For weeks Awesome Wife has been bugging me to tell her what I want for Christmas. Clothes? Gear? Books? What do I want? She thought she’d come up with a great gift idea when I lost my camera, but her hopes were dashed when Fuzzy found it the next day.
The problem is that I’ve reached that age where, if there’s some thing I want, well I generally just go buy it. I really have pretty much everything I need. Of course AW and I still buy each other nice gifts, but generally, whatever major gift we give one another at holidays is something we’ve pretty clearly specified.
Thinking about this recently, I thought about how it’s one of the things I miss about being a kid. Remember how, some years, you’d get a Christmas gift, and it was something you completely didn’t expect, maybe hadn’t even thought of, and yet it was totally the Best Gift Ever? Remember how incredibly happy that made you? That’s what I miss about being a kid at Christmas.
The ideal Christmas gift would be something that made me feel that way, that didn’t cost a lot, and that I never had even thought of. Oh, and it would have some kind of connection to baby Jesus, too, since, well you know, it’s Christmas.
Yesterday when I got home from work, the package from Fuzzy had arrived. Just as he’d promised, it contained my camera which I’d lost on Luke’s Trail, now safe and sound.
Side Note: Probably the nicest thing* about recovering a lots camera is recovering the photos you hadn’t yet uploaded off it when you lost it. I’ll share just a couple here.
*In fact, from a financial standpoint, losing the camera wouldn’t have been as big a deal as I’d feared. Over the last year or so prices on point & shoots have plummeted. If you’re looking for a last minute Christmas gift, you can pick up the updated version of my camera for about $110. I’ve had it for 18 months, abused it thoroughly, and it’s still working great.
Here’s a cool zoom from along the rim of Good Water Canyon. The circled area shows an apparently recent cliff-break/slide KanyonKris spotted, which you can make out from the bare, vegetation-free slopes below.
From a bit later in the day, here’s a better close-up of the “angel” anthropomorphs down at Buckhorn Wash:
On the way out we had a nice Pronghorn* spotting:
*I blogged about Pronghorns in this post. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.
This shot from Price (top of Luke’s Trail) isn’t great, but it clearly shows the relative rockiness of the pediment mantle which the trail lies atop of. We’re looking West, and in the background the line of the Book Cliffs is bending around to the South.
The Gift
But the package also contained something else- a bumper sticker. And not just any bumper sticker, but one that was the absolutely best, most spot-on, perfect-est Christmas gift for me ever*.
Speaking of filling in blank spots, that’s what I did last Tuesday. KanyonKris and I played hooky from work, meeting up before dawn at the Orem Park & Ride and heading South, then Southeast, over to Price, then South to Castle Dale, where we turned off the highway and drove East toward the San Rafael Swell.
Geo-Side-Note: This was my first time heading South on Highway 10 from Price. The road follows a broad valley across the Mancos Shale which has a similarly drab appearance and ground-cover to the (unnamed) valley between Green River and Price. These 2 valleys make sort of a big crescent, in which Price sits at the junction. On the West side of the valley are high cliffs, and in fact these are the very same Book Cliffs we looked at in the last geo-post, which run up to the Northwest from Green River, then bend clear around Price and start heading South past Huntington and Cast Dale, where they form the Eastern edge of the Wasatch Plateau. So when you’re driving up out of Price toward Soldier Summit on your way back to the Wasatch Front, you’re driving up through the Book Cliffs.
According to “Fuzzy”, the owner/proprietor of Fuzzy’s BicycleWorks in Price, this bend in the Book Cliffs creates a sort of precipitation “hole” right around Price, such that they rarely get snow in and around town. But we’ll get to Price riding and Fuzzy in a little bit…
Like most Utahns, my usual exposure to the SR Swell is via the Eastern edge, which is specifically the San Rafael Reef. The SR Swell is a large (40 x 75 miles), 2,000 foot high, ovaloid uplift in Central Utah. On the Western edge, this uplift has tilted and cracked huge wedges of Navajo sandstone in a nearly 75 mile-long line of giant cliffs and “flatirons”. This wall/reef has been eroded by countless little stream/washes into dozens of fantastic, tight slot canyons*.
Extra Detail: The Swell was uplifted during a geologic episode known as the Laramide Orogeny, which was a 30 million year-long period of mountain-building in Western North America starting around 75 million years ago. The Laramide Orogeny produced the Rocky Mountains, as well as- closer to home- the Uinta Range.*
*Interesting geo-factoid: the Uintas are roughly 4 times as old as the modern Wasatch Range. But that’s a story for another post.
But when you approach the Swell from the Western side (Castle Dale), your introduction to it is very different. Instead of sighting this massive wall on the horizon, you just sort of roll along through open scrublands, first over Mancos Shale, then down onto the Cedar Mountain formation, working your way gradually lower, but mostly just rolling along over a not very interesting gray & brown landscape. Then you get a little lower still, the road gets a titch more squiggly*, and Junipers and a few Piñons appear, and then all of a sudden, the world… falls… away…
*But still graded and excellent. The roads in this area are the best-condition unpaved roads in the state.
No really, I mean it. The road ends at a spot called the Wedge Overlook, where what you are overlooking is the so-called Little Grand Canyon. No, it’s not as “grand” as the actual Grand Canyon, but it’s still absolutely, thoroughly and spectacularly awesome. Here it is:
OK, now at this point in the post, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: “Why does this photo suck so badly? If the view is that great, shouldn’t he have taken a decent photo instead of just cropping some still from his helmet-cam?” To which the answer is yes, I should have and indeed did so. In fact I took a dozen+ wonderful shots. But, later in the day, I lost- yes lost- my camera. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
Tangent: Long-time readers will recall that I have a long, sad history of losing/ destroying cameras. In fact when I purchased this one, I broke my own rule and bought the super-duper extended warranty* that would cover any kind of impact/breakage.**
*Because warranties are a form of gambling, with the odds similarly stacked against you. So is insurance, I guess, but I do buy that because not doing so- ironically- turns out to be a bigger gamble. Still, I actually have a long, complicated and reasonably-well-thought-out (for me at least) Half-Baked Theory as to why we’d all be better off if automobile insurance were outlawed***, but I’ll save that for another footnote in another tangent in another post.
