Journeys in the Back of Beyond: Simply Driving to the Bottom of the Grand Canyon (!?)

Running a geology field studies course is nothing if not stressful. Right on the heels of the most intense storm I've experienced on one of these trips, it was morning and we were on the road to the next thing. A simple thing really, just driving down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But I had no way of knowing it would happen, given the storms of the previous night. Had the storm affected the road into the canyon?

 
The Grand Canyon is one of the great spectacles of the Earth. Millions of people every year stand on the edge of the abyss and peer in, taking in the vivid colors and hidden depths. Tens of thousands venture down some of the few trails that reach into the incredible gorge, and several thousand raft the river. But how many drive the canyon? Did you even know you could?
And no, I'm not talking about visiting the canyon "Thelma and Louise" style...

For more than two hundred river miles, no road crosses the Grand Canyon (plus another hundred miles along the shores of Lake Mead). Navajo Bridge near Lee's Ferry is at one end, and Pat Tilman Bridge near Hoover Dam is at the other. In between in the depths of Grand Canyon there is a single road that reaches the river. It's called Diamond Creek Road, and it starts on Hualapai Nation land at Peach Springs, Arizona. It's a marvelous adventure.

The "diamond" that gives the road its name: Diamond Peak

Without even considering the philosophical objections to building roads through the wilderness world of the Grand Canyon (objections I completely agree with), there are staggering engineering barriers. There are a series of formations, including the Redwall Limestone and the Coconino Sandstone that form sheer cliffs. The locations of trails in the Grand Canyon are controlled almost entirely by the few locations where they can surmount the cliffs of these two layers.

At Diamond Creek, the Hurricane Fault has offset the formations in just such a way that the cliffs can be avoided entirely. For the entire twenty mile length of the road, there is nary a cliff to worry about, as the road follows the bottoms of desert arroyos and washes. The biggest worry is flash floods and mudflows, which can easily shut down the road in July and August during the monsoons (and badly inconvenience river rafters who plan to take out at Diamond Creek). Unfortunately, our storm had all the hallmarks of an intense monsoon storm, and for all we knew, the road would be closed, and the whole endeavor moot. We were running late anyway, and I couldn't know the status of the road until we reached the Peach Springs office of the Game and Fish Service of the Hualapai Nation. We got there, and the sign on the door told me the worst...

All my plans dashed. But what can you do but barge your way into the office and see if the road was really closed? And it turned out that their closure was cautionary, the sign left from earlier in the day when no one had checked the road conditions. The road was okay, and I was given the permit to take our group into the canyon (the form interestingly was a permit to trespass on Hualapai land). It was the only permit given that day, and we would have the Grand Canyon to ourselves! We started down the gravel road, the Colorado River twenty miles away.

One can certainly debate the idea that it's "cheating" to drive to the bottom of the canyon, and there is a certain validity that scenery that hasn't been "earned" by completing a stiff hike might end up being less appreciated. But many people can't handle the very strenuous hiking and many simply don't have the time. Driving down into the canyon is a unique opportunity to study the oldest rocks of the canyon, the ones that are the very hardest to access in any other situation.

Diamond Creek cuts through to the Granite Gorge Metamorphic Suite, which is the oldest group of rocks found in the American Southwest, dating to as early as 1.8 billion years ago. At roadside there are marvelous exposures of schist, gneiss, and pegmatite granite with bright shiny crystals of muscovite mica and quartz.

Outcrops of schist intruded by pink pegmatite granite

A bit farther up the canyon one can see the layers of the Tonto Group, a series of three formations called the Tapeats Sandstone, the Bright Angel Shale, and the Muav Limestone. The three layers formed as the Pacific Ocean transgressed and covered much of the western North American continent in Cambrian time, just over 500 million years ago. The Tapeats Sandstone sits atop the rocks of the Granite Gorge Metamorphic Suite.

The Great Unconformity: the vertically oriented rocks in the lower half of the photo are the ancient metamorphic schist and gneiss. Above the metamorphic rocks are horizontal layers of the Tonto Group.

That last sentence needs a bit more explanation. The boundary between the Tapeats and the Granite Gorge rocks is a profound unconformity representing a gap of more than a billion years. This unconformity is actually called the "Great Unconformity", and is an erosional surface that was witness to not one, but two major mountain-building events. The metamorphic rocks were once the core of a vast mountain range that formed 1.7 billion years ago when the North American continent collided with a set of two exotic terranes, the Yavapai block and the Mazatzal block. Imagine an island the size of California or New Zealand grinding into the edge of a continent along a subduction zone and you will get the picture. This massive mountain range eroded to a flat low-relief surface over the next few hundred million years.

The Great Unconformity up close. Dark brown conglomerate of the Tonto Group rests unconformably atop the ancient metamorphic rocks.

Later on, about a billion years ago, the continent stretched and broke apart, forming a series of fault-block mountain ranges that reached heights similar to the mountains in and around Death Valley National Park today. The rocks of these mountains are exposed in the easternmost part of the Grand Canyon, but they too were eventually eroded down to a low-relief surface as well, although small  ridges a few hundred feet high persisted. Along the lower reaches of Diamond Creek Road, you can lay your hand on a boundary between two rock sequences with a gap of more than a billion years between them. The unconformity can be seen in the photo above where a conglomerate rests on contorted metamorphic rocks in the bit of shadowed ledge. The "Diamond" of Diamond Creek is the uniquely shaped peak on the left side of the photograph. It is actually a sliver of rock caught between two branches of the Hurricane fault system.

Another layer that is prominently exposed along Diamond Creek Road is the Devonian-aged Temple Butte Limestone. Most park visitors never see it because in the eastern section of Grand Canyon National Park the Temple Butte is a discontinuous thin layer that is pretty well invisible from the rim. In western Grand Canyon it is more than 700 feet thick. It formed as a tidal estuary and tidal flats along the edge of the continent about 385 million years ago.

Temple Butte cliffs in Diamond Creek

We reached the end of the road where Diamond Creek flows into the Colorado River, the watercourse responsible for carving the Grand Canyon. It was a moment for the students to cavort in the river for a few minutes, and to wonder at the work the river has done. This spot is where many of those who've rafted the river through the Grand Canyon take out, a usually raucous process, but no one was about on this particular day.

The most "mysterious" aspect of Diamond Creek and Peach Springs Canyon is that the tributary canyons to this creek follow illogical pathways, and are actually older than the Grand Canyon itself! It's an odd problem. Along the upper reaches of Peach Springs Canyon, there are a series of Paleocene to Miocene-aged rocks clinging to the canyon walls. They once filled the canyon, meaning the canyon was carved prior to sixty million years ago, and the rivers that carved it flowed northeast, opposite of the Colorado River today. Apparently the land subsided so that the canyons were filled with sediment, and then they were exhumed when the modern Grand Canyon was carved, most likely within the last four or five million years. There has been more than one Grand Canyon carved through the Colorado Plateau!

Peach Springs Canyon  (red) and the odd channels (blue) that were carved millions of years prior to the Grand Canyon itself (they were buried and exhumed when the modern canyon was carved).

Near the bottom of the road we happened upon a Bighorn Sheep. They were once more common and figured prominently in the Ancestral Pueblo petroglyphs found throughout the region. 

