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: In the Former Realm of Glaciers...Part II, on Trail Ridge

It was the morning of our last day of an all-too-short visit at Rocky Mountain National Park during our vagabonding journey across the 39th parallel. We were now turning towards home, with the intention of crossing the Continental Divide on Trail Ridge Road. It's one of the nation's most spectacular drives, on par with Tioga Pass and Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite, the Beartooth Highway near Yellowstone National Park, or the Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier National Park. It was another day in the former realm of the glaciers, as we drove from the end of the Pleistocene ice rivers to their source at the Continental Divide.

We made a first stop at Moraine Park to see a non-thunderstorming valley (it had been a wild night in the rain). A turn towards the mountain crest (above) gave us a fine view of a u-shaped valley, and a hanging valley. Hanging valleys develop when a larger glacier cuts a deeper trough than a smaller tributary glacier. The valley floor of the smaller glacier sits at a much higher elevation, often resulting in waterfalls or cascades where the drainage enters the deeper valley. In the picture above, the hanging valley is on the upper right hand corner (click on the photo for a larger view).

Rocky knobs in the middle of the valley that have been shaped by the grinding action of the ice are sometimes called roche moutonnées. The name refers to rock "mutton" or fleece (different sources disagree), presumably because the rocky outcrops looked like grazing sheep from a distance. The ice grinds and smooths one side of the rock, and plucks and tears at the other end, producing an asymmetrical outline.

The linear ridge in the picture above is one of the vast piles of debris left behind along the margins of the glacier that filled this valley, which is called Moraine Park. These ridges are called lateral moraines. A terminal moraine also once blocked the end of the valley, forming a shallow moraine lake. Over time the lake filled with sediment and evolved into the meadow we were strolling along. The picture below provides a perspective on the size of the lateral; it's big.

It was time to start up Trail Ridge, the premier park road that traverses the divide between Big Thompson Canyon and Fall River and crosses three passes, Iceberg, Fall River and Milner, to reach the headwaters of the Colorado River on the west side of the park. The road reaches 12,183 feet (3,713 meters). The route provides a bird's-eye view of the birthplace of the glaciers that scoured the high country.

From our first stop on the road, Many Parks Curve, we had a nice panorama of the lateral moraines we had just left in Moraine Park. The moraines surround the linear meadow in the center of the photo below. The park service website for Rocky Mountain has a marvelous interactive page on the glaciation of the park that offers this particular panorama with labels of the glacial features, and a view of this landscape as it would have appeared during the height of the ices ages.

The road climbs relentlessly and we arrived at the next viewpoint, Rainbow Curve. In the distance on the flank of MacGregor Mountain we could see a feature that is often mistaken for a glacial feature, a group of exfoliation domes (below). It would be easy to imagine glaciers overriding and smoothing off the summit of these granite monoliths, but these peaks stood above the ice rivers. The rounded shape of the domes results from unloading, the expansion of the granite as erosion removes the heavy overlying rock. Cracks form parallel to the surface of the rock, causing corners and edges to fall away.

We were so high up now we might as well have been flying (see the photo below). Looking down we could see the other major glacial moraine complex at Horseshoe Park and the long winding switchbacks of Trail Ridge Road on the right. On the left side one can see the tan colored deposits of the "Alluvial Fan", which formed in 1982 when a poorly built earthen reservoir damming Lawn Lake gave way, pouring nearly 30 million gallons of water down the small side canyon. The surging waters filled Horseshoe Park for a time, and killed three people.

Like Moraine Park, Horseshoe Park was once a shallow lake dammed up behind the terminal moraine of the glacier. When the lake filled with sediment, Fall River flowed across a nearly level surface, and the water took a meandering course across the meadow complex. The meander loops are constantly changing as faster flows cause bank erosion on the outer edge of the loops (cutbanks), and deposition on the inside of the loop (point bar). The loops get larger and larger until they breach the meander neck and form a cutoff.