**Unfortunately you need the actual camera to collect on the warranty. KanyonKris helpfully pointed out that broken cameras are often offered for parts, etc. on eBay, and that I could possibly procure a “stand-in” on the cheap, but that would’ve broken my Rule of Crime****.
***In my younger days, I actually- and I am not making this up- had an extended version of this Half-Baked Theory that applied to banks, but it fell apart once I managed to accumulate $100 and needed to put it someplace.
****Which is not what you might assume. My Rule of Crime has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or morality (although I am personally ethically and morally opposed to crime- that’s beside the point) but rather the logic of crime. The Rule is that you should only commit crimes that you will only need to commit once. One time. So for instance, stealing $10 million out of a bank vault, or the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre***** is a sensible crime, because you do it and then presumably you’re set for life. On the other end of the spectrum, holding up a liquor store is right out, because you’d need to rob them practically weekly to maintain any sort of a reasonable income, and then the odds would doom you to death or incarceration in short order. Similarly, petty fraud sits down on this Low/No end of the Crime-Rule spectrum. I should point out BTW that KanyonKris strikes me as exactly the kind of logical, creative, smart and ultra-resourceful guy who would make a Fantastic Master Criminal if only he weren’t So Darn Nice.
*****Leaving aside the whole fencing issue, of course.
But here I am, losing yet another camera. So if you don’t know me in real life, you are probably thinking, “I am never loaning him anything…” but really, this only happens to me with cameras. And in my defense, I bring my camera absolutely everywhere and take tons of photos with it. So I think you should give me a little bit of slack, at least until you read how I lost it.
The Little Grand Canyon looks so different than the Eastern edge of the Swell- the Reef- because it’s not all crazy-tilted. It’s just been eroded down into countless little draws and canyons as the Swell has uplifted. It’s sort of a little Colorado-Plateau-within-a-Colorado-Plateau (which in this case happens to the actual Colorado Plateau.) The geology here includes a number of formations we’ve looked at previously; I’ve marked the main ones in this photo*.
*Courtesy of KanyonKris, who is exactly the kind of guy who doesn’t lose things like cameras.
Our reason for visiting the Wedge Overlook wasn’t just to see the view, but also check out a new mtn bike trail we’d heard about. The Good Water Rim trail departs from the overlook and follows the rim of Good Water Canyon- a network of small canyons feeding into a bigger tributary to the main San Rafael Little Grand Canyon- for 15 miles of singletrack. The ride was mostly level*, not at all difficult, and provided wonderful views. Sometimes the views would be of the deep canyon reaching out to the San Rafael River…
…and other times it would just be of the shallow Navajo-lined side washes.
Side Note:Utahmountainbiking.com, whose reviews of trails are usually spot on, gives this trail borderline-ecstatic reviews. KanyonKris and I enjoyed it very much, but were not quite as enthusiastic. While interesting, the trail is almost completely non-technical. The views are great, but after 30 miles out & back, well, you’ve seen the same view quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong- it’s a very enjoyable trail. But if you’re a mtn biker planning a first trip to Utah, there are a few dozen trails I’d ride before of this one.
Regardless of aspect, the trail stuck to the same geologic layer: the Carmel Formation. The Carmel is a “mid-Jurassic” formation, separating the (early-Jurassic) Navajo from the (late-Jurassic) Entrada. It formed in a shallow marine and peritidal environments in seven distinct “depositional cycles”. The marine environment which led to its creation was a shallow inland sea extending from Southern Utah to Southern Alberta, called the Carmel Seaway. The formation consists of various layers of limestone, siltstone, sandstone and evaporates*.
*Mineral sediments concentrated by evaporation. Closer to home, the mud flats around Great Salt Lake are full of ‘em.
So wait a minute. If the Carmel separates the Navajo from the Entrada, why didn’t I mention it back over in Moab, when I was going on and on about those formations? Because it doesn’t occur over there; the Carmel Seaway didn’t reach that far East*. In any case, the trail rides over, and makes good use of, an abundance of remarkably flat gray slabs- limestone members of the formation. Some are small- like dinner plates, and clatter, jump and sometimes even flip under a bicycle tire. Others are massive, living-room-sized slabs. How are they all so flat, and on the same level?
*“East” is relative here, since what is now Utah was in a different spot on the globe in the Jurassic than it is today.
Extra Detail: I couldn’t figure out which limestone member; there are 3. A big one occurs near the tippy-top of the formation, an even bigger one in the middle, and a small/narrow one down at the bottom.
The answer becomes obvious when you look at the breaking-away chunks of the rim. Each massive car-sized boulder is comprised of a series of 2-3” thick horizontal plates. When one is eroded away, the next is right there to take its place.
The Carmel as a whole is relatively erosion-resistant layer when compared with the softer underlying Navajo. When the Carmel is finally removed, the Navajo quickly erodes into deep washes and canyons.
The Carmel and Ancient Marine Life
The Carmel appears to have played an interesting role in the evolutionary history of marine life. The limestone layers created what geologists carbonate hardground, which means a lithified (turned to rock) seafloor. These hard seafloors favored life forms that with hard, protective exteriors, and/or “encrusters” that formed hard, protective shelters or tubes, over critters that burrowed into softer/sandier soils for protection. The Carmel- and other Jurassic period hardgrounds- saw an explosion of various bivalves (oysters, clams, scallops, etc.) and other encrusters, such as serpulid worms, which construct and reside in hard little tubes.
The Carmel was one of a number of Jurassic carbonate hardgrounds that formed during the Jurassic, and later the Cretaceous. But for a long, long time before- throughout the Triassic and Permian, practically no such hardgrounds were formed. The next most recent hardground-forming era was back in the Silurian* and earlier Ordovician periods, and interestingly, this was the time-span that saw the rise of the echinoderms**, which include all sorts of spiny things, such as sea stars, sea urchins.
*We looked at the supernova hypothesis for the Silurian extinction back in this post.