Diamond Creek is a fascinating excursion. It is entirely on Hualapai lands, and they charge a fee of around $17 per person for permission to drive the road. I never mind paying the fee, because the tribe doesn't have many sources of income or all that many jobs on the reservation. The town of Peach Springs where the road starts has a very nice motel and restaurant (and not much else), and if you are a train lover, you'll be able to listen to them all night long. The rails are amongst the busiest you'll ever see. The town is on one of the last remaining stretches of the original Route 66.

Our crew was ready to get to camp, so we drove an hour or so to my brother's cabin where we would spend the next three nights.

Wait a minute. Showers, kitchen, hot tub? You call this roughing it?

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!

Heading Out to the Back of Beyond on the Colorado Plateau!

Geotripper may go quiet for a week or two, as I will be on the road with twenty of my best students out on the Colorado Plateau, the incredible region surrounding the Four Corners. I've been dreaming of this trip for a year now, as I had to start making group camping reservations last July! It's getting crowded in some of the places like Grand Canyon and Zion, but I've learned over the years that there are some pretty quiet places out there as well. When I started blogging a decade ago, one of my first ideas was a blog series about the places we visit on our field studies journey. I am reposting the introduction both for my students, but for anyone out there who might be traveling in the region and might want to know a little more about the lands they are passing through.

From July 1, 2008:

Please forgive me for filling the feeds with such a long post, but I wanted to pull together an annotated list of the blog posts of my just completed journey through the geological history of the Colorado Plateau. It turned into a massive project that lasted more than a year, and included seventy different postings and more than a hundred photos. Don't feel compelled to try reading it, but I hope you enjoy it if you do. If it lacks precise continuity and style, remember that I had no idea how it would end when I started it and I had no editor! I've been taking students on the plateau for twenty years, and it has proven to be one of the best places on the planet to learn earth history.

Time Beyond Imagining, the first post back in June of 2008 introducing the concept that would guide the entire series. I had no idea what I was getting into!

Time Beyond Imagining - An Intro to the Colorado Plateau, a first introduction to the sweep of the landscape that I would be covering through the series.

Time Beyond Imagining - The Oldest Rocks on the Colorado Plateau: The oldest rocks are exposed at only a few places, including deep in the Grand Canyon

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 2: A discussion of the 12,000 feet of sediments hidden deep in the depth of the Grand Canyon dated at around 1 billion years

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 3: LIFE!: The first appearance of complex life during the Cambrian Period

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 4: Something is Missing! Journeying up the walls of Grand Canyon through the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian periods

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 5: Seeing Red Looking at the Mississippian Redwall Limestone in Grand Canyon

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 6: Seeing Red (Really!) We rise up through the walls of the Grand Canyon to the Permian rocks of the Supai Group and Hermit Shale

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau, Part 7: Mountains Rise: Permian rocks are exposed throughout the plateau country. We leave the Grand Canyon and explore some of these other places

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Old Salt I was beginning to realize that the project would be longer than I thought. We explore the formation and effects of salt precipitation in Late Paleozoic time

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Sand! A return to the Grand Canyon and the prominent Coconino Sandstone near the rim

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: A Final Transgression Looking at the top two layers in the Grand Canyon and related rocks on other parts of the plateau.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: On to the Grand Staircase An introduction to the Mesozoic history of the plateau country, which lies outside the Grand Canyon. We start exploring the other wonderful parks out there

The Grand Staircase and the Geologic Time Scale A diagram of the Grand Staircase, the younger rocks of the Colorado Plateau

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Into the Triassic An introduction to the widespread Triassic rocks of the Plateau. It would prove to take a number of posts!

Mid-week Mystery Sample: What is it? A short departure to discuss the identity of a Triassic fossil from the plateau. A fairly long discussion followed!

Mid-week Mystery Sample: What is it? Heck if I actually know! I admit to my ignorance...

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Ash and Wood A study of the paleontology of one of our unusual parks: Petrified Forest in Arizona

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: This Yellow is NOT Mellow The Chinle also contains mineable uranium deposits; I wade into the controversy

Leetso, the Yellow Monster A continuation of the heritage of uranium on the plateau

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: The Real Jurassic Parks The Jurassic rocks of the plateau are responsible for much of the spectacular scenery in the region. This was the introduction

The Colorado Plateau Story: the real Jurassic Parks Follows the story of the Kayenta and Wingate formations, and three unique and little known parks: Capitol Reef National Park, and Colorado and Vermillion Cliffs National Monuments.

The Real Jurassic Parks: Navajo! The Navajo Sandstone forms some of the best photography opportunities: this was a discussion of Antelope Canyon, a beautiful slot canyon

Antelope Canyon, A Real Jurassic Park An excuse to show more pictures of Antelope Canyon!

Zion: A Real Jurassic Park First part of look at one of our "crown jewel" national parks

Zion: A Real Jurassic Park, Part 2 A hike to Angels Landing in Zion National Park

The Real Jurassic Parks: Capitol Reef (Oh, and Sheep Blogging) A return to Capitol Reef and an excuse to show off one of my favorite bighorn sheep pictures

The Real Jurassic Parks: The San Rafael Group An introduction to another group of Jurassic formations, including the all-important Entrada Sandstone. A busy semester had begun and posts were becoming sparser at times. I was realizing the project was going to take some time, and I stopped using the word "brief"!

The Real Jurassic Parks: Goblin Valley and the Entrada Sandstone One of Utah's unique and isolated state parks

The Real Jurassic Parks: Kodachrome Basin (and a great resource!) Another fantastic Utah State Park and a link to an e-book on the geology of Utah's parks and monuments

The Real Jurassic Parks: Arches National Park An intro to Arches National Park, one of my personal favorites

The Real Jurassic Parks: Arches National Park, continued. And an Eminent Threat. After several weeks I got back to work with a continued exploration of Arches, and discussed new threats to parks in the region

The Real Jurassic Parks: Where are the Dinosaurs? A look at wonderful Dinosaur National Monument and a rotten political situation there

The REAL Jurassic Parks were really Cretaceous I thought the Jurassic would provide the most posts in the series, and therefore had no idea how long I would spend in the Cretaceous. This was the introduction

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Cedar Mountain Formation The only dinosaur dig I ever took part in was in an early Cretaceous formation in Montana, but it was related to the Colorado Plateau. This post turned into seven part story on our adventure

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Story of a DinoDig Much of the story was trying to get there in the first place: what is geokarma?

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: Every Cloud has a Golden Lining We drive through Yellowstone and arrive at the dig site

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig What we were looking for and why it was important. What is a deinonychus?

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Dino-Digging Begins This is what grunt work is all about

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig wraps up We started finding bones!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Final Discovery We found a dinosaur that invariably is the last entry in a dinosaur dictionary...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The View is Nice but Access is a Problem... Back on the plateau, we are introduced to the remaining Cretaceous rocks and two archaeological parks, Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients National Monuments

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: Walled Cities and Tragedy More on the Canyons of the Ancients and a walled medieval-aged city...in southern Colorado!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Tragedy at Castle Rock Pueblo A haunted place...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Mancos Sea An interesting formation that some geologists curse at...