By the time we reached Forest Canyon overlook, we were truly in the land of glaciers. Looking across the canyon, we had an excellent view of the birthplace of a glacier, a curving bowl-shaped valley called a cirque. The cirque in the picture below is on the flank of Terra Tomah Mountain (12,718 feet; 3,876 meters). Cirques develop when enough snow falls on a yearly basis that some survives the summer melting. Year after year the snow accumulates into a permanent snowbank that has been compressed into solid ice. When the ice reaches sufficient thickness, it behaves plastically and starts to flow slowly away from cliffs, plucking out loose boulders and destabilizing the slopes above. Eventually the ice eats into the mountainside enough to form the bowl-shaped valley.

The snowbanks filling the bottom of the cirque in the picture above are not glaciers; the climate has been too warm these last few centuries to allow a glacier to persist at this elevation. Several small glaciers can be found in Rocky Mountain National Park, and we could see what looked like a small one tucked into a higher cirque in Hayden Canyon (below). The bouldery debris below the icefield can be considered a terminal moraine, although the ridged appearance of the rocks may indicate the presence of a rock glacier, a moving icefield that is more or less completely buried by rocks. The park service site mentioned previously offers an interactive interpretation of the sights seen from the Forest Canyon overlook.

Glaciers in alpine environments tend to form extremely rugged terrain (as seen above), but Trail Ridge Road follows a long ridge with rather muted topography characterized by gentle slopes and swales that were never glaciated.  These boulder-strewn fields preserve a relict landscape of the terrain that existed before the ice age glaciers sculpted the ridges and valleys below.

The conditions are fierce at this elevation, with extreme cold for most of the year, and occasional hurricane-force winds. Trees cannot survive here, the only vegetation being low perennials and grasses that can tolerate the short growing season. This kind of tundra environment is more characteristic of northern Canada and Alaska.

At the highest part of the road we passed a herd of elk relaxing in the sun. Once we crossed Milner Pass, we started descending into the Kawuneeche Valley, the headwaters of the Colorado River. A spectacular ridge forms the western side of the valley, the Never Summer Range. The Never Summers are composed in part of much younger plutonic (granitic) rocks than the ancient metamorphic rocks forming the core of the park. The rocks formed in Cenozoic time (25-30 million years ago) during a time of profound change in the American west. The San Andreas fault was beginning to develop, the Sierra Nevada were beginning to rise, and volcanism was sweeping across Nevada and Utah.

We were considering staying at park's other campground at Timber Creek, which seemed to have plenty of openings for some reason (we were able to stay the previous two nights on the east side only because of cancellations by others). We also noticed that although the views of the Never Summer Range were spectacular, something was terribly wrong with the forest. The trees were dead...everywhere. What happened here? That will be the subject of the next post...

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: In the Former Realm of Glaciers...

In the last post, we saw Rocky Mountain National Park turn black, white, and shades of gray during an intense thunderstorm. It was another day on our vagabonding journey across the 39th parallel, a trip that explored the geology across Nevada, Utah and Colorado last July. I've been expounding on our discoveries off and on ever since. We managed to score a campsite for a second night in Rocky Mountain National Park, which gave us time for a short hike into the realm of the glaciers.

Our campsite the first night was in a rocky gorge just downstream of the glacial terminus in Fall River Valley at Aspenglen. The previous day we had experienced a bit of magic on a walk around Bear Lake, one of the most popular stops in the park, and we decided we wanted to explore a bit higher, closer to the origins of the glaciers that once existed in the park.

The short hike to Nymph and Dream Lakes looked like it would do the trick. It shared a trailhead with Bear Lake, but climbed a few hundred feet in a mile to a pair of tarns, rocky basins scoured out by glaciers during the Pleistocene Ice Ages. It didn't take long to arrive at the lily-filled Nymph Lake.

An entire corner of the lake was covered with some kind of water-loving flower with strange stringy petals, whose identity I leave to you, the reader. This is because I am a geologist, who despite knowing hundreds of mineral and rock names, cannot remember the names of more than a dozen flowers or so...

The skyline above the lake was dominated by the tower of Hallett Peak (12,713 feet; 3875 meters), a reasonable example of an almost-horn. A glacial horn is a spiky kind of mountain peak that is surrounded by cliffs caused when glaciers plucked away at the base of the mountain. The Matterhorn in Italy/Switzerland is a famous example. Hallett Peak has indeed been plucked, but a considerable area of the original unglaciated surface still remains on the highest part of the mountain.