**We looked at echinoderms- and specifically Brittle Stars- last spring down in Mexico in this post. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.
After the ride, while we were in the area, we drove down to the bottom of the Little Grand Canyon and the San Rafael River crossing, an easy drive which I strongly recommend. This whole area is both beautiful and remarkably accessible; come Spring I’ll be returning with the Watcher family for sure.
On the drive down we passed one of the best rock art sites in this part of the state- Buckhorn Wash. Buckhorn is a huge cliff-side panel, some 160 feet long, chock-full of large anthropomorphic figures dating back several thousand years. The style/period is Barrier Canyon, which we’ve looked at previously, so I won’t repeat the background here, but mention just a couple of cool/unusual things about this site.
Several of the figures are holding curious staves, snakes or other objects. Some of the anthropomorphs are winged, like weird, shamanistic archaic angels. 2 of the figures, oddly, seem to be over-painted with a yellow pigment; it’s not clear when or by whom, or even whether it was in historic or prehistoric times. (This site BTW is almost all pictographs, meaning painted figures, as opposed to petroglyphs, which are pecked/carved figures. The last rock art site we visited, Thompson Wash in the Book Cliffs, features a mix of both types, consistent with the multiple styles/periods found there.)
But the weirdest thing is that most of the anthropomorphs have later, deliberately-pecked holes in their chests. What does this mean? Were later visitors trying somehow to deface the site, or remove or later it’s significance or power?
Extra Detail: Buckhorn, like Thompson Wash, is another restoration success story. The site was similarly trashed until the mid-90’s. There also another, unmarked, Barrier Canyon site some 3 miles up-canyon of the main Buckhorn panel of which KanyonKris and I were unaware, and which I’ll be sure to visit on my next trip. Slifer’s book has detailed directions.
We headed back to the highway at Castle Dale, gassed up and did “lunch” at the Huntington Maverik, then raced North toward Price to catch a quick ride while we still had daylight.
Ode to Maverik
Tangent: Lunch was Crunchy Cheetoes, a Rock Star and a Maverik chocolate chip cookie. It is time for a trailer-trash Confession: I love Maverik (pic right, not mine*). I love the cheap gas, I love that the sunglass tree is always well-stocked (for the countless times I have forgotten/lost/destroyed sunglasses in the backcountry) and I love their fresh-baked cookies**. There. I said it. I love Maverik and I don’t care who knows it. When I roll into the outskirts of a rural Utah hamlet after days camping, backpacking or biking in the backcountry, and I spot that cheesy red and white sign ahead in the distance, my little heart practically sings for joy; there it is, everything I need in the civilized world, a proud little bastion of organization, resources and logistics, the very essence and ultimate triumph of Western civilization, conveniently packed into one little store. I swear, if I’m ever camped out alone in the desert and a flying saucer lands and aliens get out and ask me to show them the crowing achievement of our civilization, I am taking them straight to the nearest Maverik. Ah,Maverik!(If only they stocked better beer…)
*I pulled it from the Convenience Store News website. Man, it is like there is a website for everything.
**99 cents, and totally, decadently and awesomely delicious.
Price has a nice singletrack network on the north side of town running over a series of low hills or mini-mesas that collectively form sort of a long “pre-bench” leading up to the Book Cliffs. Price sits, as I mentioned, atop the Mancos Shale, and the pre-bench just above is also of the Mancos, but of an upper member, the Blue Gate. Though silty and fast-eroding like the rest of the Mancos, the Blue Gate Member seems to have just a bit more “spine” than the lower members, and actually forms modest-tough-beautiful minor cliffs and hoodoos in the side canyons in the pre-bench (pic below= crappy helmet-cam still).
Most of the trails are accessed via a brutal jeep-road-climb or hike-a-bike up onto the pre-bench, but once on top, the trails are great, all twisty, windy* and fun. Lower down, close to the edge of the pre-bench, they’re mostly smooth and stone-less and open, but as you get higher and “Norther”, Juniper and Piñon appear, creating a non-Mancos-y woodland, and the trail starts to feature occasional boulders, intermittent rock gardens, and coarser, larger-grained, and distinctly un-Mancos-like soils. What’s going on?
*As in they wind around a lot, as opposed to there being lots of wind.
What is going on is that the Blue Gate pre-bench is overlain with a very different soil formation, called pediment mantle. A pediment in geology is a broad, gradually sloping area at the base of mountains or cliffs, covered with a relatively thin layer of fluvial gravel which is the product of erosional (not depositional) processes. Where does stuff come from? From the Book Cliffs, which as we saw in our last geo-post, are gradually eroding their way North across the land.
The pediment mantle here is of uncertain age, thought to be laid down mainly sometime over the last 10 million years, probably more recently near streambeds, and consists of a “poorly-bedded”* mix of silt, sand, pebbles, stones and boulders.
*Although this sounds like a term from the Urban Dictionary, it is in fact geo-speak for “all jumbled up”.
The pediment mantle atop the Blue Gate member forming the “pre-bench” North of Price is only between 10 and 150 feet thick, but it’s enough to dramatically change the character of the surface. The land is covered with Piñon, Juniper, and well-established Sagebrush, and the trails corner well, hold up under moisture and feature intermittent interesting little rock gardens.
What’s cool about the Price-pediment-mantle is that it’s a great example of geology in action. While all this rock and sediment stuff sounds geeky and esoteric, here’s a clear, real-world example of how geologic processes and history change the land you ride across and the experience of the ride. Mountain biking in Utah is always fun, but until you understand what you’re riding on, you’re really just pedaling in the dark.
Pressed for daylight, we climbed steadily to the top of Luke’s Trail, then turned around and zipped back down. The descent was a delight- a bit too twisty to rip it, but interesting enough to keep you on your toes, constantly weaving and ducking your way under and around Piñon/Juniper limbs, and S-curving your way across pretty sagebrush-filled meadows.