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Green Table An exploration of the famous cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Black Mesa story I wade into the coal mining controversy and get more comments than any other entry in the series

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: A City in the Wilderness Life had become busy and it was a month before I returned to the plateau with a discussion of Chaco Culture National Historical Park

And The Old World Passed Away... The Geologic History of the Colorado Plateau And another month passed! I tried to find the words to describe the profound events at the end of the Cretaceous Period

Time Beyond Imagining - A not-so-brief History of the Colorado Plateau Another long gap, but I was finally talking about the last 65 million years of Colorado Plateau history with an intro to the crustal deformation that was beginning to effect the region

Time Beyond Imagining - Land of Giant Lakes A discussion of the origin of the rocks at Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks National Monument. I thought I was close to the end, but I was still wrong, after a full year!

Fire Down Below - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau Another month of blogging on other things and I returned to the Cenozoic history of the region with a discussion of the volcanic activity that started to emerge on the plateau, including Shiprock

Fire Down Below II - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau The laccolithic mountains of the plateau country

Fire Down Below III - a Geological History of the Colorado Plateau I find I have almost no pictures of Navajo Mountain despite having driven around it dozens of times...

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape Cenozoic events led to a truly scrambled landscape with a mystery-of-the-day

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape in Unaweep Canyon More mysterious canyons at Unaweep and Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Time Beyond Imagining: A Scrambled Landscape in Colorado An exploration of Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a canyon that shouldn't be there

Time Beyond Imagining - A Really Scrambled Landscape on the Colorado Plateau The opening discussion of one of the great plateau mysteries: why is there a Grand Canyon?

Time Beyond Imagining - Unscrambling History and the Origin of the Grand Canyon The complicated story continues

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau I thought I was almost finished, but found that much happened in the final few million years of the story. This is the story of the San Francisco Peaks Volcanic Field

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau Part 2 A look at the volcanoes in the western Grand Canyon and how they formed massive lakes in the Grand Canyon, some 200 miles long!

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau Pt. 3 The story of a stupendous rhyolite eruption at the Jemez Caldera in New Mexico

Time Almost Beyond Imagining: Who Do the Magic that Hoodoo? My favorite title for a discussion of a unique park near the Jemez Caldera, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau and Deep Time Although I had reached the last million years of a two billion year history, I felt a need to try and describe the immensity of geologic time, using the ruins of Bandelier National Park and the Jemez Caldera

Time Beyond Imagining - Where did the Ancient Enemy Go? The "disappearance" of the Ancestral Pueblo people is explored at Bandelier National Monument

Time Beyond Imagining: Why Can't We Touch the Venus de Milo? Once again, I thought I was done, but found a series of fascinating (to me) stories about research in the limestone caverns on the plateau. I began with a rant about preserving these wonderful caves that took us to Rome and Paris, of all places

Holy Crap, Batman! The Bat Cave is Full of it! Bat Cave in western Grand Canyon, and bat-sh*t. Lots of it, sort of

Holy Smokes, Batman, that crap is on fire! I was saving my best titles to the last, I guess. A horrific crime against science at Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon

Of Rat Pee and Uranium and Scavengers...The Underground Story of the Ice Ages on the Colorado Plateau What the caves on the plateau tell us, and how.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Final Struggle for Life on the Colorado Plateau I imagine the death of the very last mammoth on the Colorado Plateau

Time Beyond Imagining: The End of the Story, or the Beginning? In the final post of the series, I discuss the arrival of humans on the plateau, and how humans change the land they occupy. I also tip my hat to Ken Burns and his series on "The National Parks: America's Greatest Idea". The parks are the laboratories in which I and my students study the history of the earth.

So there you go: 71 posts that tell a story encompassing 2 billion years as it is exposed on a very special part of the earth's surface: the Colorado Plateau, covering parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Congratulations if you ever made it through the whole thing. I never realized I was writing the equivalent of an entire book, but it was a story I truly enjoyed telling, and I also deeply appreciated the feedback that many of you provided.

A Look Back at Ten Years of Geotripping: Dealing with the Dangerous Rays of Death

One of the greatest thrills of digital cameras is how easily they allow the documentation of celestial events. A 60x zoom is telescope grade, and yet is available on cameras costing less than $400. My history with digital cameras began 18 years ago, and their versatility has allowed me to document a large number of astronomical and meteorological phenomena. 2017 was a culmination as I was able to be in place to witness the total eclipse of the sun in August. But leading up to that day, I had put together a post of the what were to me the most fascinating sky events of my life so far. That post appeared on August 3 of last year...

Dealing with the Dangerous Rays of Death: Singular Solar Events I've Seen

Do you ever look at the sun?

Some advice: DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN! You can destroy your eyes!

Good, now that we have that out of the way, what is this post all about? The sun has been on my mind the last few days. I'm preparing for the final adventure of the summer, and it has a lot to do with the sun, most specifically, the only eclipse to cross the lower 48 states since 1979, the first to cross the country in 99 years, and the last to cross the American West until 2045. I got to thinking about the singular events that I've seen over the years that involve the sun in some way or another.

The sun. A diameter of about 860,000 miles, more than 100 times the diameter of the Earth. About 93,000,000 miles away from Earth. Big enough to hold 330,000 Earths. Containing 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. The source of energy that makes life possible on Earth.

The most obvious moments that we might pay attention to the sun are during sunrise and sunset. Every one is different and unique. At those times, the sun is at eye level, and the thickness (and dirtiness) of the atmosphere provide a bit of protection for viewing with the unprotected eye. As the sun passes across the horizon, light is split into bright colors of the spectrum, providing a beautiful spectacle. I've probably taken thousands of sunset and sunrise pictures over the years, but here are two of my favorites, a sunset in Newport California a few years ago (above), and sunrise over Lake Rotorua in New Zealand in 2004 (below). To this day I cannot keep straight my internal compass; I couldn't help but think the sun was rising in the west (it wasn't). Lake Rotorua is one of the world's rare geothermal regions with geysers. Hot springs in the lake account for the steam rising off the water.

A difficult phenomena to see related to sunsets is the green flash. It is a sudden flash of greenish light above the sun at the moment of sunset, and it is said to last only a second or so. As the sun dips into the horizon, the layers of the atmosphere will cause some of the sunlight to be refracted, with red and orange on the lower parts of the disk along with green (and rarely blue) across the top.

It takes some very specific circumstances to see the flash, a clear view to a distant horizon, most often along coastlines. I have relatives on the coast of Oregon, so I've had a fair number of chances to try and capture the moment. I may even have succeeded once or twice.

Rainbows are one of the most familiar optical effects associated with the sun. Most everyone has seen them, so it takes some unique circumstances to really set one apart from others. My favorite moment came with a monsoonal storm on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon last year. I was looking down at a rainbow in the depths of the canyon.

Rainbows involve the splitting of white light from the sun into its component colors of the spectrum. Caves and deep slot canyons provide another sort of splitting, that of the sun's energy into a more or less pinhole of light. I was exploring a lava tube in the Mojave National Preserve a few years back. It was dark inside, but there were a few small skylights, and the early afternoon sun came bursting through like a blast from alien phaser.

One of the more famous places to see beams of light from the sun is in Antelope Canyon, Arizona. A deep slot canyon, Antelope is one of the most popular tourist stops on the Navajo Nation. The sandstone canyon is more than 100 feet deep, and only a few feet wide at the top. One can actually jump across if it were allowed. Tours are offered all day, but one pays a premium around noon for the obvious reason that it's when the sun sends beams of light into the depths of the canyon.

