The Grand Canyon

 Nevada, Utah
Nov 202020
 

November 20, 2020

We left Zion National Park via the Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel. Bored and blasted through the sandstone cliffs above Pine Canyon this amazing engineering feat blows the mind. Construction of the 1.1-mile tunnel began in the late 1920s and was completed in 1930 at a cost of $1, 896,000. At the time of its dedication, on July 4, 1930, it was the longest tunnel of its type in the United States. The purpose of the tunnel was to create direct access to Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon from Zion National Park.  The project included a 25-mile long road, that includes seven switchbacks taking vehicles up 800 feet in elevation from the valley floor.

Several galleries were cut into the exterior wall of the tunnel. During construction, the galleries were handy for disposing of rock and waste. Now, they provide natural light, ventilation, and some beautiful views.

Looking out one of the gallery windows from inside the tunnel

A three-hour drive to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon with a stop at Moqui Caves we traveled through the Vermillion Cliffs, a park that requires a four-wheel drive and a permit from the BLM, but can be enjoyed from the Highway.

The Vermillion Cliffs as seen from Highway 89A

We headed to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  It was a moment where we both agreed we were a bit non-plussed.  We discussed that it might be due to the amazing sights we had seen, and then we went exploring.

North Rim of the Grand Canyon Survey Marker

Views of the North Rim

We began the long drive around the various canyons to Cape Royal with stops at various lookout points.  The views changed and our WOW factor was amped up considerably.

Point Imperial

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Looking through Angels Window down to the Colorado River

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During the summers of 1967 and 1968, an extensive archeological investigation was conducted on the Unkar Delta. That is the flat area in front of the Colorado River. Fifty-two Anasazi sites were recorded on the delta.

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The Colorado River flowing through the canyon.

Sometimes a silly graphic gives you a better idea of how our earth has formed than words.

These three canyons sit on the Colorado Plateau.  The Colorado Plateau consists of a deep layer-cake of rocks, mostly sandstone, and limestone.  These rocks recorded nearly two billion years of time – nearly half the age of the Earth.

We began at Bryce Canyon and worked our way down the geological scale to the Grand Canyon.  While difficult to describe this might help.

We are staying the night at Jacob Lake, the only place within miles and miles and miles of the Northern Rim.  An interesting place, but it has a full Smokey the Bear, making it the best, in my opinion.

 

 

Zion National Park

 Utah
Nov 182020
 

November 18, 2020

We are staying at Zion Lodge, so after a quick breakfast, we headed out to do the trails closest to the lodge, The Kayenta Trail with stop-offs at the three Emerald Pools.  It is fall, so the colors are spectacular. The Cottonwoods turning their fall yellow is breathtaking.

The elevation at Zion National Park goes from 3666 to 8726 and it sits on the edge of the Colorado Plateau making its geology light-years away from Bryce.  Two million years of the Virgin River flowing through the canyon carving into two Jurassic formations,  the Kayenta Formation and the Navajo Sandstone, created a labyrinth of canyons. Zion also sits between two active faults.

Zion is Hebrew for “a place of sanctuary and tranquility”, it was given the name by Mormon pioneers in the 1860s

As the west was expanding, it was difficult to get to this area due to the lack of roads. Around 1910, when old wagon roads were upgraded automobiles started arriving in this area, the road into Zion Canyon was built in 1917.

The park was established in 1919 with a proclamation by President Taft, at the time is was called Mukuntuweap National Monument.  In 1917, the acting director of the newly created National Park Service visited the canyon and proposed changing its name to Zion.

The Zion Lodge complex was built in 1925 designed by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood in a rustic architectural style.

In 1920,  3,692 people visited Zion.  In 2019 it was over 4.4 million. Even during COVID in November the park is full, and the lodge is sold out

Here are some more shots from today’s hike.

 

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The Hoodoo That You Do

 Utah
Nov 172020
 

November 17, 2020

Hoodoos of Bryce Canyon

Weathering and erosion play only a minor role in the development of hoodoos.  These are formed more by the freeze/thaw process than anything else. As the water flows into cracks and re-freezes, it expands and cracks the rock around it, this is called frost-wedging, and that is how, after millions of years you get hoodoos.

