2010 Helmet-Cam Retrospective

Let me start by saying that, in general, I think it’s kind of pretentious to do a retrospective-year-in-review-type post, because doing so implies that a) the blog is more important/has a bigger audience than it actually does, b) the year was somehow exceptional or notable, which it really wasn’t (with the obvious though admittedly not-world-shattering exception that it was the first year I had a helmet-cam), c) even if it was an exceptional year, that I would somehow be in any way more qualified than any other Average Joe to, er, retrospect it, d) that the visual content of this blog somehow merits review/re-posting, and e) I think they always come off as a wee pit pretentious.

But, I’m doing it anyway, because a) I’ve been looking at a bunch of old helmet-cam clips this past week, which have really highlighted the remarkable changes in the living world over the course of the year, b) it allows me to get a post up during this quasi-nether-week without doing any real* research, and c) I guess, if we’re completely honest, I am just a wee bit pretentious.

*Just to be clear- the issue here is that I am lazy- not that I am unimaginative, or in any way out of cool post ideas. In fact I have a great two-fer brewing for next week, about a cool predator and hearing.

I get this weird thing about seasons every year. In the Summer I’ll be walking around in shorts and a T-shirt, maybe hiking or biking past some spot in the woods up in the mountains, and I’ll think that in just a few months, the forest all around me will be leafless, freezing cold, and under several feet of snow. And while I know it consciously, I just can’t really believe it. It just doesn’t seem intuitively possible that the same place could be so different in such a short time. Then 6 months later, skiing or what-not in the backcountry, I’ll have the exact opposite experience, looking around at the frozen silent forest, trying to imagine it green and leafy and warm and full of flowers and hummingbirds and dragonflies, and I just can’t really believe that it’ll be that different so soon. That all this snow will somehow melt away and the dead forest will just come back to life.

Tangent: I’ve been fascinated by the place-change effect of seasons for a long time, since long before starting this project, or even knew anything about forests. In the summer of 2001 I decided to photograph the same spot on the same trail weekly throughout the Summer/Fall. I didn’t see it through, but still have some of the old photos, reposted below.

During past winters I’ve sometimes reality-checked myself by looking through photos from the preceding summer, which helps, but a still photo is just that- a still. But this year, looking at old video-clips, I’ve found a connection to the past cycle of seasons I never managed to experience before.

So anyway, I started to do a kind of a month-by-month helmet-cam retrospective, intending to document the change of seasons and be all kind of artsy and such, but by the time I got to May, I thought, “Man, this is a lot of singletrack through leafless scrub-oak footage…” So instead, I’m just going post a bunch of my favorite helmet-cam clips from 2010. Here we go:

The Clips, Already

Some of the best early season clips I got were down South. This is a portion of the descent of Upper JEM outside of Hurricane, UT, traversing the upper 3 members* of the Moenkopi formation. The trail is lined mainly with Blackbrush and the occasional Utah Juniper up top, with Rabbitbrush and Mormon Tea joining in lower on down. I love the flow of this clip, the way the land changes color as we tranisition between geologic members, the weird light and ominous clouds. Pine Valley Range in the distance.

*Upper Red, Shnabkaib, Middle Red

Tangent: Yes, that’s right. The helmet-cam was my Christmas present last year. What’s that? What did I get this year? Well, I received several nice gifts, but one of the most interesting was a pair of Eyeclops Nightvision Infrared Binoculars. They’re not real night vision binoculars, like the kind of light-amplifying devices used by the military and such, but rather an infrared flashlight attached to a camera-viewer. It’s a fun little toy and I hope to use it for things like night-time bug-hunting, maybe checking out scorpions and such down in the desert come spring.

But in playing around with it (pic below, left = living room chair viewed in darkness) , I discovered a curious and unexpected side effect, which is this: it appears that artificial hair coloring doesn’t show up in infrared light. [I actually have a great photo that displays the effect, but unfortunately I can’t post the photo here, for reasons I can’t really get into.*] Meaning that when you look at someone with colored hair through the infrared viewer, their hair looks gray or white. You can actually pick up the viewer, scan a room full of people, and instantly see who’s dying their hair- Isn’t that freaky??

*Because Awesome Wife would likely leave me if I posted it. If you’re a real-world friend and want to see it, email me- it is way, way freaky.

Back in March I was in the same area with the team, and filmed this clip of the road descent into La Verkin with Teammate-Perry. I like this one for the rush of speed, as well as the physio-geographic significance: We’re crossing the Hurricane Fault here, dropping off the very, very Western edge of the Colorado Plateau and into the Basin and Range country, which extends clear to the Sierra Nevada.

