaur species known. There is the wood, of course, and a stunning variety of amphibians and reptiles, including Phytosaurs, huge crocodile-shaped creatures that exceeded 30 feet in length.

Just west of Petrified Forest, I got the finest treat of the day, a perfect view of Meteor Crater. I put the best of the pictures up in yesterday's post.

A short time later, more colorful rocks came into view, but they were older than the Chinle of Petrified Forest. We had reached the Pennsylvanian and Permian rocks of the Supai Group. These rocks are the same ones exposed in the walls of the Grand Canyon, about eighty miles to the north. This is the edge of the Colorado Plateau, where the high flat landscape gives way to the deep fault valleys of the Basin and Range Province. Because the valleys are so deep, erosion eats away at the edge of the plateau, forming scenic deep gorges like Oak Creek Canyon, north of Sedona.

I was distracted by some wildfires burning in the thick forests of the plateau. I finally realized I was missing one of the more extraordinary features of the Colorado Plateau, the San Francisco Peaks Volcanic Field. The field is a vast basalt lava plain populated by hundreds of cinder cones, and an immense stratovolcano that reaches more than 12,000 feet in elevation, the highest point in all of Arizona. The edifice of the San Francisco Peaks has been altered somewhat by erosion; it was once 4,000 feet higher. It would have been the highest point in the lower 48 states.

The existence of the volcanic field is somewhat of an enigma. There's no obvious reason for it being here. There are suggestions that it is the result of an incipient hot spot, but the idea is not wholly accepted. The field is active; an eruption took place less than a thousand years ago.

Somewhere near the end of the flight, my poor beleaguered seatmate asked a geological question. He was wondering why there was a gigantic hole in the ground that wasn't a meteor impact crater. It was an open pit mine, probably for copper. I almost had a convert to the ages of rock!

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.

Geo-Picture-a-Day Week: Houses Made of (Former) Stone, and a Dog

It's day five of geo-picture-a-day week in the Geoblogosphere (thanks to Evelyn at Georneys for the idea), and we've moved on to houses of former stone. Adobe is made of iron-oxide stained clay derived from the erosion of feldspar-rich rocks. The sediments are briefly held together again as an artificial rock for a time while being used as a shelter by humans.

Taos Pueblo is one of the oldest continually inhabited settlements in North America, at around 1,000 years. The Taos Mountains, a sub-range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, rise high above the village.

The village is justly famous, and the buildings are described by some as the most-photographed in the country. The Taos people are quite private, but tourists are allowed to explore some areas around the plaza. It's a fascinating glimpse into the history and prehistory of New Mexico.

Oh, and the dog. A lesson on how to stay cool on a hot summer day...