Tangent: But first, 2 things about the last post. First, if you ever want to find out how many coworkers really read your blog, do a post like that one. All week long, coworkers have been coming up to me, saying (mostly) nice things* about how they’ll miss working with me, mentioning that they read the post, and sometimes asking a follow-on question or two to try to get a handle on the details of the past-blown-up deal or B or C or some other aspect of the LQC*.
*A couple even hugged me, which I thought was kind of nice. In general, I’m not a Gratuitous Hugger, but I have some great co-workers. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever did a tangent on Gratuitous Hugging, which is a rich, rich topic. Oh well, possible material for Part 2.
**Never gonna tell. But contrary to what Co-worker Matt is spreading, there is no anagramming involved. Seriously, the guy sat down in my office yesterday trying to Da Vinci-Decode “ABC…” One of the odd things in my life, BTW, that I think has been if anything exacerbated by this blog, is that people generally assume I’m smarter than I am. Really, I’m not all that bright- I’m just interested in a lot of things and like to run off at the mouth. Lots of times I’ll be talking with someone and they’re looking at me and I can tell they’re thinking, “Boy, I wonder what he’s thinking about right now- probably some deep, important stuff…” But mostly I’m just thinking about when I can next go for my next bike ride. Or lunch.
Second, I’m sorry- especially to male readers- about the “We Have To Talk” teaser. Because men are terrified of that phrase. When our wives/SOs say it to us, we simply have no idea what’s coming next. We honestly don’t know if they’re going to ask us for a divorce, or our opinion on the color for the new drapes. Really, we think it could be either. Because in relationships- and this is the truth- men never really have any idea of what is going on. Oh, we like to think we do, but we’re pretty clueless. We’re like long-distance drivers who have absolutely no idea how an engine works. We know we’re supposed to fill the tank with gas when the light comes on and maybe check the oil every once in a while. We generally think that when we get back in the car and start up everything will run just fine, but for all we know the next time we turn the key the engine might just blow up, like at the end of The Mechanic. That’s kind of like… oh, you get it already.
Monday night OCRick and I drove down South to Gooseberry Mesa. After a quick night-ride on the Bench level we drove on up onto the Mesa and camped. I looked up at the stars for a while and saw Perseus, Auriga, Gemini, the Big Dipper, Draco*, Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, Jupiter, Cassiopeia, and much more.
*Thanks, Doug M.!
Tangent: We have a new favorite Phenomenally Awesome Campsite on Gooseberry. For years we had an Awesome Campsite, but about a year ago it got taken out by a cell tower. Then back in October, we stumbled across the new, Phenomenally Awesome Campsite, which turns out- incredibly- to be even better than the Old Awesome Campsite. It’s 2WD accessible, private, right on singletrack, and the view, well…
No, I’m not showing it on a map here. If you’re headed down there, email me and I’ll give you the beta.
The next day we rode all over the mesa. We pedaled past Piñonand Juniper and Cliffrose and Sagebrush and Mormon Tea and Prickly Pear and Turbinella Oak, and rolled over the Shinarump Conglomerate and the Lower Sandstone Member of the Chinle formation. The rock surfaces were dotted with bits of crustose lichens, and shady spots bore bright green swathes of moss. Away from the trail, in the open spaces between the trees, I spied rich black patches of mature cryptogamic soils. We heard the calls of Pinyon Jays, caught glimpses of the banded red & white Moenkopi members below the rim, the Wingate cliffs and Navajo domes of Zion in to the North, and the massive laccolith of the Pine Valley range to the West.
Tangent: So you’re probably wondering how I like my new bike. After careful testing, I’ve assembled this highly technical Evaluation Assessment Matrix (may be too advanced for non-technical readers):
Seriously, I love it. The low bottom bracket requires a bit of “awareness”, but gives the bike a wonderfully stable feel on fast descents. And the brakes deliver a masterful sense of effortless controlled power, even if the sounds emanating from them remind me of the zombies in The Walking Dead. I could prattle on about this or that feature, but the most remarkable (and surprising) thing about a full-suspension carbon 29er with a through-axle fork is that you don’t get tired. After a full day on Gooseberry in the off-season I just can’t believe how good I feel. My wrists, butt, neck, legs, arms- everything feels great. And the next morning I feel, well, normal.
All of these things- and the stars the night before- I not only recognized, but now knew something about their stories: what they were, where they came from, why they were here- pretty much none of which I knew 3 years ago. Though there will always be new bugs, birds, rocks, shrubs and stars to learn about, by any reasonable measure, I’ve completed the project. I’ve watched the world wake up.