The effect is truly spectacular, although one should be aware that as lonely as these pictures seem, I was shoulder to shoulder with other photographers snapping like crazy.

Another fascinating phenomena occurs when the Moon passes into the Earth's shadow, a lunar eclipse. They are not rare, happening around two times a year, and they can be seen simultaneously across the globe (as long as the moon is visible in the sky). 

Lunar eclipses are fascinating to watch, and it is surprising to realize just how much of the sun's light is reflected from the moon. At totality, the moon practically disappears except for some refracted light around the edge of the Earth. Hundreds of stars become visible that weren't there moments earlier.

In a ridiculous age when science has to convince some people that the Earth is not actually flat, a lunar eclipse can help. The Earth casts a circular shadow across the surface of the Moon.

And then there is the opposite number, those events that result from the Moon passing in front of the Sun, a Solar eclipse. Although the Sun is many times larger than the Moon, the Moon is much closer to the earth, and is thus big enough to blot out the sun entirely. Solar eclipses are rarer than Lunar eclipses, and total solar eclipses are rarer still. I've been able to photograph a number of partial Solar eclipses over the years. For me, it is a clumsy affair, trying to hold a filter over the lens while keeping the Sun in the frame, but I've surrendered to the use of a tripod a few times to make it work.

The picture above is one of my favorites because of the huge sunspots that were present during the Moon's transit across the disc of the Sun. If the eclipse occurs when the Moon is farther from the Earth (it has an elliptical orbit), an annular eclipse can occur, in which the Moon doesn't cover the entire disc of the sun. I caught the picture below in 2012.

And then there are the transits of the planets. These happen when a planet crosses the disk of the Sun. Only two planets can do this, Mercury and Venus, because they are the only planets with orbits that are closer to the Sun than Earth. I've witnessed two of them.

A transit of the planet Mercury took place in May of 2016. I almost missed it because of cloud cover, but they cleared enough for a couple of shots. There was a sunspot as well. In the picture below, the top arrow points to a sunspot. The lower arrow points to Mercury. It is a small planet, only barely bigger than the Moon, and it orbits much closer to the Sun. Such transits are only visible by binocular or telescope (with filters, of course).

Zooming in made Mercury a bit clearer (below). Transits of Mercury are not overly rare, occurring in 1999, 2003, 2006, and 2016. Another will take place in November of 2019, but then we will need to wait until 2032 to see another.

The rarest Sun-related event I've ever seen is a transit of the planet Venus. The one I witnessed happened in 2012 (below). Previous transits had been in 1874, 1882, and 2004. The next will not happen until 2117 (in December, if you are planning on watching).

The big event of all things Solar is of course a total Solar eclipse. As noted above, it's been decades since one took place in the lower 48 states, and next won't cross my neck of the woods until 2045. I'll be almost 90 years old if I make it that far. I've had the privilege of witnessing one, though, in 1991. It crossed the south end of Baja California at San Jose del Cabo. A small expedition from MJC drove the length of the Baja Peninsula to see the event, one of the great adventures of my life. I didn't get pictures at the time, as the best technology I had was a Kodak Instamatic. The pictures below are from Dr. William Luebke, MJC's retired astronomy professor.

There is nothing quite like the few moments of totality. The sky goes dark, stars and planets become visible, and the ambient temperature plummets (it was summer when we were there, and the temperature dropped from over 100 degrees to 80 or less; it was a relief). The corona of the sun becomes visible, and there may be solar prominences visible as well. We had more than four minutes of totality, more than usual.

It's going to be a zoo in Oregon in a few weeks, as literally millions of people are converging on the region to have a look at this rare event. We will be staying about an hour's drive from the path of totality, so I have no idea if we'll be able to even get to the dark zone through the gridlocked traffic. If we do, I'll be busy getting pictures to share, and if we don't...well...we'll always have Baja.

A Look Back at Ten Years of Geotripping: What are the Most Incredible Places You've Ever Stood (the Final Five)?

Yesterday we looked at five of the most incredible places I've ever stood. The post had become very long, so I decided to cut it in half. What follows are the final five of the most incredible spots. We've been working our way through my favorite posts in ten years of blogging...

Number 5: Walking in the Footsteps of James Hutton, Scotland (From May 6, 2014)

This entry into my series on the "Ten Most Incredible Places I've Ever Stood" is sort of a two-for-one deal. It was my journey into a different kind of geological past, the history of the science rather than the history of the world, although that was part of the story too. This was a visit to the birthplace of geology as a science, at two locations in Scotland.

"What clearer evidence could we have had of the different formation of these rocks, and of the long interval which separated their formation, had we actually seen them emerging from the bosom the deep? We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean. An epocha still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe. Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time...."

These are the words written by John Playfair as he described an extraordinary boat journey he made with James Hutton in 1788 to Siccar Point, a spot where Hutton found confirmation of his model of the Earth's development. At the point, Silurian graywacke sandstone layers (425 million years old) stand nearly vertical, and are overlain by bright orange and brown layers of the Devonian Old Red Sandstone (345 million years). Such features are called unconformities. During the interval of time before the deposition of the Old Red Sandstone, the sea floor had been compressed and thrust upwards into a mountain range that was subsequently eroded completely away. Such events required the passage of vast amounts of time, something quite incompatible with the mere 6,000 years of Earth's existence assumed by medieval religious scholars. Hutton's explorations of Scotland ignited the revolution that led to the development of the science of geology.

In 2001 I had the chance to visit some of Hutton's most famous rock exposures. We had put together our very first international field studies journey to England and Scotland, and being unfamiliar with the territory, we had contracted with a tour company to take care of the logistics. We got a canned tour of the famous tourist localities like Stonehenge, Big Ben, and Edinburgh Castle, but we made special arrangements with the tour company (for a price) to deviate from their usual itinerary (we missed the golf courses of St. Andrews) so we could instead head into the southern uplands of Scotland to Siccar Point. We committed to the trip 1 1/2 years in advance, having no idea that hoof-and-mouth disease was about to be detected in the British Isles, including the farms around Siccar Point. To my almost unspeakable frustration, access was impossible. Not wanting to just give up, I pulled out the topo maps and we made our way to a campground on the coast about a mile north of Siccar Point. I read the passage from John Playfair to the students, and than I ran as far as I could along the beach cliffs to where I could see the point, but not the relationships (although we could pick up the associated rocks along the coast).

The idea of unconformities and the concept of geological time would have been enough to secure Hutton's reputation as a geological pioneer, but he made another profound observation in the middle of the city of Edinburgh. That was the second spot I was seeking on this geological pilgrimage.

For years I've been showing a video to my students on the development of the theory of plate tectonics. It was done in the early 1990s but has held up well aside from the ancient computers in some of the scenes. It begins in Edinburgh with a look at the Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat, where James Hutton discovered an ancient volcano that once sat on the sea floor. Other observers in these early days of geology thought that basalt accumulated on the sea floor by precipitating out of the water, much like salt deposits in a drying bay. Hutton found a contact zone in a small quarry at the base of the Salisbury Crags where the intruding basaltic rock had pried up the previously existing sedimentary layers forming a vast sill. In other parts of Scotland he found intrusions of granitic rock that had done the same thing. In short, he had discovered intrusive (or plutonic) igneous rocks, and opened our eyes to an entirely different way of considering our planet, an active planet with an internal heat source, and cyclical processes that had been operating for millions, not thousands, of years.