Further down in the Mojave, this clip is from outside Blue Diamond, just outside of Las Vegas. The riding is slow and light dim, but I love the otherworldly feel of this ridge, following the faint singletrack, as well as the sense of solitude and open space just ~20 miles from the spawl and noise of the city. The tall yuccas alongside the trail are Spanish Dagger. Spring Range in the distance.

OK, this one isn’t helmet-cam, but I’m including it anyway. It’s driving across a wash in the Mojave, specifically Beaver Dam Wash, the lowest point in Utah. I love the blast of sun and green and water all together way out in the middle of this dry, spiky expanse of desert.

Tangent: What’s that? You’re wondering what else I got for Christmas. Well I got whole bunch of great books on my latest obsession, er, I mean interest- history of the first peoples in the Americas, and in the Great Basin in particular. (My recent rock art encounters have piqued my curiosity.) And I got some CDs and some more of that quick-drying underwear, and oh, yeah, this:

OK, so I bought myself that one…

Back up in Utah, this is one of one of my favorite stretches of Gooseberry Mesa, the South rim. Following Hunky Neighbor here, we’re rolling across the Shinarump Conglomerate, which marks the transition from Moenkopi to Chinle formations. About a minute in we roll up onto the next Chinle member “up”- the Lower Sandstone Member. We’re passing by Blackbrush, Mormon Tea, Cliffrose, Turbinella Oak, Utah Juniper and Singleleaf Piñon. Little Creek Mesa in the distance.

Closer to home, a couple of May bird-sightings. Here’s a male Black-Headed Grosbeak singing alongside the Shoreline Trail up above the Capitol…

And here’s a soaring Red-Tailed Hawk from Jack’s Peak. Oquirrh Range, Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island and Salt Lake Salient* in the distance.

*No, I haven’t explained this yet- it’s the geologic formation that comprises what I generally refer to as the “foothills” at the North end of Salt lake Valley. We’ll get to it when I do my Geology of the Wasatch post. (And yes, I will do a Geology of the Wasatch post one day and it will be awesome- my veritable Wasatch Opus. You will not want to miss it.)

Around the 1^st week of June the forests around 7,000 – 8,000 feet practically explode in greenery. Here’s a clip from up in Pinebrook. The leaves (mainly Maple & Aspen) are only partway out, still that light, lime green color, and the underbrush (mainly Ninebark & Snowberry) though green, is still low, only recently freed from the weight of the snowpack.

Just 2 weeks later, on the eve of the solstice, I took this clip from the Northern (and best) stretch of the Mid-Mountain trail, passing through several Aspen groves. You can’t see it in the clip, but the trail is lined with blooming Sticky Geranium and Wild Rose.

I did some cool summer road trips this year. This clip is from along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, riding the Rainbow Rim Trail. The tall conifers are Ponderosa pines. In stretches we pass through stands of Gambel Oak and New Mexican Locust. Out at the point we roll by a couple of Colorado Piñons, and finish off with a corridor of blooming Cliffrose. This section smelled fantastic. (At 2:27 I glance into the inner gorge.)

This clip turned out cool. It’s the full moon rising over the Paunsaugunt as I pedaled the bike path back to camp. There are all kinds of cool conifers on the Paunsaugunt. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but I’m pretty sure we’re passing through Douglas Fir and Ponderosa.

OK, another non helmet-cam clip, but a good view of Redfish Lake up in the Stanley Basin of Idaho.

Earlier that same day, here’s a clip from up on the ridge on the West side of the lake (so on the right side of the previous clip) with some nice views of the lake. The trees on this stretch are Douglas Fir, and geologically I suspect I’m rolling over a glacial moraine, not from the last glacial advance, but from the one before, likely ~100,000 years ago.

Later on that vacation, here’s a clip from our campsite on the Lochsa River up in Northern Idaho.

Tangent: I just realized that reading the 2 previous tangents, you probably think that the only thing I care about around Christmas is getting presents. I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. For while I certainly enjoy receiving gifts, I certainly know what really makes Christmas a truly unique, special and magical time, which of course is Making Fun of People’s Holiday Cards. Oh come on, you know you do it too. Every family has a Crazy Aunt or some such who sends out a whacky form letter every year that you and your significant other just can’t wait to get.* Actually, in all seriousness, I like Christmas card-form-letters**. Yes, sometimes they have a lot of detail, but they’re a great way to get caught up on the lives of friends and family you don’t get to see very often.