My plan was always that this project would have a start and an end. And this is probably a good point to wrap it up. Except…
Now that I finally have all kinds of time and freedom, I’m going to get to go to all sorts of cool places and see all sorts of cool things- stuff really worth blogging about. So I’ll probably blog again, which means starting a new blog. I’d probably leave a pointer here to the new blog for any readers who were interested, which is kind of silly, because then, well, it’s really the same blog… So here’s what I intend to do:
Next week I’ll complete the project, which I’ll call Part 1. After I wrap up Part 1, I’ll take a brief break from blogging- probably around a month*. Then, I intend to start Part 2.
*Couple reasons for the break. First, I’ll have said my piece and feel I can let it sit for a bit. Second, I want a break. Third, I’ll be traveling light in a third-world-y kind of place where I don’t really want to be dragging a laptop around.
All About Part 2
Part 2 will be more focused on travels, places and experiences over the coming year- it won’t simply be a continuation of blogging about the Wasatch and Northern Utah. And it’ll be different than Part 1 in other ways. Posting will be less frequent, and there may be other changes in tone, perspective and focus.
Note that I said “intend”. I’ll start Part 2 when- and if- it feels right. I’ve always felt this project worked best when I wanted- was itching- to blog, which fortunately, was most of the time. When I felt I had to blog, well, it felt kind of like a job. I’m taking a break from jobs- of all kinds- for a bit. I think (and hope) that I’ll be itching to blog again soon, but if not, Part 1 will stand on its own.
So that’s the “plan”, such as it is. Next week I’ll finally get around to explaining the thing I probably should have explained when I started the project- the Wasatch. And some other stuff.
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 rockartencounters 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 1st 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?
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.
The last two Thanksgivings we spent down in St. George. This year we had to be back in town for the weekend*, and so just did a short trip down to Moab. We had a wonderful time, but the temps were absolutely frigid. 8F in the morning, and a high of ~24F by mid-afternoon. It was a little odd to be hiking in the desert more bundled up than I typically am when backcountry skiing.
*Because we were hosting a 50th birthday party for Vicente. And when I say “hosting”, that’s all we did. His lovely wife threw the party, but had it at our place as our house was better able to handle the crowd. So mid-afternoon Saturday, the caterer/sushi chef and bartender showed up, did all the set up, threw a fantastic bash, then completely cleaned up. Cost us no effort, no money, nothing. All throughout the evening guests kept coming up to us and thanking us, and we were like, “It was nothing. No really, it was nothing!” The next morning Awesome Wife said, That was fun- we should have more friends throw parties at our house.” So anyway, if you’re looking for a place to throw a party, our house is available. You just have to prep, set up, pay for everything, and clean up. Oh, and you have to invite us.
Side Note: If you do happen to find yourself in the Moab area in colder temps than you bargained for, and you need warm stuff cheap, head to Alco, on the South end of town on the East side of US191.
Thanksgiving morning we headed up to Arches National Park, just a 5 minute drive out of town. We drove up into the park, past Balanced Rock, the Windows section, the turn-offs for Delicate Arch and Fiery Furnace, before parking at the Devil’s Garden trailhead.
Tangent: I’m one of these backcountry snobs who routinely avoids national parks because of crowds, over-development, regulations, etc. But the truth is, every time I go to a national park I have a wonderful experience. No matter how popular the park, it’s possible- with a bit of planning, timing and/or effort, to get away from the madness and have a great time (as we just saw a few weeks ago down in the GC). I need to get over myself and start enjoying the parks more.
Devil’s Garden is series dozens of large, parallel Entrada sandstone fins, running Northwest to Southeast. We’ve come across Entrada before, down around St. George. It was laid down as bottom deposits in a shallow sea some ~160 million years ago. It erodes easily in smooth surfaces, waves, alcoves, and of course arches, but we’ll get to that in a bit. The Devil’s Garden trail winds through this area running alternately around, through, over, along and in between the fins, visiting a dozen + spectacular arches en route.
Setting out from the trailhead I noticed the (as I always do) the shrubs and stopped to check out one of the most interesting desert plants in the Western US: Four-winged Saltbush, Atriplex cansecens.
From a distance, FW Saltbush doesn’t look all that remarkable. In the Fall the female plants are easy to pick out. They’re the ones with branches bearing bunches of what look like little cornflakes, which are actually the fruits*, each of which bears 4 little, papery “wings” (pic left).