These natural amphitheaters throughout Bryce need to be seen to be believed

It is difficult to determine the actual makeup of each color, you really do need to be a geologist, and even with a great book, we were both very unsure of what we were seeing.  It is simply breathtaking, no matter how it was formed or what the different rocks are called.


To highly simplify the process of how hoodoos are made you begin with the thin walls of the rocks called fins. These are not yet hoodoos.

Frost-wedging enlarges the cracks in the fins creating holes or windows.  They are still not hoodoos.

As the windows grow their tops eventually collapse, leaving a column.  Rain continues to dissolve and sculpt these limestone/sandstone pillars into spires.  Now you have a hoodoo.

 

As you can see there is snow on the ground.  The elevation of Bryce is between 7,600 and 9,100 feet.

Hoodoo comes from the Southern Paiute word Ooh doo.  It means being afraid, or showing fear.  It is actually  pronounced uuudooooooooooooooo

Queen Victoria, in the part of the canyon called Queens Canyon, was named for its likeness to a statue in London, England.

Here are some amazing shots of our day.

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Looking down the trail we walked up to get back to the rim – Navajo Trail

If you look closely you can see two bridges

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I see two chickens atop those hoodoos

 

Entrenched Meanders

 Utah
Nov 162020
 

November 16, 2020

Arches to Bryce via a lot of fascinating places.

We stayed at Red Cliffs Lodge and woke to this in the morning outside our room.

We doubled back to Arches National Park to see the Delicate Arch, which we had run out of time the day before to visit.  It is the symbol of Arches National Park, but I must say our previous day was far more interesting.

Then we hopped on the 313 to Dead Horse State Park.  Dead Horse looks over the Canyonlands, and if you don’t have a few days to spend in Canyonlands, this is a great way to get an overview.

Colorado River flowing through Canyonlands

Within the Canyonlands, they harvest potash through evaporation.

It begins by pumping water from the Colorado River deep underground to reach the potash ore, which lies about 3,900 feet below the surface. The water dissolves the soluble potash into a brine, which is then pumped into underground caverns. Once it is fully dissolved, the potash brine is pumped into an evaporation pond.

The water in the evaporation ponds is dyed bright blue to help it absorb more sunlight and heat. This reduces the time it takes for the potash to crystallize, at which point it can be removed and processed for use as fertilizer.

Taking 191 to 70 we stopped at the Elgin Cemetary in Green River. So today I learned another self-descriptive adjective, I am a taphophile (an excessive interest in graves and cemeteries).  This brought me to the Elgin Cemetery, located in Elgin which is considered a ghost town, incorporated into the city of Green River, although their cemetery is still active.

The cemetery contains the remains of civil war veterans, Spanish-American War veterans, WWI, WWII, Viet Nam, and Afghanistan vets.

A casualty of the Spanish-American War

What makes this place so unique is the desire to bring a memory to an area where flowers and trees simply can not grow due to lack of water. How they celebrate their dead is one of the most unique sites I have seen. There are plastic flowers, celebrations of interests, such as bees, not to be understood by an outsider, but ways to just say, we were here.

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We continued down Hwy 70 to Salina.  Here we stopped in on a German POW camp. During WWII over 425,000 POWs were sent across the US to camps.  Nearly 15,000 were sent to Utah. The camps were staffed by American soldiers who were unable to fight overseas for reasons including physical to disciplinary issues  The Salina camp was home to one soldier that disgraced both the uniform and his country. Private Clarence V. Bertucci murdered nine German prisoners of war and nineteen prisoners because he “hated German’s”.

Racing against the sun we were headed to Bryce Canyon but we still had one stop to make. Butch Cassidy’s childhood home.  We passed a small area called Ice Cream, which makes sense.  It looked like Banana ice cream with chocolate sauce at the bottom of the bowl.