*Sadly, my own Crazy Aunt stopped sending us her card/letter a few years ago. I can’t figure out if she stopped doing it altogether, or somehow got wind of me making fun of it and took me off the list. It’s a shame, I loved it. It was always written in this super-happy upbeat tone, but kept mentioning things that seemed borderline inappropriate for a Christmas card. Actual line from a past edition: “After breaking off his engagement, Tad*** bought a VW Rabbit and moved to California…”

**Except for the downer ones. You know, the ones that go, “It’s been a year of challenges for the Hetzweigs; Hal lost his job in May, Betty’s back in rehab, and we had to put down Rasputin this year, but we’re hopeful little Petey will learn to cope with his deep anger issues…” Gee, I’m sorry it’s been rough, but did you have to dump all this on us the week before Christmas? Couldn’t you have emailed me or something back in October?

***Not his real name.

The truth is, there’s only one type of holiday card that drives me batty, and that is the Card With New, Unidentified, Unannounced and Unexplained Family Members. I’m not talking babies or pets here- I’m talking adults. Several years ago one of my cousins sent us all a card with a picture of him, his wife, their 2 teenage sons, and… another teenaged boy. We don’t see this cousin but every few years, but so far as we knew, he’d always had 2 kids. Could we have somehow missed one over the years? We doubted it. The card had no explanation, and we chat so infrequently with him, his parents or his siblings that there wasn’t a smooth way to just call him up on some other pretext and say, “Oh, BTW, who’s the other teenager on your Christmas card?” And because we felt awkward asking, by the time the next year’s card came around (again, with mystery teen) it was too late to ask, and so… anyway it was like 2 or 3 years before we were clued in*.

*He was a teen from a troubled home who played basketball with their sons and whom they took in and became his legal guardians. A totally awesome, inspiring story. I just wish they’d noted it in the card so we weren’t scratching our heads (and then semi-faking like we already knew) for so long…

This year, we got a card from AW’s cousin, a single(?) man with a young son. The card said, “Happy Holidays from the Jones* Family” and had a photo of the cousin, his son, a middle-aged woman and 3 teenaged girls. Who are these people? No note, no names, no nothing**. None of these women were in his card last year. We hadn’t heard of a wedding or even a serious girlfriend and suddenly we get the Brady Bunch Christmas card… We are totally clueless…

*Not his real name.

**Which is ironic, because this is the kind of Christmas card that totally merits a lengthy detailed form-letter…

Closer to home, the Wasatch Crest always makes for good video. This clip is from SkiBikeJunkie, Coryalis and my 83-mile Fourth of July Super-Crest tour. You can tell by the low brush/grasses and the light Aspen leaves that it’s still early in the summer. In addition to the usual Wasatch characters, we pass a number of Limber Pines between around 1:00 and 1:20.

For comparison, here’s a piece of that same stretch, exactly 2 months later. Check out how much higher (and drier) the grasses are, and how the Aspen leaves are now a dark, mature green.

This next clip I like- even with the problematic lighting- because it’s one of my favorite stretches of Great Western Trail, and also because it’s my only helmet-cam clip of, er, me. SBJ was kind enough to film it later during the Super-Crest ride. The conifers in the shady sections here are mostly Engelmann Spruce, which do real well on these North-facing slopes*

*And have been doing even better following a century+ of fire suppression in the Wasatch.

Here’s part of that same stretch 3 months later, the trail now lined with fallen Aspen leaves. Passing through the darker Spruce stands, the golden underbrush seems almost to glow, lighting up the forest from below.

The colors peaked in mid-October. Here’s another stretch of Mid-Mountain, about 2 miles North, and 4 months after, the Solstice-Eve clip up above.

Later in the Fall we returned to Gooseberry, where I took this clip following Fast Jimmy through Piñon-Juniper along the rim, with glimpses of the banded Moenkopi formations below.

In mid-November I followed Cory on this high-speed descent down into City Creek. The oaks and maples are bare, the grasses wilted and brown, the sky gray. The landscape is practically begging for snow. We’re rolling over conglomerate soils here, eroded down from the tertiary conglomerate cliffs above. I’ve been trying to keep up with Cory on the downhills for 15 years now, and he just seems to be getting faster. We hit 29.9mph on this stretch.