I didn't have much of a clue about how to find the quarry, but sunset came late in our northern latitude, so after dinner I set out from our hotel and walked to the crags. It didn't actually take very long before I found a concrete monument and the very exposure that had been illustrated in Hutton's early books. It was a marvelous moment in my geological life (and a great sense of relief because I was going to be showing it to my students the next morning and had to pretend I knew where it was all along).

The big adventure of the next day would be the climb up to the summit of Arthur's Seat, the eroded and glacially scoured volcano that had once been in an ocean. The peak is surrounded by the city of Edinburgh, and was originally preserved as a deer hunting park for the king, but more recently because of a number of rare plant and animal species, as well as being a bit of greenery in an urban setting.

The peak is an archaeological treasure with the remains of ancient fort at the summit, and the ruins of a chapel, St. Anthony's, built in 1425 on the flanks. It was such a strange sight for the middle of a city.

Although it was a bit hazy, the whole city was visible from our 822 foot summit. We could sit on our "throne" and consider the volcanic eruptions that built up the volcano, the continental collision that deformed and tilted the rocks, and the glaciers that scoured the flanks during the ice ages of the last two million years.

Do these pictures look a little fuzzy, a bit low of resolution? There's a story there. I had heard of digital cameras, but they were expensive and I couldn't fit them in my budget (my, how times have changed...). Because the Scotland trip was a major event for our department, I convinced the administration to spring for a modest camera (an entire 3 megapixels!), and it arrived in Shipping and Receiving late in the afternoon before our departure the next morning. When I got on the plane, I had taken and downloaded all of three images. I barely knew how to use the camera, and didn't really trust the technology, so I ended up mostly taking lower resolution pictures. I would never make that mistake again, but such is the learning curve. At least I didn't accidentally delete them all like I've done on a few other occasions. If you would like to see some very excellent and more recent pictures of Arthur's Seat, check out this recent post at Magma Cum Laude: http://blogs.agu.org/magmacumlaude/2014/04/06/edinburgh-arthurs-seat-and-salisbury-crags/

Not many people in Edinburgh know of James Hutton, and his role in the development of the science of geology. Mostly I got blank stares when I asked directions to the monument. James Hutton is buried in Edinburgh and we paid a visit to the cemetery, but they had to pull out a catalog to find out where he lies buried. The section of the cemetery where he is interred was locked and chained, apparently because of continuing abuse by leaders of the popular ghost walks of Edinburgh (yeah, I took one too, but aside from atmospheric fog in the streets I was unimpressed).

Hutton's resting place is on the left side of this yard.

How much does the average person know about Scotland and England? That there is a queen, and the men wear kilts. We of course realized that we weren't going to be seeing any queens, and it was silly to think that all the men in Edinburgh would be going around in kilts. Except that both of those things happened!

As we made our way down the road towards Arthur's Seat, we noticed that nearly every man on the street was wearing a formal kilt, and we wondered why. As we approached Holyrood Palace, we realized that everyone was gathering for a "garden party" hosted by Queen Elizabeth. There were just a few people in attendance, about 8,000 of them. From our vantage point on the flank of Arthur's Seat, we could pick her out, wearing a blue outfit in a receiving line next to the side of the building just slightly left of center in the picture below. Yes, it was a crazy, unique day.

Just to accent the weirdness, we passed the street sign below. It wasn't actually a prophecy, but instead was an alleyway (a 'close') on the edge of the old city, which was the edge of the world to the medieval inhabitants.

Number 4: What it's like to be the first person to see a cavern? Kartchner Caverns, near Benson Arizona (from May 8, 2104)

Can you imagine flashing a light in a dark corner of a cavern, knowing that you are the first human being ever to lay eyes on the formations? I haven't had that privilege in my life, but I have found two or three places where I can imagine what the experience was like. Most of the caverns that are accessible to amateur spelunkers like myself have been long known and rather completely explored. Unfortunately, most of them have been severely vandalized, and the early use of torches for light left soot deposits on the formations. It is a rare treasure to see a cave where damage has not yet happened. Such caves in my experience include California Caverns near San Andreas, California,  Black Chasm Cavern near Jackson, California, and the subject of today's post, Kartchner Caverns near Benson, Arizona.

Many of the speleothems are still active; there are water droplets on many of the soda straws

The "Ten Most Incredible Places I've Ever Stood" series has been a series of hard choices. This one made the list because of the shock and the awe, the way the cavern made my jaw drop as I stepped in. It is an experience unlike any other that I've had while underground. There is a difference between even a well-protected cave, and one in which whole areas have never been touched by a human being. The floor of one of the large rooms was covered with mud, and it was clear from the trackway above that only one trail through it was ever made, in order to put in a light source. The rest of the room remains as it was discovered.

How incredible is it that some of the soda straws that fell are still standing in the mud?

The discovery and visitation of any cave causes irreversible changes. Kartchner Caverns were discovered on private lands in 1974 and the people who found them were concerned about preserving the original cave environment. The cave was at nearly 100% humidity, and opening it to the desert environment would have dried it out. Such changes in humidity can adversely affect life in the cave and stunt the growth and development of speleothems (cave decorations like stalactites and stalagmites). And yet the caves were spectacular. Was there some way of preserving the caves while making them accessible to the public?

The discoverers hit on an audacious solution. Through a series of delicate and secret negotiations, the owners of the land agreed to sell the lands containing the cave to the state of Arizona to be developed as a show cave, but to be developed in such a way as to preserve both the features and the climate inside the cave (many of the legislators didn't know what or where the park was when they voted for it). They preserved the humidity of the cave using a series of unique airlocks. Pathways were constructed with a minimum of disruptions to the original configuration of the cave. It took 25 years from the time of discovery to the opening of the park to the public in 1999.

There was one catch. Nothing goes into the cave with the visitors. No food, no water, no backpacks...and no cameras. As you might expect, I live for photography and this for me was a hard restriction. In 2005, though, I got the opportunity of a lifetime: as part of a fund-raiser for the park's foundation, they had a photography day, and the National Association of Geoscience Teachers made arrangements for us to take part. I was going to be given access to the cavern to photograph to my heart's content. To be sure, I had to sign a waiver of commercial rights, and the images that you see in this post today are protected and cannot be sold or used in any way.

Perhaps the most incredible stalagmite/column I've ever seen

What a wonder it was to step into a cave that appeared the same as it was on the day of discovery! The airlock closed behind me and although the temperature was only 78 degrees, it felt much hotter because of the intense humidity. The passageways were dimly lit and it took some time to develop my night vision. But moment by moment the cavern came into focus. It was simply stunning.

I wandered from passage to passage lost in the moment. It was nice not having a guide (staff were stationed throughout the cave to answer questions and keep an eye on things), but it was also nice to be exploring a pristine cave knowing I wasn't doing major damage just by being there. Exploring a newly discovered cave means leaving muddy footprints and accidentally destroying delicate formations underfoot, or leaving trails in the mud. I remember thinking that the experience was something like being in a museum, but I thought that in a good way: the resource was being protected, and yet hundreds of thousands of people could see and enjoy it. 