From Dream Lake a little higher up the trail, the profile of Hallett was clearer. One can see the u-shaped valley to the right of the peak. Rivers only erode the bottom of a valley, and mass wasting adjusts the valley walls into an V-shape. Glaciers scour the valley walls and the valley bottom, giving the valley a more circular aspect.

I was entranced by another flower (yellow this time; identification welcome!) along the trail.

Walking down the trail, I was more aware of the sweeping view we had to the south towards Longs Peak (14,259 feet; 4346 meters), the highest peak in the park. Glaciers actually had a challenge with the rocks of Rocky Mountain National Park. They consist mainly of hard granite and metamorphic rocks of Proterozoic eon, mostly between 1.7 and 1.4 billion years. The glaciers repeatedly tore away at these rocks during a series of glaciations starting about 2 million years ago and ending only about 13,000 years ago. There is clear evidence of three episodes, but independent climate records (on the ocean floor, for instance) suggest there were many more. A mere handful of glaciers remain, covering only a few acres.

We hiked back down the trail and saw the storm clouds gathering again. We were starting to appreciate just how sunny our hike had been as a second huge thunderstorm enveloped the region. This one was actually more fierce than our storm the previous day, and lasted for hours. We found that our tent had a slight vulnerability to heavy rain, and we watched helplessly as the tent filled with water. Finally, around midnight the storm let up (we had retreated to the car), so I grabbed a towel and cleaned things up as much as I could. In the morning we discovered that our campsite had a stunning view of Longs Peak that we couldn't have seen during the storm of the previous night. Strange lenticular clouds drifted around the summit of the mountain in the early morning.

It was time to cross the Continental Divide and start our homeward journey...in the next post we tackle the Trail Ridge Road.

Vagabonding Across the 39th Parallel: A Day of Black and White in the Rocky Mountains

I love the freedom of association that is geoblogging. Since I am the boss of my own little domain, I can write about something, forget about it for awhile, get distracted, do other things, and when I am ready, I can get back to what I was doing in the first place. And so it is with Vagabonding Across the 39th Parallel. We did a geological transect across Nevada, Utah and Colorado in July, and I've been blogging about our journey off and on since August. At first it was practically a from-the-road report, but now as the fall leaves are turning, it has become a description of a sweet memory of summer past. We had made our way across the Sierra Nevada, successfully traversed the barrens of central Nevada, found a unique valley in Utah, and reached our goal of Rocky Mountain National Park (with 5 other blog entries in between). We were doing things a little bit different than our normal, extensively planned trips. Our rules were:

... we had 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...

When I last blogged on the trip in September we were walking around Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, one of the main tourist destinations on the east side of the park. Later in the day, the clouds built to a menacing degree, and the day turned into black, white, and shades of gray (the pictures below are all actually in color). A storm was brewing...

It had been an unusual summer, with near-record snows persisting well into late July, and high river runoff. During our stay we experienced some intense thundershower activity that caused flooding in nearby parts of Colorado, especially in the Breckenridge area which received something like four inches of rain in one day.

Colorado natives see nothing that unusual in thunderstorms; they happen all the time. But for Californians like ourselves, such storms are a treat (and a little bit scary). We get one or two thunderstorms a year back home, and they don't last long. The storms in Rocky Mountain National Park were loud, raucous, and intense. We parked at Sprague Lake and had walked halfway around when the storm began. We rushed back in the downpour and watched the storm pass by (and kind of hoped that it wasn't pouring this hard back at our camp). It was delightful; I recalled John Muir's memorable and exuberant description of watching a Sierra storm from the top of 100 foot fir tree. I was cowering in a car, though...

Towards sunset, the storm's energy abated, and we went to check our camp, which thankfully had missed the worst of the downpour. It was a beautiful day, even though we were living in a black and white world.

The sun rose the next day and we saw a different world, a world full of color. We had a new day to explore! More in the next post...