I saved my favorite clip for last. It may seem like an odd pick, and my feelings aren’t hurt if you don’t like or get it. It’s slow and meandering, I’m alone, the scenery is unspectacular, and the trail rather undefined. It’s the descent of a side trail* off Mid-Mountain trail during the peak bloom of Serviceberry on the day before the summer solstice. The video’s slow and poky, but when I watch it I feel the sun on my neck and smell the brush all around. I feel the Serviceberry brushing my arms, the Sagebrush scratching my shins, my flexed stomach flat on the seat and the braking-burn in my forearms**. For me, this clip is Summer.

*Lower Finesse.

**Because yes, I am a Luddite and ride with v-brakes. Or rather rode. Did I mention my new bike?

It was a good year. The next one will be great.

Filling In Blank Spots

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*.

*I blogged about a hike with Bird Whisperer through 2 of these- Ding and Dang Canyons- a couple years back.

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…

*Would be a great singlespeed ride.

…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.

Note About Sources: Geologic info for this post came from Sedimentation, Stratigraphy, and paleoenvironments of the lower members of the Carmel Formation (Middle Jurassic, Southwestern Utah), Kirsten M. Banner, A carbonate hardground in the Carmel Formation (Middle Jurassic, SW Utah, USA) and its associated encrusters, borers and nestlers, Mark A. Wilson et al, and Geologic Map of the Price 30’ x 60’ Quadrangle, Carbon, Duchesne, Uinta, Utah and Wasatch Counties, Malcolm P. Weiss et al. (Crops of this map were used in the Price Geo-Graphics.) Archeological info came from Dennis Slifer’s Rock Art of the Utah Region.

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.

Thanksgiving Part 4: Book Cliffs, Rock Art & Graffiti

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.

**I covered expanding clays 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.

*I gave an overview of the Utes in this post.

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.

That was a great Thanksgiving.

Note about sources: Geologic info came from Halka Chronic’s Roadside Geology of Utah, Lehi F. Hinzte’s Utah’s Spectacular Geology*, the Inn On The Alameda website and Utahgeology.com. Info on Thompson Wash rock art came from Dennis Slifer’s Rock Art of the Utah Region. Info on “floaters” came from Wikipedia and Awesome Wife (who’s been plagued by them for some time.)

*A fabulous book with one glaring flaw: no index. Really? A geology book with no index? Are you kidding me?

Thanksgiving Desert Hiking Part 3: Big Footprints

The morning after Thanksgiving we slept in and took our time getting going, lingering over the complimentary hotel breakfast* waiting for the temps to climb over 20F.

*Before I had kids I used to diss those free breakfasts. Now we are all over them- the most cost-effective way to fill the bellies of 3 children around. I only wish our kids were like reptiles- stuff them with half their body-weight in waffles and fruit loops and don’t worry about feeding them again for a week. Unfortunately, no matter how many waffles they eat, they’re hungry again 45 minutes later.

After breakfast we packed up, checked out and headed out of town. Driving North up US191 from Moab is like a drive through time: you cross the Colorado River driving past 290 million year old Honaker Trail rock and by the time you reach I-70 you’re rolling over 80 million year old Mancos Shale.

Side Note: Just a few miles North of the turnoff for Arches, on the way up to the turnoff for Dead Horse Point and Island In The Sky, you pass all these gnarly, convoluted, deep-red cliffs lining the West side of the highway. The shapes looking almost haunting, and sometimes out of the corner of your eye as you’re zipping by at 70 MPH you think you catch a glimpse of a form, or even a face, trapped in the rock. The “face”-glimpses are always convoluted, miserable-looking and vaguely Dante-esque, like those Nazis who looked inside the ark in the first Indiana Jones movie. (Right before they melted.) Anyway, years ago, when I used to do weekend Moab trips from the Denver area and knew absolutely nothing about rocks, I called this section the Wall Of Tortured Souls (WOTS).

The WOTS is actually part of the Cutler Group, which was laid down in Permian times, between 240 and 290 million years ago. Like most of the other main geologic formations around it consists of several distinct sub-units, or members.  The WOTS is composed specifically of the Organ Rock Shale member, which was formed from a series of highly oxidized (hence the reddish color) layers of mud. Organ Rock is always striking, and shows up in some spectacular spots. The sloping bases of the massive buttes in Monument Valley are Organ Rock. When you’re riding the White Rim, and look off the edge and down below into Monument Basin (pic right), those freaky, free-standing “totem pole” pillars are also Organ Rock. It’s a soft stone, eroding quickly and dramatically. The Monument Basin pillars are each capped by a fragment of White Rim Sandstone (stuff you’re riding on), which slows the erosion of the pillar below.