When we popped back out on the dirt road we re-grouped and bombed down the steep, rutted half-mile back to town and the car. Loading up the bikes in the dusk, we laughed about what a great descent it had been and how we couldn’t wait to return. Then I noticed- my camera was gone.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I keep my camera in a small pouch (a cell-phone case) with a clip that clamps onto my Camelbak strap. When I first rigged up the system ~18 months ago (following my last camera/biking mishap) I used a piece of electrical tape on the open end of the clip as a failsafe. But over time it became tedious to constantly apply and remove tape for practically every ride, and I started mounting the case without the tape. After a few cautious rides, it seemed to be holding onto the strap just fine, and I soon forgot about the tape. And so things were, just fine as can be, till last Tuesday, when I found myself camera-less.
Kris immediately encouraged me to drive back up onto the pre-bench, where we looked around by flashlight at a couple of points where the trail intersected the road. It was hopeless of course, but that’s the kind of guy Kris is: patient, upbeat, generous with his time, happy and eager to help a friend out. Finally we gave up and drove back down to town in the dark. Kris mentioned that he’d spoken to “Fuzzy”, the owner of the local bike shop, earlier in the week to ask about trails, and that he’d call him in the morning and ask him to let us know if the camera turned up. I said, “Sure, yeah…” I knew he was just trying to help, but really, you drop a little camera in a woodland while descending at speed- it’s gone, off in the brush, never to be seen again. I might as well have dropped it in a river of molten lava... So it turned out to be a great day, but kind of an expensive one. I did my best to shrug off the mood as we chit-chatted on our drive back to the Wasatch Front.
Back home, the next day was a busy one, with plenty of catch-up work, email and phone-calls from the day I’d missed. After work AW and I attended a music program at school that Bird Whisperer and Twin B were part of, returning home home late and tired. Getting ready for bed, I noticed my phone was blinking. It was a text from KanyonKris. He’d heard back from Fuzzy. My camera was at the shop.
Special thanks to Fuzzy of Fuzzy’s BicycleWorks and local riders in Price, UT. Fuzzy put out the word on my camera on the shop web page, and it was recovered inside of 6 hours. What a cool shop and biking community.
Back on US191, we sped North back toward I-70. After you pass the Moab airport, all the cliffs and domes and faults and anticlines and all the rest of the geo-drama is left behind, and the road is lined by endless, dull gray scrubby rolling plain. Even the “scrub” is sparse; mostly what you see is a lot of gray dirt. This is the layer above* the Morrison formation, the Mancos Shale.
*In many areas, there are 1 or 2 more narrow formations in between the Morrison and the Mancos: the Cedar Mountain and Dakota Sandstone formations.
Unlike so many of the Utah geologic formations we’ve looked at so far, Mancos doesn’t form any cliffs or smooth waves or arches or alcoves. It doesn’t form spires or bridges or slot canyons. It isn’t the centerpiece of any national or state park, monument. And yet, you probably see more of it driving around Central and Southern Utah than you do any other formation.
Part of this is because there’s so much of it. Mancos is a mudstone, laid down in shallow seas during the Cretaceous, and in many places it lies a few thousand feet thick. But the other reason is that many roads tend to follow it. Mancos doesn’t form any of those spectacular features because it erodes so easily, and quickly comes to rest in broad, gently undulating lowlands, perfect for routing a highway. If you drive from the Colorado border to Price, UT, you’re on Mancos the whole way.
Once you get off the asphalt, Mancos is both wonderful and horrible. In dry conditions, graded dirt roads across the Mancos are often smooth and fast, allowing a passenger car to zip comfortably along at 40 or 50 MPH. But when wet, forget it. Mancos roads become a thick, gloopy stew that’ll quickly snare your 4WD vehicle.
Extra Detail: Often times when you’re tooling along some Mancos track you’ll see deep tire ruts left over from someone drove the wet road. If you check out the deep ruts, you’ll often see that they have marks from tire chains, which is how the ranchers get through when it’s wet. I used to carry around tire chains in my old pickup for just this reason, but eventually decided it was just less hassle to stay off Mancos/clay roads when potentially wet.
I always find Mancos a bit un-nerving, partly because I’ve encountered it wet, but also because it seems so bleak, and borderline lifeless. Why so few plants? This part of the state is dry for sure, but other nearby soil types generally don’t look so bleak. Another reason is the high concentrations of selenium in Mancos soils*, which are problematic for many plants. But probably the most important reason is that Mancos is an expanding clay**, which increases its volume dramatically when wet. The frequent moisture-induced expansions and contractions of the Mancos make it very tough for seedlings to gain a toehold in the soil.***
*I covered selenium content in soils, plants and people in this post.
***And now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen fully developed cryptobiotic soil on Mancos. (Though maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough.) I covered cryptobiotic desert soils in this post. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.
As you approach I-70, you’ll see a massive wall of high, beige cliffs on the North side of the freeway. These are the Book Cliffs, formed from the Mesaverde formation, layers of sandstones interspersed with shales and limestones.
I’ve driven past and along the Book Cliffs (pic left) probably a couple of hundred times. Embarrassingly, with the exception of a few quick forays over a decade ago in Colorado, I haven’t explored the area at all. And what’s interesting, is that with the exception of a few hunter-friends, practically no one I know in Utah has spent any time in the Book Cliffs. The reason is that because Utah has so many more spectacular places to visit, hardly any of us bother with the area. It’s part of the Utah irony: this state has so many amazing features which if you picked up and transported to say Michigan or Nebraska, would totally merit national park status. But here in Utah, we don’t even really notice them. That’s a shame, because when it comes to the Book Cliffs, there are at least 3 really cool things about them.
Tangent: Thinking about the Book Cliffs got me noodling about the broader issue of geographic blanks spots. By blank spots in this case, I’m not talking so much about faraway places I’ve never been to, say like Madagascar or New Caledonia, but places I’ve been right by over and over again, but never checked out. The Book Cliffs are one example. Another is- or rather was- Jack’s Peak*, until the Trifecta and I climbed it this Spring. The Canyon Range West of Scipio, the Pine Valley Range North of St. George, the Uintas West of Mt. Agassiz- all are blank spots on my mental map of Utah. Closer to home there are still dozens of draws and minor peaks in the Wasatch and Oquirrhs I’ve yet to explore, and even within 2 or 3 miles of my home there are side streets I’ve never turned down. As you think about your own home “turf”, it’s likely you can think of similar blank spots that you’ve passed by time and again for years or even decades without checking out.