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: A Moment of Pure Magic

My ongoing series Vagabonding Across the 39th Parallel is an exploration of the geology and spectacular scenery of our trip across the middle tier states of Nevada, Utah and Colorado back in July. With fall arriving this week, the trip is becoming an ever more distant memory, but some moments stood out that just left me speechless with awe. They were unforgettable

We set out on the road without a real itinerary, just a vague route and ultimate goal of reaching Rocky Mountain National Park, and some personal guidelines: find new things to see, either places that hardly anyone knows, or famous places we haven't been to before. We saw a lot of famous places, but often these places were made special by odd circumstances, like arriving before the crowds, or showing up after they have dispersed. In today's post, light and dark contrasts produced pure magic.

Bear Lake is a modest-sized glacial lake at about 10,000 feet in the central part of Rocky Mountain National Park. It is one of the most popular walks in a park known for wonderful hiking trails. The parking lot fills early in the morning, and a small army of volunteers spend their entire day directing traffic. The lake is scenic, but on this day it was especially so; the air was absolutely still despite the storms looming on the skyline (we would get drenched a short while later). The effect was stunning, and the crowds seemed to realize it. Everyone spoke in whispers along the trail, and kids weren't even tossing rocks into the water. No one seemed to want to break the fragile peace of the still waters. The pictures that follow are the views we got as we strolled around the lake. Click on any of them for a larger version of the picture...enjoy!

 Longs Peak, 14,259 feet, is the highest peak in the park, and dominates the skyline to the south...

I've never seen more perfect reflections on the water of any lake anywhere in all my travels. It was just magical...

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: Setting out on the Road

The ultimate authority (Wikipedia, of course) defines a vagabond as "...an itinerant person. The word is derived from the Latin adjective vagabundus, “inclined to wander”, from the verb vagor, “wander”..." Vagrant and vagrancy are obvious derivatives with negative connotations, but to be an itinerant wanderer sounds appealing to me.

As any reader of this blog would know, I travel a lot. But, seeing as how most of my traveling involves taking students along, I always follow a carefully planned and conducted itinerary. That makes me pretty much the opposite of a vagabond. I've always longed to explore off our route on these trips, but there are a lot of constraints when one is responsible for a large group of people. So, with an open schedule for a few weeks, I decided to try a bit of vagabonding.

Not entirely, of course. We still had to have someone watch the animals, and we occasionally let people know where we were at. We stayed in an occasional hotel when the weather got really bad. We weren't hitch-hiking (can you picture me and Mrs. Geotripper on the side of the road with our giant tent and our thumbs out?)! But we set out on the road with a few vagabonding goals:

...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...

It's a miracle that we got anywhere, given that last item. This wasn't a geology trip, but since geology is everywhere you go, this story is geological, too. When we returned home, I looked at a map and realized that we spent almost all our two weeks pretty close to the 39th parallel, thus the title of this coming blog series. We had a wonderful time; please feel free to join us as we journey across the American West!

If the pictures look a bit familiar, you will realize that I sent several blog posts from the road. The top picture is Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, and the second picture is a herd of wild horses in western Nevada.

Bookends to a Storm: Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park

The calm before the storm; Bear Lake and Longs Peak

Wouldn't you just know that we would decide to go camping in the middle of flash flood-producing storm at  Rocky Mountain National Park...

We had a gorgeous day strolling around an almost eerily calm Bear Lake, but in the late afternoon the sky opened up with a tremendous thunderstorm. We delayed setting up camp, and when we arrived later at our campsite, things were peaceful and the night skies clear.

The next day, the same pattern built up, a late afternoon deluge, followed by a break, so (having moved to a different campsite) we set up camp and lazily had dinner in Estes Park. When we got back, lightning and thunder were rocking the entire valley, and the skies were opening up with all manner of hail, rain, and wind. We found out there were limits to the "waterproofness" of our new tent, termed the Taj MaHayes by my students. We sat in the car for a few hours, and when things finally settled down, we sopped up the mess and dried off as well as we could. We found out later that the storm dropped inches of rain across much of the park and areas south (Breckenridge got nearly 4 inches overnight).

The morning after the storm

Morning brought a beautiful sunrise, and bizarre looking clouds over the summit of Longs Peak, the highest mountain in the park. There were lakes and new channels all over the campsites. The rivers we saw today were overflowing their banks, including the river in Moraine Park, and the Colorado in the Kawuneeche Valley. It's been a neat vacation....