Up and up we drove, past Chinle and Moenkopi, Wingate and Kayenta, Navajo and Entrada. Eventually the rocks melted away and we continued North across the high rolling plain toward I-70 that always seems so dreary after the geo-spectacle that is Moab. But a few miles North of the turnoff for Klondike Bluffs, we turned off the highway and traveled East for a couple of miles over clay roads to the base of a low rocky ridge. We parked, hiked across the rock for 5 minutes, and found what we were looking for.

The rock layer above the Entrada is the Morrison formation. Laid down ~150 million years ago, the formation covers a huge piece of the Western US- from the Dakotas to Arizona. Morrison isn’t particularly spectacular sandstone. Oh, it’s pretty enough in places like Dinosaur National Monument and numerous outcrops just West of Denver, but it’s a cracked, beat-up modest-looking kind of rock. Its outcrops have none of the wow-factor of Wingate cliffs, Navajao dunes or Entrada waves and arches. But what the Morrison does have, and is particularly well-known for, is fossils. Dinosaur fossils.* But we weren’t looking for fossils; we were looking for tracks.

*It’s also rich in uranium.

Unlike fossils, dinosaur tracks- and especially “walkways”, or a procession of tracks- are rare in the Morrison. Copper Ridge North of Moab is one of only two known Morrison formation walkways in Utah. The site contains the tracks of 5 different dinosaurs (though only 3 are really easy to pick out.) Dinosaur tracks are always cool. It’s one thing to look at a rock and know how old it is, and it’s even cooler to come across a fossil of some kind, to see the impression, the remnant of a creature that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, when everything about the world was different- the climate, the geography, even the oxygen content of the atmosphere.

But somehow to see a footprint- better yet a walkway of successive footprints- is cooler still. Here’s evidence of some forgotten creature doing something. These giant prehistoric monsters actually moved, right here, where we’re standing.

All About Dinosaurs

Everybody knows that dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrates on the planet for about 160 million years. At a high level the dinosaur family tree broke out into 2 different groups- Ornithischia and Saurischia. The Ornithischians were all plant-eaters and included dinosaurs like Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Ankylosaurus. Saurischians included both meat-eaters and plant-eaters. The Saurischian plant-eaters, known as sauropods, were long-necked animals that walked on all fours and included the largest dinosaurs. Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and Apatosaurus* were all sauropods. The meat-eaters, known as theropods (which also included some plant-eaters and omnivores) were 3-toed, and generally- but not always- had shortened forelimbs. Many species were bipedal. T. Rex, Velociraptor, and Allosaurus were theropods.

*Called Brontosaurus when I was a kid.

Extra Detail: The Velociraptors in Jurassic Park were way oversized; an adult would’ve only been about waist-high. The dinosaur used to model them for the movie was a related type, Deinonychus. Utahraptor, though, might’ve been an even better match size-wise.

Theropods are the only dinosaurs not to have become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. Birds are believed to be a surviving branch of the Coelurosaurs, the group of theropods that included both T. Rex, and the above-mentioned raptor-type dinosaurs. Crocodilians are not dinosaurs, but archosaurs, a group which also includes dinosaurs.

The 5 dinosaurs at Copper Ridge were 4 theropods and 1 sauropod. Paleontologists can’t be sure which species they were, but they have some pretty good suspects, based on the size and shape of the prints, the distance between the prints, and the rock formation (i.e. Morrison is a Jurassic formation, so they have to be Jurassic species.) Sauropod prints are less common that theropod prints*. The sauropod prints here are believed to have been made by Camarasaurus, Apatosaurus or Diplodocus, thought to have been 12 feet high at the hip, and 70 feet long from nose to tail.

*I’ve seen dinosaur prints several other times, but only once stumbled across one by accident. It was a theropod print, about 8 inches long which I came across hiking out of Coyote Buttes. I only noticed it because it was late in the day and the low sun-angle produced a shadow in the print.

Tangent: One of the most remarkable things about dinosaurs to me is the high level of interest in them. Awesome Wife and I discussed a few different possible destinations/ activities for the day after Thanksgiving, and picked Copper Ridge primarily because we knew that dinosaurs are always a hit for kids (especially boys.) Closer to home, the local dinosaur museum is a standard rainy-Saturday backup; we’ve been there probably 30 times. There are countless museums, movies, toys and games related to dinosaurs.