*Speaking of Jack’s Peak, Since I’ve become (at least marginally) geologically-aware, I’ve learned that the peak, and the ridge leading up to it, is actually its own little anticline.
Nested Tangent: When I think about blank spots, I tend to construct an image of them in my head- how the landscape looks, the vegetation, the aspect, etc. We all do this- think about an upcoming vacation. Say you’re going to Hawaii, to a hotel you’ve never been to before. You have an image in your head of the hotel, your room, the pool, maybe the lobby. Maybe the image has been influenced in part by photos on a website or in a brochure, but it’s still in your head; when you actually get there, they layout of the place will be somewhat different.
I do this all the time in ordinary business travel. I visualize the airport, the hotel, the offices of the company I’m going to visit. Closer to home I do it when I’m going to check out a new trail; I have an image of what it will look like, which stays in my head until I get there and actually see it.
Most of the time these “blank spot visualizations” are instantly swept out of mind by the actual, real-world image once I actually get to, see, and “fill in” the blank spot. But sometimes, when I finally reach a blank spot that I’ve thought about for a long time, such as the Newfoundland range or Cerro Piñones, the visualization lingers for a bit as my mind seems to try to somehow reconcile the two. I’ve mentioned before that I have frequent dreams of “wrong geography”, where I see landscapes or actual maps that are different than real world. I wonder if the source of such dreams is the countless “blank spot maps” my mind is continually creating and discarding…
In my ideal life, I’d dedicate a day a week to checking out, and filling in, blank spots. And if I ever (unlikely) managed to fill them all in, then I guess I’d move someplace else and start over again.
First Cool Thing About The Books Cliffs
First, the Book Cliffs are the longest continuous unbroken escarpment on the planet. That’s right- you can drive from Grand Junction to Helper and be alongside them the entire way. There’s no other place on Earth with a similar feature of such length and continuity. Isn’t that amazing? And yet I don’t think there’s a sign or a pull-out or anything that points that out…
Second Cool Thing About The Book Cliffs
Secondly, the Book Cliffs have a rich human history, reflected in the incredible archeological wealth of the area. The draws and side canyons of the area are practically rotten with rock and art and graffiti, dating from archaic to historic times. Nine Mile Canyon is the classic example, but Range Creek, an area which just became known to the public in the last decade, is even more amazing. (Later in the post, we’ll visit yet another example of such archeo-booty.) Even in the modern day, the Mesaverde formation is significant, in that it houses all of Utah’s currently mined coal seams.
Third Cool Thing About The Book Cliffs
And third (and as always, I have saved the coolest thing for last) the Book Cliffs are moving. No, no, no- I’m not talking about moving as in continental plates, yada, yada moving. Yes, of course they’re moving like that- everything is. But the Book Cliffs are moving faster; they are practically walking North across the land.
More specifically, they’re eroding across the land. In many posts we’ve looked at various example of geologic erosion. But what’s interesting in this landscape, where the geologic layers are more or less flat and non-convoluted, is that the primary direction of erosion is not vertical, but horizontal.
As the exposed Mesaverde cliff faces are assaulted by wind, rain and sun, they slowly crumble and fall away. Millions of years ago the Book Cliffs stood far to the South of where they are today, and millions of years in the future they’ll stand much further North.
On I-70 we turned East, away from home, and proceeded to the Thompson Springs exit, where we left the freeway and wound our way North a few miles to the base of the cliffs.
Side Note: Past the gas station Thompson Springs is a borderline ghost town- the perfect setting for an apocalypse/end-of-world/zombie movie. It knew better times in decades past as a home for coal miners and a stop for travelers, but the last half-century have dealt it a double-whammy. First, the interstate bypassed the town, which lay astride the old US6, and then passenger trains ceased stopping there in favor of Green River. Today it’s sort of creepy and fascinating- kind of like Mancos Shale.
At the mouth of Thompson Wash, a modest draw in the Book Cliffs, lies an outstanding rock art site. Over the years the petroglyphs have been heavily vandalized, but restoration efforts in the 90’s removed the worst of the offending modern graffiti. Today it’s well worth a stop. Just a few miles from the freeway, the site is festooned with art spanning possibly as far back as 5,000 – 7,000 years, including at least 4 distinct periods/styles.
Botanical Side Note: As you approach the base of the Book Cliffs, the vegetation changes, becoming better-established, taller and richer. One reason I think is that the Mancos is now covered by sandier, less-expanding/contracting soils, which are debris from the eroded Mesaverde cliffs. A second reason, specifically near the mouth of the Wash, is probably just greater moisture.
Sagebrush appears North of “town” and increases in height as you approach the cliffs. At the mouth of the Wash it forms small shrees, reaching over your head (pic above, right, Twin A for scale). Sagebrush (which I blogged about a long, long time ago) can be a bear to ID down to the species level, but whenever it gets as big as you are, chances are its Big Sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata.Fremont’s Mahonia, which we looked at a couple hundred miles to the South back in October, also reappears here. I’d never checked it out before in late Fall, but the leaves turn a beautiful lavender color (pic left).
The first is Barrier Canyon, an archaic motif we talked about down in the Grand Canyon, and which dates back as far as 4,000 or maybe even 6,000BC. Thompson Wash is one of the classic Barrier Canyon sites, just fantastic in both details and accessibility. The main Barrier Canyon panel includes 19 large anthropomorphs, up to 7 feet tall.
The second is Chihuahuan Polychrome Abstract, which dates from 700BC to 300BC. This style, which occurred across the Great Basin (further West it’s known as Great Basin Abstract) features geometric designs and patterns. One hypothesis is that the patterns represent entoptic phenomena, which are visual effects whose source originates within the eye itself. “Floaters” are an example of an entoptic phenomena.*
*“Floaters”, specifically myodesopsia, are the results of anomalies or deposits in within the vitreous humour, which is the (otherwise) clear gel filling the interior of your eyeball. The actual floaters that you see are the shadows cast by these anomalies on your retina. I see floaters occasionally, but only when looking at bright and empty clear blue sky.