Some marvelous "helictites", otherwise known as stalactites on LSD.

Although I can't be mistaken for a professional photographer, I learned long ago that photography in a cave is always tricky. There is no "natural" look to a cave except total darkness, but a camera flash steals perspective and washes out delicate differences in color and shading. I used the ambient lighting to maintain some depth to the photos. That meant standing very still for longer than usual exposure times (tripods weren't allowed at the time). 

Flowstone refers to speleothems that result from water seeping out of cracks in the walls of a cavern. Over time gigantic mounds build up that resemble ice cream sundaes. Kartchner is full of spectacular examples.

I'm not sure what to make of the features below. There are some nice soda straws, which are so delicate that they are the first to be broken off in unprotected caves. The spiky things are the beginnings of helictites, which tend to ignore gravity, growing instead under the influence of water pressure from the interior of the "confused" stalagmites.

Below, one can see a spectacular column in the foreground, and some marvelous draperies in the upper left background. None of the features were broken off, and none were vandalized. I can barely describe what it is like being in such a place. Every minute in the cave was precious. I know there is an argument about worrying over technology in situations like this, and that one needs to live in the moment, reveling in the experience of being, but I actually find caves disorienting. Despite all my orienteering skills on the Earth's surface (and people tell me they are formidable) I get lost in caves. I can't remember one room or one decoration from another. Photographs keep me centered, and keep the memories of the moment alive. And I can share them!

I passed a stunning wall of draperies. Time was beginning to run short and I would be needing to leave this fantastical world for the surface before long. I was sweating, dehydrated, hungry and tired. It wasn't difficult getting around, but the humidity gets to you eventually, draining your energy. I started to head for the exit chamber and the airlock to the outer world.

There was one last close-up of a moist, almost glowing surface of some flowstone, and then I was out the door to the world of light and fresh air. The contrast was shocking. Caverns are incredible places, but they aren't really a human environment. I can understand how the first explorations of caverns could awaken our ancestors to the ideas of shadow-worlds with their demons and nightmares. Hell was presented as an underworld of fiery pits and eternal torment. But in a different context, caverns have been a place where dreams come alive. I think of the spiritual awakening of an initiate in a deep cave thousands of years ago encountering the drawn images of animals and people on a cavern wall seeming to run and play in the flickering light of a burning torch. Wandering through a pristine cave in the present day brings us face to face with a fascinating world that is not completely apart from us. The deep hidden parts of caves may not be a human environment, but much of our early spiritual and cultural development derived from living and exploring the outer edges of the underground environment. Caves are places where magic seems possible.

Number 3: Standing over Dante's Inferno in the Broken Lands, Death Valley, CA (from May 10, 2014)

The Panamint Mountains and Telescope Peak, the highest part of Death Valley National Park, as seen from Dante's View..

Death Valley is the hottest place on planet Earth.  Furnace Creek recorded a temperature of 134 °F (57 °C) in 1913. With the dethroning of the improperly recorded temperature in Libya from 1922, this is the hottest officially recorded temperature in world history. Badwater, a dozen miles south of Furnace Creek at the deepest point in the valley, is often a few degrees hotter. The hottest overnight temperature ever recorded, 107 °F (42 °C), was measured here on July 12, 2012. That day, the average temperature was 117.5 °F (47.5 °C), the world's hottest 24-hours on record.

Hot temperatures are an interesting feature of Death Valley National Park, but the park is much more significant for other reasons. It contains a wider range and variety of rocks than any other park that I know of. I have been chronicling our February journey to Death Valley over the last few months in a series called "Out of the Valley of Death", and today's post is a confluence of the two series that I've been working on. Dante's View was our next stop after exploring the interior of an upside-down mountain at Titus Canyon, and it makes number three on my list of the Ten Most Incredible Places I've Ever Stood.

The Black Mountains of Death Valley are one of the most rugged mountain ranges in existence. They rise 6,000 feet almost straight up from the lowest part of the Death Valley graben and are practically devoid of trails or roads. The thought of climbing the mountain front near Badwater is as daunting a challenge as I can imagine. The Proterozoic metamorphic rocks are highly deformed and internally sheared by intense faulting, making for a highly unstable climbing surface. But there is a way to the top of the range. A paved highway winds up the other more gentle eastern side of the mountain range, reaching Dante's View at an elevation of 5,476 ft (1,669 m). The overlook is directly above Badwater, more than a mile below at -282 feet ( -86 m). It has one of the most incredible views to be found in any national park.

Frank DeCourten called the Basin and Range province where Death Valley is located the "Broken Land", and the description is apt. From Dante's View, thousands of square miles of land are visible as range after range marches off into the distance. In the last few million years crust in this region was stretched beyond the breaking point, and it broke into countless grabens (fault valleys) and horsts (fault-block mountain ranges).  River drainages that once reached the sea do so no longer, and water leaves the region only by evaporation. The region is sometimes called the "Great Basin" despite the multitude of mountain ranges. Death Valley is the lowest of the low, the ending point of numerous desert washes and the Amargosa "River" that sometimes in wet years has water.

At Dante's View, one's attention is most often drawn towards the salt pan of Death Valley, the lowest land in North America (in the picture above). It is quite a sight, and so alien-looking that it stood in as the location of Mos Eisely in the original Star Wars. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker stood here, looking at the spaceport and mentioning that "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy". The salt that covers the valley floor to a depth of hundreds of feet was washed out of the marine sediments that make up many of the mountains in the region, and from the rain itself. Water flows into the salt pan and evaporates, leaving behind the salt and other minerals, including gypsum and calcite.

The view from Dante's encompasses, well, the entire compass. To the south (above) the Black Mountains continue for several miles, including two of the gigantic "turtleback faults". The rocks are some of the oldest in the western United States at 1.7 billion years. The dark metamorphic rocks gave the mountains their name. Although the slopes are not as hot and dry as the valley floor, it is still a tough environment for most plants. The mountains are as barren as any I've ever seen.

To the north (above), the Black Mountains include younger volcanic rocks dating from the middle and late Cenozoic era. They include the Artist Drive Formation, and the ancient lake and valley sediments of the Furnace Creek and Funeral formations. The Grapevine Mountains rise in the far distance. They are composed of thick sequences of marine sediments dating from the Paleozoic era. The farthest ranges are more than 60 miles away.

To the east (above), range after range culminates in the snow-covered Spring Mountains above Las Vegas (did you know you can ski near Las Vegas?). The highest peaks exceed 12,000 feet. Some of the water that accumulates on the slopes of the Spring Mountains travels underground through the intervening mountains to emerge as springs in Death Valley.

One of the most amazing things about the view from Dante's is how different it would have appeared 20,000 years ago during the last of the ice ages. Meltwater from the glaciers of the Sierra Nevada drained into the Great Basin, filling one valley after another until it spilled over into the Death Valley graben, forming a 600 foot deep lake more than 100 miles long.The lake left behind shorelines and terraces in what is currently the driest place in North America, and at least four species of native fish which still live in isolated springs around the park.

Water still accumulates in the Death Valley graben on occasion. Lakes were there in 2005 and 2010, but the same wet weather that filled the salt pan with water also wreaked havoc with the road to Dante's View and it was closed, so I have no pictures of the lake from above. This one from the valley floor will have to do.