Next, stop Butch Cassidy’s childhood home.  It is well preserved and what I loved best were the signs explaining he was a “nice boy”, and also his entry into the census.

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*We rolled into Bryce Canyon after dark, with another adventure awaiting us in the morning.

 

An Explanation about the title.  Rivers meander, that is how they carve canyons.  Once the canyons are deep, the environment no longer influences the flow, and the meandering is entrenched.  I can not think of a better explanation of oxymoron.   And yet, we are on a meandering adventure, entrenched by the fact that we made reservations in advance. Thus the title.

Gee Gee Gee It Is Geology

 Colorado, Utah
Nov 152020
 

November 15, 2020

Today began with a drive from Palisades, Colorado to Arches National Monument in Utah.

Driving 139  in Colorado

We took the 139 which is all part of the Dinosaur laden area of Colorado.  When one drives for miles without seeing another car you either become fascinated with the geology, or you turn on rock and roll and go with it.  We chose geology.  I had purchased the Roadside Geology of Colorado and of Utah, I read Pam drove.  We don’t understand half of what we learned, so I won’t bore you with the details, but I will throw some of it out, as it is part of what makes this part of the US so absolutely gorgeous and interesting.

We began with a long drive through vast spaces ringed by book cliffs.  The valley holds oil, gas, and oil shale.  During the boom times, there was a lot of activity in this area, it is all gone, and the remnants have been moved out as well, giving us the beauty without the commerce.

 

We crossed into Utah and the WOW factor began.  Our first Wow was the Dewey Bridge.

The Dewey Bridge was originally brought in pieces from Chicago in 1916 and assembled across the Colorado River. For a short period of time, it was the second-longest suspension bridge west of the Mississippi. It was designed to support the weight of 6 horses, 3 wagons, and 9000 pounds of freight.
The bridge featured an all-wood deck measuring 502 feet long, 10.2 feet wide from support to support, and 8 feet wide from rail to rail. The bridge also consisted of two metal towers, a run of seven cables on each side of the bridge deck, and cable anchors. The old Dewey Bridge was restored in 2000 and then burned on April 2008 by a 7-year-old playing with matches.

Then we began driving with cliffs on both sides and the Colorado River to our right. This is where the sandstone begins.  We took 128 to get to our hotel for the night, The Redcliffs Lodge.  The trip begins with Dakota Sandstone and a lot of uplifting, tumbling, and tossing about of the rocks that make up this area.  A little further along one begins to encounter Entrada Sandstone, then they begin to layer atop each other.  There is a lot of discussion of the fact that this all took place from the Quaternary to the Precambrian ages.  If you want to know more I highly suggest you grab the book, it makes Utah amazing, but it is highly complicated as well.

We finished our day with a several hour walk to see some of the arches of Arches National Monument.  We headed to the far end of the park called Devils Garden and saw Landscape Arch, Navajo Arch, Partition Arch then continued to hike to the Double O Arch.  We gave up at that point, it is a wonderful hike, but we felt we had seen what we had come to see, many will argue that by not finishing the loop we cheated, but we were happy.

Landscape Arch

Double O Arch

Navajo Arch

A stop on the way out of the park at a small area called Park Avenue and onto our hotel.

Park Avenue

Here is the rest of what we saw, that I do not believe needs much explanation.

Pronghorn frolicking in the open space

The small mountain range – the La Sal Mountains – are visible for miles, even from Colorado

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Walking on Rock Rims is a large part of getting to the Double O Arch

This blue was rather stunning. It is called desert varnish and is a result of iron mixing with manganese. It normally looks black, but catching it in just right in the sun, made it worth photographing.

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The Three Gossips, a name I figured out before ever seeing the sign.

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The mountains around our hotel.

 

I also shot a few in Black and White

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We have plans to go back tomorrow to catch Delicate Arch and then on to the next adventure.

 

 

Dinosaurs

 Colorado, Utah
Nov 142020
 

November 14, 2020 – Day 4

Today was spent searching dinosaurs and geology.  We began at Dinosaur National Monument.