Third is Fremont, the dominant culture across Utah from about 400AD – 1300AD. Fremont also features anthropomorphs, but they look more “bling-superhero” than the “creepy ghost-guys” of the earlier Barrier Canyon style. Fremont anthropomorphs are broad-shouldered, trapezoidal figures often equipped with weapons, shields and headgear. Fremont rock art has been subdivided by archeologists into six regional divisions. The Book Cliff sites, including Nine Mile Canyon, fall under the Northern San Rafael style, which features more animals and abstract patterns. This seems to be the dominant style at Thompson Wash, but one large panel here depicts anthropomorphs more in the Southern Rafael style, which runs across Southern Utah from Moab to Escalante.
The fourth style is Historic Ute*, which features such obvious post-Euro-contact elements as horses, but also sometimes incorporates elements of earlier rock art traditions. Ute panels seem to be more narrative than abstract- like the artist was telling (or recounting) a specific story. In addition to the Indian rock art, there is, as I’ve mentioned, a fair amount of Euromerican graffiti, and some of this is interesting in its own right, dating back to at least the 1880’s.
Several thousand years, at least 4 distinct cultures/styles, mixed in with elements of neighboring styles- everything I’ve described her lies within about a 100 yard radius. And that’s the way cool thing about Thompson Wash.
A little tucked-away stopover/ retreat along the world’s longest unbroken embankment, it’s been a crossroads of cultures for thousands of years. It’s like our own little Middle East/Holy Land right here in Eastern Utah. Right off the interstate, where I’ve passed dozens and dozens of times over 2 decades, I finally stopped to check it out. Filling in blank spots pays off again and again, and I’m going to do more of it this coming year.
Everything seems better in the light of day. In most cases, I don’t know why this is. We go to bed worried about work or our kids or spouses or that project we couldn’t get done or the President’s birth certificate or whatever and then when we wake up a few hours later, although the problem is still there, it somehow seems more manageable. This of course is the idea behind “sleeping on” a problem or challenge. It’s not that you actually figure it out while you’re unconscious, but rather that your mind somehow backs away from the ledge, so to speak.
But in the case of getting lost in the middle of the night in the desert, it’s very obvious why you feel better about your situation in the light of day: because you can freaking see where the hell you are. And though I was still “lost”, I could make out enough of the surrounding topography (pic left) to realize that I had in fact wandered a bit North and West of where I wanted to be. So I started up the rig and started slurping and slopping my way back South.
Getting Found
After about a mile and a half I came to one of those merging forks that I’d completely overlooked the night before, and saw fresh tire tracks in the mud in both forks. Since I’d seen no other tracks the night before, I knew someone had come this way after me. I stuck with the South fork. Another mile and a fence loomed- the national park boundary- next to which a pickup was pulled out. An older man stood by the open tailgate, cooking breakfast on a campstove.
The man- let’s call him Gene- wasn’t entirely sure where he was either, having also wandered in in the night, but had a better idea than I did and better maps to support that idea. He was also headed for the trailhead, to day-hike down to a rock art site, and advised me on his best guess of how to arrive there. I thanked Gene and continued South. Another mile or so and the road descended into a broad, sage-filled meadow, and morphed into 2 water-filled parallel canals* of uncertain depth, extending for at least the next 100 yards. This was the worst-looking section yet, and I stopped to check it out. For about 5 minutes I waffled on what to do- go for it or backtrack? If I got stuck there was a good chance Gene would be along, but still…
*Seriously, you could have paddled a kayak down along either tire-rut.
As I equivocated in the morning sun, I heard a low distant hum, then a rumble from across the meadow. Moments later a Nissan emerged from the Piñon-Juniper on the far side.
I’ve posted before about Arizona Steve, how we met almost 3 decades ago, our parallel lives and our long history of backcountry adventures together. We generally see each other once or twice a year, and whenever we do, I’m glad to see him. But of all the times we’ve met up, I don’t think I was ever gladder to see Arizona Steve than I was Thursday morning.
Steve had reached the trailhead at the ungodly hour of 1AM, then set his alarm for dawn to come looking for me. He’d encountered many of the same navigational challenges I had, but had persevered due to a combination of better gear* and superior 4WD juju.** We convoyed through multiple mud bogs another 8 miles to the trailhead, where we broke out packs and assembled gear.
*GPS with full topo map set.
**Probably part skill, part confidence, part cojones.
Side Note: The guide we used for the hike and access was theFalcon Guideauthored by George Steck. His directions to the trailhead are ~20 years old, and in the intervening decades the park service has closed some of the roads described by him. Steck provides 2 access routes- one South via June Tank, the other East from Graham Ranch. The June Tank route is basically intact, is shorter and easier, but more vulnerable to rain/snow. The Graham Ranch route, which was always longer and more complicated, has changed significantly.
One gets the sense that conditions in the canyon may have also have changed. In some cases, Steck describes a bypass for a trivial obstacle, but then makes no mention of a fairly challenging section less than ½ a mile down-canyon.
*Jumble of boulders immediately up-canyon from the conglomerate arch.
**Jumble of boulders just below junction with Northeast arm of the canyon.
The Tuckup trailhead lies on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at roughly 5,800 feet, atop the Kaibab limestone layer, which I mtn biked over of back in July over on the Kaibab Plateau, some ~35 miles to the East. The surrounding woodland consisted largely of familiar plants- Colorado Piñon, Utah Juniper, Cliffrose, and occasional thickets of Gambel Oak or the lone Serviceberry. As we strode off the rim and started our trek downward, these plants hung on sporadically over the next few hundred yards before sputtering out completely, to be replaced by a scrubland of Rabbitbrush and Snakeweed.