Some of my choices for the "ten most incredible places" involved lava, or fossils, or significant historical and geological events. I chose Dante's View for sheer grandeur. From the high vantage point of Dante's, one gets a sense of being on top of the world, a world that is sometimes an inferno, and certainly broken up. There are few places on Earth like it.

Number 2 (but really a tie for number 1): The Grandest Canyon of All, Arizona (from May 14, 2014)

A clearing storm in Carbon Canyon, a tributary to the Grand Canyon

Of course, the Grand Canyon was going to appear on a list like this. It is one of the great spectacles of geology on planet Earth, and it has been entwined with my life many times over. I can trace the first inklings of my curiosity about geology to a vacation at the North Rim when I was a child of nine or ten. Picking up fossils in a meadow along the highway north of the park, I wondered how they could have ended up at 8,000 feet above sea level. A decade later I was a gawky thin teenager in his first year of college looking for direction in his life. A week below the rim on the New Hance and Grandview trails with an inspirational professor provided the impetus for following a career in geology. And then there has been the nearly three decades of leading students to this stunning place, introducing them to this most incredible gorge and the geological history it reveals. Yes, the Grand Canyon is one of the ten most incredible places I've ever stood.

The Desert View Watchtower on the eastern edge of the South Rim of Grand Canyon.

But there is a problem with picking the Grand Canyon as one of my "spots". It's a really big place! There are 200-plus river miles, the canyon is a mile deep and ten or fifteen miles wide, and has countless side canyons and tributaries (so many that a lot are named after their mileage along the river, i.e. Two-hundred Mile Canyon). Many of the side canyons would be national parks of their own in any other setting; Havasu Canyon and National Canyon are tens of miles long, and just as deep as the main gorge.

Mather Point, possibly. I didn't label this one!

So do you pick the rim? This is where most people see the canyon for the first time. There are two rims of course, the North and the South. Probably 90% of the park's visitors come to the South Rim, and that is where most of the facilities are located. It has some grand viewpoints, including, um, Grandview Point. I love visiting there, but it isn't the most incredible part I've stood on.

The North Rim is distinctly different. A thousand feet higher than the South Rim, it is covered with an extensive cool forest of fir and ponderosa. It's lonelier, with a single resort, a small camper store and a campground (check out the excellent Geogypsy Traveler blog for the perspectives of a North Rim ranger). No matter where I am on the North Rim, it feels more wild. It's one of my most cherished places in the world. But I can't pick out a single spot that I've stood on that set it apart from other areas of the canyon.

There are the archaeological sites. People have lived on and in the Grand Canyon for more than 4,000 years, and have left behind intriguing clues about their lives and beliefs, including the split-twig figurines and multitudes of petroglyphs and pictographs. Had I not ended up a geologist, I would most certainly have followed archaeology as a career. The Grand Canyon has some great archaeology, but I couldn't pick a single spot that represents all the canyon means to me.

It took a lot of consideration, but in the end, I knew the "spot" would have to be Hance Rapids at Mile 77 on the Colorado River. So many things in my life converged at this spot. The New Hance Trail reaches the river at this point. I walked the trail in 1976 on my first geology field studies trip and stood on the shore of the Colorado River for the first time. I had walked through 1.7 billion years of earth history to reach this spot, seeing the rocks I had been studying in class for the previous two months. The history of the canyon came alive to me as I walked in wonderment, seeing the crossbedding in sandstone caused by wind blowing over dunes 300 million years ago, the footprints of pre-dinosaurian reptiles and amphibians, the ripplemarks of long-gone rivers and beaches, and fossils from times before multicelled life existed on the planet.

It is at this point that river-runners first encounter the Granite Gorge, the Inner Canyon of the Grand Canyon. The rocks are schist and gneiss 1.7 billion years old  that formed in the roots of a long-gone mountain range that until recently was hidden in the deep crust of the lithosphere. Only in the last five or six million years has the Colorado River exposed these rocks to view. It was near this spot that John Wesley Powell wrote his immortal words about the Grand Canyon: "We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown...We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth...We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not."

The Great Unconformity separates these ancient rocks from the only somewhat younger rocks of the Grand Canyon Supergroup (the reddish sediments on the right in the picture below).  The Supergroup is a group of late Proterozoic sediments that are three times as thick as the main sequence of Paleozoic rocks that make the upper 4,000 feet of the Grand Canyon cliffs. They were faulted, tilted, eroded, and ultimately buried by the advancing Cambrian sea of 515 million years ago. It may be the most famous unconformity on the planet.

This was the spot where I became a geologist.

I returned to Hance Rapids last summer for the first time in thirty years, only this time I came by raft rather than by foot. I am still processing that journey in my mind, but I already know that it was one of the most significant events in my life. I became aware of the fragile nature of life, first among the plants and animals in this challenging environment, but also of my own. Aside from the profound risk of driving a car every day, I came the closest I've ever been to realizing the possibility of death when I was dumped into the near freezing water and rode the toughest rapid for more than a quarter of a mile. We went over more than 150 rapids in seventeen days, and Hance was the first of the monster rapids, rated 8 or 9 on a scale of 10.

Some pictures surfaced a couple of years ago on my Facebook page of that first profound adventure that I had in 1976. It's remarkable how little the river and the rocks have changed, but I realized how much has changed in our understanding of how the rocks of the canyon accumulated, and how the canyon itself came into being. Plate tectonics had been accepted only a few years prior to my arrival in the canyon, and the tectonic history was only just then getting worked out. Parts of the story are still mysterious.

I also realize the massive changes in my own life since then. Back then, there was a dedicated geology professor discussing the history of the canyon, and a young man making life-changing decisions in the professor's class. The young man had not yet married, there were no children in his life, he had not earned a living on his own. He was just starting out.

Today, my kids are grown, I get awards for longevity at my job, and I'm closer to the end of my career than I am to its beginning. I am a teacher now, but I continue to be a student as well, seeking out new places, and revisiting the old ones from the past for continuing enlightenment. The canyon will continue to exist, changed only in a few ways during my tenure on the planet. It knows or cares little of the latest life form that scrabbles about its surface, and it will shrug off the gigantic reservoirs we've constructed to try and control the river.

The canyon is an incredible place. It gives us perspective in so many ways, and that's why it ended up as number two on the list of the most incredible places I've ever stood.

Just who is that thin person in the yellow jacket??

AND...

Number 1: Road's End at the Edge of the World...Cedar Mesa, Utah (from May 15, 2014)

There's an empty quarter within the bounds of the lower 48 states. It's a vast area, a swath of land across southern Utah and northern Arizona where towns are few, and the vistas are wide. It's bounded by Blanding on the east, Mexican Hat and Kayenta to the south, and Lake Powell off to the west. Outside of these few villages there are some reservation lands and ranches. There is a national monument (Natural Bridges), and a national park off to the north (Canyonlands), but mostly it's uninhabited Bureau of Land Management land. In other words, lands held in trust for all the people of the United States.

I've been going through a list of the ten most incredible places I've ever stood. Some of these I chose because of their geological significance, and some because of their incredible scenery. A few were chosen from sheer emotion and personal spiritual reasons, and that is also the motivation for my number one choice. Not many people know of the place. It's not a national park or monument, and the geology, while interesting, is not exceptional. It's in the center of the empty quarter of Utah on the edge of Cedar Mesa. It's called Muley Point.