The park contains over 800 paleontological sites and has fossils of dinosaurs including Allosaurus, Deinonychus, Abydosaurus, and various sauropods.   As the ranger so poetically put it, when the University Paleontology departments come to dig, it is like hitting the grocery store.  There are three aisles of oceanic fossils and 8 aisles with dinosaur bones, what is your pleasure today?

Many of the perfect, intact bones went to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, as it was Earl Douglass, a paleontologist working and collecting for the Museum that discovered the site in 1909.

Visitors can see the bones at the Quarry. There is a covering over a large excavation where you learn all about the area and you can even touch the bones.

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This amazing collection of bones is due to a drought. The dinosaurs came looking for water and died by the dry river beds.  Once the rains came the dinosaurs and other ancient animals were carried by the river system which eventually entombed their remains in Utah.  Then an upthrust of earth sent them to the surface.

You can take a short hike and see bones around the site, outside of the Park Service structure

Douglass wanted this area to be preserved, he wrote to the head of the Smithsonian at this time saying   “I hope that the Government, for the benefit of science and the people, will uncover a large area, leave the bones and skeletons in relief and house them. It would make one of the most astounding and instructive sights imaginable.”

And he got his wish, the area around the quarry was declared a national monument on October 4, 1915.

A two hour plus drive, part of which was on Stegosurus Highway put us into Colorado over the Douglass Pass at 8,205 feet and snow on the road when we were in the shadows.

In Utah Highway 64 is the Stegasaurus Highway.  Here it crosses Brontasaurus Way in Dinosaur, CO

Our next stop was the Colorado National Monument. There are many ways to enjoy the park, but a drive through the park on Rim Rock road is an easy way to take in most of the beauty. While absolutely stunning it is the geology that makes it so. The park has three different groups of rock and sediment. The oldest rocks are Early to Middle Proterozoic gneiss and schist, including the Ute Canyon Stock. Overlying these are mostly horizontally bedded Mesozoic sedimentary rocks, including the cliff-forming Wingate Sandstone. Overlying these are various types of Quaternary unconsolidated deposits such as alluvium, colluvium, and dunes. If that sounds too technical so be it, but just know it is gorgeous.

Balanced Rock is a 600-ton boulder that has been perched on a pedestal while most of the rock that once surrounded it has weathered away.

The Coke Ovens are named because of their similar appearance to conical-shaped coke ovens built to convert wood into charcoal. These huge domes are made of Wingate Sandstone and are the remains of earlier monoliths that lost their protective Kayneta caprock.

This is Independence Monument and it is all that remains of what was once a continuous ridge. The relentless erosion of the massive Wingate Sandstone has left this 450-foot high monolith with its protective sandstone caprock of Kayenta Formation. On the 4th of July local climbers go to the top and plant an American flag. This has been a tradition since John Otto first began exploring and creating trails through the area.

In the Windgate Sandstone cliff-face, there are arches and windows in the area that are formed when cracks cause blocks to fall out.

Some fun shots from the day

Fat Tire Raptor by Rand B. Hillyer in downtown Fruita, CO

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An interesting sculpture in Palisades, Colorado

The odd street naming of Paradise, Colorado

The South West During Covid

 Nevada, Utah
Nov 132020
 

November 2020

I am traveling during COVID, just to get a break.  I am traveling with my cousin and we are staying in well-researched hotels, and eating a lot of picnics.  We also chose to do many out of the way locations to help avoid as much humanity as possible during this scourge.

Day 1, 2 and 3

The Hoover Dam and other oddities

Fallbrook Pioneer Odd Fellows Cemetery
 Used as a community burial site as far back as 1886, the current three-acre plot of land was given to the local Odd Fellows Lodge in 1904 by F.W. Bartlett.   The above is the grave of Sergeant William Pittenger. Pittenger  and eighteen others were some of the first Congressional Medal of Honor recipients for their actions in the “Andrews Raid.”  A raid into confederate Georgia in April 1862.