Botanical Side Note: Just below the rim, occurring sporadically down a few hundred feet, was this holly-like bush with tough, leathery, sharp-spiked leaves. It’s Fremont’s Mahonia, Mahonia fremontii, and it’s very closely-related to (same genus) Oregon Grape*. Like Oregon Grape it’s an evergreen.I’ve seen this shrub all over Arizona, as far South as the Ajo Mountains down by the Mexican border, but I haven’t come across it in Utah, though the guides say it occurs in the Southern part of our state as well.
It’s eye-catching and easy to pick out; the persistent leaves seem to bend and cup and “swoop”, almost like hundreds of tiny gesturing hands.
*BTW, there’s an error in the Oregon Grape post: I listed it as belonging to Ranunculaceae, the Buttercup family. It- and Fremont’s Mahonia- actually belong to Berberadiceae, the Barberry family, and both families belong to the order Ranunculales. Sometime soon I will get around to fixing the error. I know nobody cares about this but me, but I’m trying to correct old mistakes when I can.
We dropped off the Kaibab Formation and descended a short sloping, crumbly section called the Toroweap formation, laid down in a warm, shallow intermittent/recurring sea bottom some ~255 - 270 million years ago. Rocks in here are supposed to be great spots to hunt for marine fossils, but both times we passed through this layer- the very, very beginning and very, very end of the trip- we were blowing through pretty quickly. Immediately below the Toroweap we passed through another cliff-y band, the Coconino Sandstone, which I blogged about back in July on the Kaibab Plateau. Below the Coconino is a long band of soft crumbly shale slopes, which might have been tricky when dry, but full of moisture from the recent rains were a breeze to pass over. This is the Hermit Formation, thought to consist mainly of freshwater stream deposits on a broad coastal plain some ~280 million years ago.
About half-way down the Hermit slope, we started to encounter an old nemesis:Acacia greggii, Catclaw Acacia, which I posted about last January down in the Sonoran. These Catclaws would turn out to be the dominant shrub of the canyon , their prickly presence a near-constant companion clear down to the river another 3,000 feet below. Their persistent thorns spelled the end of one of my 2 T-shirts* on the trip.
*On backpacking trips I bring 1 extra T-shirt, 1 extra pair of underpants and 1 extra pair of socks. Changing into the clean T-shirt is always a little mini-highlight of the trip. After 3 or 4 dusty, sweaty days, the detergent and fabric-softener smell of a clean tee is like this wonderfully shocking little concussion of sudden hygiene in the desert.
At the bottom of the Hermit slope, the land flattened out into a broad terrace ringing the canyon on all sides. This terrace, which occurs pretty much the length of the Grand Canyon, is known as the Esplanade, and geologically it marks the transition from the Hermit shale to what is known as the Supai Group. The Supai consists of 3 mixed limestone-shale formations*, capped by a layer of harder Sandstone, the Esplanade Sandstone. This cap-layer is harder, erodes more slowly than the Supai formations below or the Hermit above, and is the reason for the terrace. We crossed a short stretch of Esplanade and dropped into a side canyon.
*Specifically- from topmost layer moving downward- the Wescogame, Manachaka and Watahomigi, none of which are particularly spectacular, despite their thoroughly awesome names, so it’s pretty easy to miss the transition from one to the next as you’re hiking along if you’re not paying close attention.
The trail wound downward through the Supai Group and through the acacias, dumping us out in a minor wash which led us a short distance to the floor of Tuckup Canyon proper. The canyon here is open, broad and dry, lined on either side by the low, shale-y slopes of the Watahomigi. But within a hundred yards the canyon began to be lined by outcroppings, then bluffs, then cliffs, of dark red sandstone. This is the Redwall Formation, one of the most notable features of the Grand Canyon and it would be the primary geologic component of the canyon until were below the junction with Cottonwood Canyon.
Though it looks superficially similar to some of the slickrock you see up around Moab or Canyonlands, the Redwall Formation (pic left) is a whole different deal. As I mentioned back in the Kaibab post, the Colorado Plateau is tilted in such a way as to form a virtual geologic “staircase”, meaning that the further South you go, the older the exposed rock layers are. The Redwall Formation, up to 800 feet thick, was laid down between 320 and 360 million years ago, on the bottom of a sea that lay here. By “here”, I mean this hunk of land that is now part of the modern continent of North America. Back then it lay some ~35 degrees of latitude to the South, more or less on the equator.
The Ancient Gallery
But all that was still ahead. Just a ~1/2 mile down-canyon, as the first red bluffs rose on our left, we spotted them: looming ancient figures gazing down on us from the overhang above. We’d reached Shaman’s Gallery.
I’ve posted about ancient rock art before, but not in such a remote location. The exact date of Euromerican discovery of the site isn’t clear, but probably occurred in the early 20th century. What makes Shaman’s Gallery remarkable is not just its remote-ness, but also its scale. It’s a huge, magnificent panel, similar in size to the Harvest Scene in the Maze District of Canyonlands, rich in figures, geometric designs and, well, doodles(?). It’s also- once you manage to get there- very accessible, by which I mean that you’re right up next to the drawings, as close as you wish. The panel lies on an overhang at a roughly 45 degree angle, shielding the art from the elements and creating a pleasant mid-day shade on the slickrock “walkway” along the bottom of the panel. Free from sun, fences, signage, other visitors, or visible sign of modern civilization, it may well be the most wonderful rock art site I’ve visited yet.*
*Though the Harvest Scene is pretty phenomenal as well.
Extra Detail: The site is not without controversy. A little googling of “Shaman’s Gallery” will quickly reveal something of the controversy surrounding the site’s discovery, location, publicity, access and even name. I won’t try to re-tell the various sides of the issue here, but we were disappointed to spot a bit of modern graffiti on the panel*.
*Which shocked us, given the tedious, time-consuming access to the site. You have to want to get to this place. Rock Art defacement isn’t unusual, and I’ve seen plenty of it around St. George and along the upper Paria River. But I’m still always amazed that people do it. There are some cases- the wholesale lifting/removal of panels- that can at least be explained by greed, but the more destructive defacement boggles my mind. Ultimately the root causes can only be malice, ignorance or both. I like to think more of the latter than the former, because I like to think that ignorance can (at least theoretically) be cured, but maybe I’m just kidding myself.