The same holds true by and large for adults. There have been oodles of movies, books and time-travel stories around dinosaurs. I’m hard-pressed to think of a time-travel book/movie in which the protagonists are transported to say the Eocene, or the Carboniferous, or Snowball Earth. Dinosaurs were interesting and important and all, but from a history-of-life standpoint, it’s hard to argue that they were that much more significant or important than many, many other prehistoric life forms. Certainly the evolution of the eukaryotic cell was more significant, complex, world-changing and just head-scratchingly amazing, but proterazoans just don’t make good antagonists. Dinosaurs just have an almost unbeatable level of drama and awesomeness on a scale we can relate to that catches the attention of people- not just paleo-geeks, but regular people who might otherwise not give prehistory another thought.

Nested Tangent: The only other past-time-period-fauna that comes anywhere close is probably the late Pleistocene, which has spawned a fair number of books, toys, games and movies. Part of this could be (or should be) due to its recency, and part of it could be (or should be) due to our own species’ possible role in the demise of these creatures. But I suspect most of it is due to the Wooly Mammoth and Saber-toothed Tiger, the 2 “Ice Age” mammals everyone knows about, which is sort of a shame in that they were just 2 of a cast of dozens and dozens of amazing, recently-extinct, very big mammals.

This everyman-interest in dinosaurs is evident even in the anti-science community. Dinosaur displays are standard fare “creation museums” (pic left, not mine, display of Adam & Eve* in the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY) where they’re often depicted peacefully coexisting with early humans (presumably within the last 6,000 years.) There are displays of humans riding dinosaurs (pic above, right, not mine either), and vegetarian T. Rexes. But you never see a diorama of a caveman riding an entelodont, or a caveboy feeding an aquarium full of trilobites, or chasing dragonflies with 2-foot wingspans.

*Two things about this display. First, I must note that Adam’s beard looks Way Awesome, and actually not too dissimilar to mine. Second, Eve looks exactly like all my babysitters from the 1970s- pleasant, kind, and disturbingly sort of hot in an I-feel-awkward-to-be-checking-her-out kind of way.

Anyway, I guess the disproportionate attention given dinosaurs is a good thing, in that it provides an approachable and exciting glimpse of paleontology to millions of folks who otherwise wouldn’t give it a second thought.*

*Kind of like geology or botany or hydrology or most of the other things I blog about…

Sauropod Tracks

The sauropod tracks include both front and rear prints. Rear sauropod feet had a fleshy pad toward the back, and so the prints are generally round and amorphous, kind of like an elephant print. Their front feet were very different; they walked sort of like a ballerina on their toes, and the print is more of an arc, or semicircle.

The front prints are often trampled by the rear prints, but I was able to pick out at least 1 front print clearly in the rock. The prints enter the wash at an angle, cross it, and then turn roughly 60 degrees to the right/East, following the wash for a few more steps.

This right here is, to me, the absolutely coolest thing about the Copper Ridge walkway. The dinosaur turned. It changed its mind. The tracks are 150 million year old record in the rock of a living creature actually making a decision in its (admittedly small) brain.

Theropod Tracks

The theropod tracks- though easy to pick out- are trickier to make sense of. 3 of them overlay the sauropod tracks and though it’s not hard to find some, it’s tough to tell who’s who. But the 4^th set of tracks stands alone about 15-20 feet to the West, crossing the wash at about a 45 degree angle. The prints are up to a foot long, suggesting a hip height of ~5 feet. Allosaurus is the top candidate; it stood 15 feet tall and weighed up to 2 tons.

The Allosaurus(?) tracks don’t turn, but they also hint at a story: the gait is irregular. The step of one leg is ~5 feet, the other only ~4 feet. This limp suggests the dinosaur was injured, either recently, or hobbled from an old wound healed imperfectly. Another idea is that maybe it was carrying something heavy- like a hunk of prey in its jaws.

Copper Ridge is a quick stop and a cool site. Having passed by probably close to a hundred times over the past 20 years, I felt silly for not having stopped by sooner. If you’re planning a trip to Moab, or even passing by on I-70- and can spare even 30 minutes, make sure you stop by. And speaking of stops…

Next Up: The Rock Art Extravaganza of Thompson Wash

Note about sources: Most of the info for this post came from Geology Underfoot in Southern Utah, Richard L. Orndoff, Robert W. Wieder and David G. Futey. Additional info came from Canyonlands Geology – A Visual Toolkit, Jerry Shue, Neal Herbert and Barbara Webb, the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum* in Price, Utah, and the Louisville (Kentucky) Portal website.

*We stopped by, later that day on the drive home, another great stop I’d passed by dozens of times previously without ever having checked out. It’s a perfect 1-hour interruption for a family drive home from Moab.