The cemetery, while sadly neglected is still a wonderful place to stroll and discover very old tombstones.

Elmer Long’s Bottle Tree Ranch

Elmer Long’s father wandered the dessert amassing a rather large collection of bottles.  When he passed Elmer inherited the collection.  In 2000 he decided to create what amounted to, over 200 bottle trees. These trees take on a myriad of shapes with strange and wonderful things attached, often on the tops of the trees.

Long passed away in June 2019 at the age of 72. The fate of the Bottle Tree Ranch is currently uncertain.

Hoover Dam

This is a view of the dam from the  Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.

The bridge is the first concrete-steel composite arch bridge built in the United States and incorporates the widest concrete arch in the Western Hemisphere.  Sitting  890 feet above the Colorado River, it is the second-highest bridge in the United States and is the world’s highest concrete arch bridge.  Construction began in 2005 and was completed in 2010.

A view of the bridge from the top of the dam.

What can one say about the Hoover Dam that has not been said already?  I have had a fascination with the dam since learning that the concrete used to build the dam has not yet completely cured.  Think about that, the dam was completed in 1936.  Due to COVID, no tours were allowed, and thanks to both COVID and the late time of year, it was also nearly free of tourists.

I do not know if the public bathrooms atop the dam are always open, but the day we were there they were.  Since the dam was built with a very heavy art deco theme, we had to take a look.

The first things you encounter are these stunning tile mosaics. These were designed by local artist Alan True incorporating motifs of the Navajo and Pueblo tribes of the region.

The glass tile that lines the walls are also part of the Alan True design.

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There are two elevator towers on the dam, each adorned with brass doors and bas-reliefs. Both were created by artist Oskar J.W. Hansen.

Hansen is also responsible for one of the most spectacular pieces of Art Deco art to grace the dam project.

Rising from a black, polished base, is a 142-foot flagpole flanked by two winged figures, which Hansen calls the Winged Figures of the Republic. They express “the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment.”

There is a slew of honorable plaques adorning this area, all sculpted by Hansen.

Near the center of the tourist-complex is a small plaque marking the spot of a dog that was loved by the construction crew.  It has a rather interesting, and yet sordid story.

Two penstock towers at the dam on the Lake Mead side.

Parowan Gap Petroglyphs

The petroglyphs can be found all over the mountains. Archaeologists have argued that the petroglyphs are a complex calendar system. Hopi and Paiute peoples have a variety of interpretations for the rock art as well, which includes representations of humans as well as depictions of animals and geometric shapes.

While the drive to Parowan is long it is absolutely worth it when you arrive.

Delta Solar Boondoggle

If you continue on to Hinkley Utah and then take a left and drive a few dirt roads, and then a few more, you will come across the Delta Solar ruins.

The Delta Solar company convinced people that by using satellite-like arrays that would follow the arc of the sun during the day, cheap plastic panels impregnated with magnifying elements would shoot intensified rays of sunlight into a crucible of combustible material which in turn created steam to power a generator.  The plastic and metal used proved no match for the desert winds and were quickly damaged.

This elaborate project was deemed a fraud in 2018, and the company which produced them was fined some 50 million dollars.

The Road Island Diner

This very out of the way diner not only has a wonderful history but also serves incredible food.

The  “Road Island Diner” was originally manufactured for and displayed at the 1939 World’s Fair, themed “The World of Tomorrow. ”  The 16-foot-by-60-foot beauty was from the legendary Jerry O’Mahony Diner Company.  It featured green Italian marble countertops, Tiffany glass clerestory windows, and hand-laid quarry tile flooring. It was bought shortly after the fair and moved to Fall River, Massachusetts, where it served as a functioning diner for 14 years before being sold again and moved to Rhode Island.

In 2007, the diner was transported from Rhode Island to Utah. Due to its size, however, the haul was forbidden from interstate highways. The several-thousand-mile backroad journey entailed state police escorts and pilot cars but arrived safe and sound.

Wandering towards tomorrows adventure

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