*Specifically achenes, which I described in this post.
Extra Detail: In spring, conversely, the males are easy to pick out, with their bunches of tiny yellow flowers. Female flowers are small, green and easy to overlook.
The other half of its name comes from its tolerance for salty, dry soils. FW Saltbush is widespread across Western North America, ranging from Baja to Alberta to Kansas, from sea level to over 6,000 feet. So it’s another wide-ranging drought-tolerant scrubby shrub. But A. canescens is both unusual and way cool in not just one, not just two, but three (yes, three!) ways.
First Cool Thing
First is its wood architecture. Long ago I described the basic wood architecture common to dicots, and- with some variations*- conifers. The main takeaway is that standard wood architecture is defined by an ultra-thin layer of undifferentiated stem-type cells called cambium, which then differentiate into phloem on the exterior, and xylem on the interior. Phloem carries the products of photosynthesis to the various parts of the plant, while xylem transfers water up from the roots to the branches and leaves. Oaks, maples, pines, sagebrush, spruces, roses- their wood all follows this basic architecture.
*Vessels in dicots are a good example; conifer wood doesn’t have them.
Some trees don’t share this standard wood architecture. “Woody” monocots, like palms or Joshua trees for example, have completely different wood architectures, which they evolved independently from their herbaceous (non-woody) monocot ancestors.*
*Since no monocot has the standard dicot/conifer wood architecture, it’s assumed that the common ancestor of all monocots was herbaceous.
FW Saltbush is a dicot (eudicot) and belongs to Chenopodiaceae, the Goosefoot family*, the family to which spinach and beets belong. Members of this family- I’ll call them “chenopods” for purposes of this post- have a distinctive wood architecture that is significantly different from the standard wood architecture. Specifically, rather than a single strip of cambium surrounding the stem, roots and branches, chenopods grow multiple, successive, concentric layers of cambium each of which produces its own “secondary” phloem and xylem. This architecture is called successive cambia. You can see successive cambia when you slice open a beet cross-wise (pic left, not mine***).
*Chenopodiaceae may sorta/kinda be obsolete now, as nearly all of it looks to be getting reclassified as the sub-family Chenopodioideae within Amaranthaceae, the Amaranth family. This sort of thing happens all the time these days**, with newer genetic data forcing researchers to re-think traditional taxonomic groupings. I stuck with the traditional taxonomy for this post, mainly because so many of the sources I used referenced it. And I’m lazy.
**But it doesn’t bother me, and here’s why: this kind of sorting and categorizing and re-sorting and re-categorizing happens all the time in sales (my trade) at a big company. If you’re not in sales, you might think that the sales process ends when the order is signed. But at a big company that’s just the beginning of a lengthy process of follow-up, paper-chasing and arguing with numerous internal bureaucrats over contracts, invoicing, commissions and credit. Here’s an interesting corollary: The bigger the company is, the less a salesperson’s success depends upon his/her personal client-facing sales ability, and the more it depends on his/her internal political and organizational abilities. Seriously. I’m not kidding, it’s true. This is just one of the countless, off-topic yet utterly brilliant insights you get from reading this blog.
***Is that the weirdest blog or what? Guess I shouldn’t talk…
The benefit of successive cambia isn’t exactly clear, but there’s some indication that it helps improve the flexibility as well as the strength when wood grows asymmetrically. Though successive cambia is unusual in shrubs and trees*, it’s very common in lianas**.
*None of which grow very tall.
**Woody vines rooted in the ground that grow up and all over trees- very asymmetrically- in tropical forests. They’re a form, not a closely-related group. Like a “shrub” or a “tree”, for example. Bougainvillea is an example of a liana. See the Phytophactor’s recent post and photo on lianas down in Costa Rica.
It’s not clear exactly what drives the evolution of successive cambia. One hypothesis is that the common chenopod ancestor was herbaceous*, and evolved wood all over again. If so, it would be another version of the monocot re-invention story, but within the eudicots, which is kind of cool.
*I only found this mentioned in one source, Hugh Mozingo’s Shrubs of the Great Basin. Finding no other mention of it, and seeing what appear to be many details in common with the standard wood architecture, I sort of doubt it.
Whatever the benefit, it must be significant. Successive cambia has evolved independently dozens of times, and not just within angiosperms. It’s actually common in the gnetales, including our own, close-to-home Mormon Tea (also all over the place in Arches) as well as the bizarre Welwitschia on the other side of the world.