Steve and I de-packed, snacked in the shade, and then spent the next ½ hour checking out the panel. The dominant features are the huge humanoid figures, but the panel is full of countless smaller, more intricate designs as well. Shaman’s Gallery is interesting in that it belongs to a distinctive and fairly localized motif.
All About Style
Rock art in the Southwest spans a period of several thousand years, and unsurprisingly, styles varied considerably over distance and time, like culture and language. I did another rock art post late last year over around St. George, and most of the art highlighted in that post was what would broadly be categorized as Anasazi*. Anasazi- specifically Western Anasazi- is the most obvious and prevalent (but certainly not only) rock art around St. George, but it’s not the most common style across most of Utah. The most common style is the Barrier Canyon Style, an archaic motif dating anywhere from 500 BC to 4000 BC, and possibly as far back as 6000 BC. Barrier Canyon, of which Horseshoe Canyon (Canyonlands, Maze District) and Thompson Wash (Book Cliffs) are classic examples. It typically features rows of (usually) faceless ghostly figures, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, looking down upon the beholder. They’re thought to represent shamans or other supernatural beings, and the ghostly appearance may represent the metaphorical death experience by ancient shamans in trance-like states. (Or maybe not. But it’s cool to think about.)
*Except for the stuff over by the Maverik- that’s definitely Archaic, Fremont I think.
Extra Detail: Some of the stylistic differences between rock art styles and periods are obvious. For example, if you see a guy on a horse, you know it was drawn after European contact. If you see bow and arrow you know it’s Anasazi, specifically Basketmaker III or later, because the bow and arrow doesn’t appear to have been widespread in the Great Basin before around 500 AD.
Extra Extra Detail: Ever wonder how the Indians got the bow and arrow? I always assumed they’d invented it independently of the (much earlier) Old World invention, and thought it a charming example of “convergent innovation.” But it’s actually thought that it was introduced to the New World via the Arctic some 5,000 years ago by one or more of the “Paleo-Eskimo”* groups. Bow & arrow seemed to be largely “stuck” in the Arctic until around 0 AD, at which time it started moving Southward.
*“Paleo-Eskimo” is a huge, huge brush-over of human history in the Arctic over the last several thousand years, which I regret, but the fascinating and unresolved story of the Thule, Dorset and other ancient Arctic cultures is simply too big a tangent even for me for bite off.
I’ve seen several Barrier Canyon sites before, and initially assumed Shaman’s Gallery to be another. But it turns out to be something different- the Grand Canyon Polychrome style (GCP). GCP is similar in many ways to Barrier Canyon and is thought to be derived from it. But it shows a number of interesting differences. The humanoid/anthropomorph figures tend to be more crowded- almost lined up.
Many show features such as arms, hands, fingers, toes, eyelashes (pic below) and even eyes with pupils.
Another recurring motif is multi-headed anthropomorphic forms, such as the 3-headed figure in the shot below. The skeletal aspect of the figure to the left of the 3-headed guy BTW is a motif common to both Barrier Canyon and GCP styles, and is thought to be tied to the re-birth-type experience of the shaman.
What’s interesting about GCP is that most of these additional features to the Barrier Canyon style seem to be derived from a completely different style far to the Southeast- the Pecos River Style of West/South Texas. This style, centered around the confluence of the Pecos and the Rio Grande, lies some ~600 miles distant from the Grand Canyon, and so the existence of GCP suggests ancient links between cultures widely separated geographically.
The panel contains multiple “overwritten” figures, and it’s difficult to tell what was drawn when. Some of the elements, such as the whiter pigments, appear to be much later additions, possibly from Anasazi times. In other words, this panel was probably revisited, and added to, over as much as a few thousands years. When the later artists visited the site, they likely viewed it as something already cryptically ancient, left behind by an unknown and mysterious people. The span of time separating the later artists from their predecessors was likely several times longer than the time separating us from the last artists.
Tangent: It’s this timescale issue of pre-Columbian peoples that blows me away, and which I feel most Euromericans way under-appreciate. Our history in the New World is overwhelmingly focused on the written histories over the last five centuries. But paleo-Indians spent probably 500+ generations here before that. When we read US history textbooks, they usually start off with a few (rather patronizing) pages about Native Americans before launching into the arrival of Europeans and dedicating dozens of pages to detailed accounts of everything from Tariff and Nullification to Espionage and Sedition Acts.
In fairness, this bias is understandable; we just don’t have clear written histories of these peoples, and can only make inferences from the signs, arts and relics they left behind. But the resultant “quick-wash” passes over millennia of history and millions of individual human stories, and that’s what really hits me when I come across ancient rock art. These were people with full, long lives, just like us. They had hopes and fear and friends and lovers and enemies and long, drama-filled soap-opera-saga lives that were every bit as important and urgent and wonderful and heartbreaking to them as ours are to us. Who passed by here? What became of them- not as a “people”, but as individuals? Was he hoping to find someone/something? Reach someplace? What happened to him, and the dozens, hundreds, or likely thousands of others who sheltered on this ledge over 10,000 years or more? Maybe one of those passers-by was a refugee, or an outcast, hundreds of miles from home, speaking a strange language, and he sketched in the style of his distant homeland, a style later adopted by other artists…
We think we’re different. After all, there’s a record of our stories- documents, numbers, photos, videos, blogs- surely our stories won’t be lost. But our age is a blip in history, and it’s completely unknown to any of us whether any of our stories will be recorded or known or in any way recoverable 10,000 years from now. And in any case, a billion or so years from now, after the expanding sun has boiled the oceans and charred the Earth, it seems unlikely that anyone will ever know that Steve and I sat on a shady ledge in a desert canyon.
Arizona Steve shouldered our packs and remarked at our good fortune. We’d found each other in good time, started our trek more or less on schedule and already had seen a wonderful site. We stepped back into the bright sun and continued down-canyon, our thoughts shifting to water and campsites.
Next Up: The plant KanyonKris should never screw around with.
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