Standing on the edge of the world at Muley Point, one looks down several thousand feet into the mysterious gorge of the San Juan River, one of the major tributaries of the Colorado River. The canyon is an intricate twisting maze of curving gorges called entrenched meanders. The river once flowed as a meandering stream channel over a flat plain relatively close to sea level. When the land rose, the gradient of the river increased, but the water was trapped in the meandering channel, so the curve was preserved as the river cut ever deeper (below).

The rocks making up the cliffs are part of the Cedar Mesa Sandstone, a Permian-aged unit that preserves some coastal sand dunes, and the occasional bone or track of some pre-dinosaurian reptile like Dimetrodon.

Entrenched meanders of the San Juan River below Muley Point

In the distance beyond the canyon of the San Juan stand the buttes and mesas of Monument Valley, the scene of so many iconic western movies (below). The valley is administered as a tribal park of the Navajo people. The farthest horizon reveals the margin of Black Mesa, the heart of the Navajo Reservation and the home of the Hopi Nation as well. The spiky monument in the far distance just left of center is Agathla's Needle, the core of a deeply eroded volcano. This volcanic neck, or diatreme, is similar in age and composition to the better known Shiprock a few miles away in New Mexico.

The view to the east extends across the Raplee Anticline to the Chuska Mountains of New Mexico, and the Rocky Mountains of southeastern Colorado. The scene below is taken from the top of the Moki Dugway on Utah Highway 261, the precarious road that provides access to Cedar Mesa and Muley Point.

The view east from the top of the Moki Dugway, the spectular road that provides access to Muley Point

North from the Moki Dugway one can see the deeply incised edges of Cedar Mesa. Looking at this barren desert landscape, it is hard to accept that Cedar Mesa was once part of the "fertile crescent" of the American Southwest. An arc of land extending from Mesa Verde to Cedar Mesa was in the "sweet spot" elevation of being not too hot and not too cold and having just enough precipitation to produce high yields of maize, squash and beans. It was a thriving agricultural region for the Ancestral Puebloan people for hundreds of years. Most of the surface of Cedar Mesa was under cultivation, and thousands of archaeological sites dot the region (unfortunately making it a target for illegal pothunters). The Puebloans moved on eight hundred years ago, and the mesa has been more or less deserted since then. The juniper and pinyon trees sprouted and covered the ancient corn fields.

Years ago I learned the craft of leading field studies with the staff and crew of Santa Barbara City College, days I remember fondly. We used to take a one-day raft trip down the San Juan River from Bluff to Mexican Hat, and the night before we would spend the night at Sand Island on the river. We would spend a few moments at Muley Point before descending to the hot, humid, and buggy campsite. One year someone pointed out that we were fully equipped to camp anywhere, so why not stay on the rim of Cedar Mesa where the view was indescribable, and the air was fresh and clean, and gloriously free of biting deerflies and mosquitoes? From that time on we camped on the edge of the world. What had been just another spot with a nice view became for me a yearly pilgrimage.

What makes this place so different? It's magic, I think. It is the top of the world, and the edge of the world. One can stand and see a vast region occupied by a mere handful of people, a land that shows little of the damage (at distance anyway) that people can do to a landscape. It's colorful and ever-changing, especially in the light of dusk or twilight. There aren't many places where one can experience the full drama of the Earth through sunset, night and sunrise, and have a completely unobstructed view of the sky from horizon to horizon to horizon.

Usually when we pull into a campsite on our field trips, the students and crew jump out, unpack, and set up their tents and the cooking area. I learned long ago that Cedar Mesa and Muley Point are different. The people emerging from their vehicles disappear. I wander along the edge of the mesa and I find them, sitting alone or in small groups, just contemplating and staring at the scene before them. I often take on the task of preparing the evening's meal just to give them more time to be out there.

I've spent a total of two weeks on the mesa over the last three decades and every night is different. We've seen warm clear days and nights, we've had windstorms (equipments blows over the edge never to be seen again), thunderstorms, and rain.

Have you ever spent an entire night taking in a special place? Have you ever watched the progression of the cosmos over hours and hours of time? We constantly insulate ourselves from the darkness, but there are certain times and places where we can revel in it. There is nothing quite like watching moonlight reach deeper and deeper into canyons below the rim. What had been featureless darkness below becomes an intricate pattern of complex beauty. I've awakened in the early hours of the morning to watch the moon setting or watching the long drama of sunrise. Some nights there are thunderstorms over the Sleeping Ute or Chuska Mountains. The fire in the sky is an incredible sight.

Sometimes there are eerie things as well. Rational people can still feel the echoes of the lives that were played out on this mesa. I've been keenly aware of the spirits that exist in and around the canyons, whether real, or constructs of the imagination. We sat on the edge of the mesa one night nearly thirty years ago and saw mysterious lights. I still to this day don't know what to make of them (and you can be sure that I've watched for their return ever since!). Yet, I've never felt scared or nervous in this place. Just curious.

The morning inevitably comes, and once the sun rises high in the sky, the mesa becomes less mysterious. We are ready for a day of seeking the Ancestral Pueblo ruins that are hidden in literally every side canyon on the mesa. Spending a night exposed to the environment that they called home enlightens our explorations.

It was hard to pick the top ten of my most incredible places, and I couldn't begin to rank them, but I do know that I might not see the Burgess Shale or the Gubbio clay layer or Siccar Point again in my life. They were memorable, and I will always cherish that fact that I got to see them. But I didn't experience them, not in the way that I've experienced the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Cedar Mesa.

That's the thing I guess. Any place in this wide world can become the most incredible place you will ever stand. It won't be that tourist destination that is famous worldwide, because those are the places that you visit once or twice and never get to know. The special places are those which you experience in the fullest sense in all kinds of situations and conditions. That's what Cedar Mesa is to me.

So, what has me worried? I was digging through the tons of old topographic maps in the old department as we prepared for the move to the new Science Community Center. And I found a topo map of the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area, and noticed that a small corner of Cedar Mesa extends over the boundary of the GCNRA. Muley Point is "protected"! But in small print were the following words: "Slated for future development". Chilling words, but thus far unrealized. A paved road, interpretive signs, restrooms, and parking lots would ruin this incredible place. I hesitated about even making its presence known, but in the end I did, because unknown places are the easiest to destroy (just ask Glen Canyon). Such places will need friends in the future.

In the meantime, revel in the discovery of your own most incredible places, and if you are ever near the town of Mexican Hat, seek out Muley Point. It's not too hard to find, the road is okay for most cars even if a bit bumpy at times. And don't just look and drive away after a few minutes. Lay out a sleeping bag, find the appropriate rock (you'll know the right one), and let this place fill you. You won't regret it.

Addendum and Update:
There are disturbing developments at Cedar Mesa in recent days. In 2016 Barack Obama established Bear's Ears National Monument after years of consultation with local tribes and stakeholders. The boundaries included Cedar Mesa, providing new protections for the rich archaeological resources of the region. It was the right thing to do, but the new administration is interested only in resource extraction, mainly oil, gas and uranium. The president is trying to decrease the size of the monument by 90% (illegally).