Second Cool Thing
The second cool thing is that FW Saltbush is C4 photosynthetic. I described C4 photosynthesis in detail in this post*, and we’ve looked at several C4 plants before. But most commonly-known C4 plants, and most of those we’ve looked at, like corn and crabgrass, are monocots**. FW Saltbush is a eudicot C4 plant. C4 has evolved at least 20 times among the eudicots, 10 of which have been within the chenopods. One of those 10 times was in the genus Atriplex, whose common ancestor appears to have evolved C4 independently sometime in the last 8-12 million years. So these chenopods have this cool alternative wood architecture, and they’re the most C4-adept family of eudicots. Pretty cool family.
*Man, it is like I have a post for everything.
**I explained the monocots and dicots in this post, with further explanation of eudicots in this post. Everything I tell you, everything!
Side Note: Shadscale, Atriplex confertolia, is a close relative of FW Saltbush, and a super-common (if small and unimpressive-looking) shrub across the Southwest. (It’s in that category of so-common-I’m-embarrassed-I-haven’t yet-blogged-about-it.) In any case, Shadscale shares the first 2 cool things- successive cambia and eudicot-C4- as well.
Third Cool Thing
The third cool thing is its sex-determination system. As I already implied, FW Saltbush is generally dioecious, in that plants bear female or male flowers, but not both. But some of them- a small minority- do bear both male and female flowers, sometimes on the same branch, sometimes on different branches. And sometimes these “switch-hitters” switch back and forth from year to year. Hold that thought.
FW Saltbush exhibits all kinds of polyploidy*. There are diploid plants, with 18 chromosomes, tetraploids, with 36, hexaploids with 54, and even 12-ploids with 108! But here in Utah, and practically everywhere North of latitude 37N, nearly all FW Saltbushes are tetraploid. But there is a population of diploid FW Saltbush not far from here, growing along the edge of the dune fields at Little Sahara Recreation Area. And the interesting thing about these diploids is that all of them are male or female- there are no switch-hitters.
Extra Detail: The other interesting thing about them is their height- more than twice normal. A. canescens generally grows to about 4 feet in height, but the Little Sahara diploids grow up to 10 feet high. This was originally suspected to be a characteristic of the diploids, along with faster growth. The thinking was that the species was originally diploid, but that smaller, slower-growing tetraploid race had come to dominate Utah as the climate dried out. However, in the rapidly shifting landscape of the dune-margins, survival favored a fast-growing relict diploid population. But in the years since, plenty of regular-sized diploids have been found down in New Mexico and Texas.
Tangent: I’ve never seen the Little Sahara diploids, because in 15 years here in Northern Utah, I’ve yet to visit Little Sahara. I love dune fields, and have visited several across the West. But the state of Utah runs Little Sahara overwhelmingly as an OHV/ORV playground, which isn’t really my thing.
The explanation was this: Dioecious plants determine sex genetically, through specific sex chromosomes, analogous to mammals, where XX is female and XY is male*. And that’s what was going on with the Little Sahara diploids. But with polyploidy, new combinations become possible. The tetraploid plants might be XXYY and male, or XXXX and female. Or they might be XXXY and be either/or. (XYYY and YYYY combinations were/are(?) thought to be non-viable.)
*Just to make things more complicated, some plants, like strawberries, have evolved a system more analogous to that of birds(which I explained in this post), where the female form is expressed through the heterozygous form (WZ) and the male through the homogeneous (ZZ).
It was a neat, tidy hypothesis, but it’s since been undermined by the discovery of numerous monoecious, “switch-hitter” diploids down in Texas and New Mexico. A. canescens gender expression is now suspected to be influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. What’s cool about FW Saltbush sexuality is that on the one hand it’s this wonderful cross-kingdom example of convergent evolution of a chromosomal system of sex-determination. Yet at the same time there are hints that it may be more subtle and “plastic” than the binary on/off sexuality of mammals and birds.
Anywho, where was I? Oh, right the Entrada sandstone and the hike. Oh man, looks like I ran out of time on this post-long shrub-tangent. We’ll have to pick it back up tomorrow, but I promise I’ll quit dinking around and get to the hike!
Note: The original version of this post contained a (bass-ackwards) error* in the the wood architecture recap. Many thanks to readers Sally and Ford for the catch.
*I make frequent errors in this project and welcome corrections. My hope is to leave this blog around for a while so that future “motivated amateurs” can get a head-start on some of the topics covered here, and the fewer bum steers I leave for them, the better.
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