OK- I’m going to do 3 posts out of this one helmet-cam video. Today is mainly just teaser, but has a great before/after. Tomorrow I’ll have a Spring-catch-up, including a new wildflower*. And Wednesday** I’ll have a geo-post- all from the same video. How cool is that?***
*Not just any wildflower- a new monocot wildflower. Yes, that’s right- a new lily, blooming right now, in the foothills just above town.
**Well, hopefully Wednesday. Maybe Thursday. Or maybe next week- hey, I don’t know; it’s not like I get paid to do this, you know…
***Pretty F-ing Cool. That’s how.
As longtime readers know, I’ve been slacking this Spring. The previous 2 Springs I meticulously detailed each and every little bloom, leaf and weed. This year I’ve been goofing off with posts about everything from Race Camp to Vegas-Boondoggles to bribing Mexican cops to desert geology, totally blowing off Spring along the Wasatch Front. And that’s a shame, because we are having a glorious Spring. So I’m going to do a bit of quick catch-up, with the help of the helmet-cam.
Back in February, I did a post entitled “Bonk”, where I threw in a little snippet of this descent as helmet-cam video-filler:
On April 18, I filmed the same- but this time entire- descent, down into City Creek Canyon:
Side Note: BTW, the way these videos embed by default, they’re in low-def. You can watch them in high-def if you prefer. If it’s a YouTube* video, click on the lower right where it says “360p” and switch to “720p”. In Vimeo, click on the button on the upper right that says “HD is off” while the clip is playing and your mouse is over the video-screen. You’ll get an option to play the video in high-def.
*I use YouTube for shorter clips, Vimeo for longer ones. BTW, if there’s an obvious way to embed clips directly in high-def, please speak up.
Yesterday, May 16- 28 days later- I filmed the exact same descent* again:
*BTW, from about 4:04 to 5:16 is a stretch I blogged about 2 years ago in a post entitled “The Green Tunnel.” It still hasn’t leafed in all the way, but you start to get the tunnel effect in parts…
What a difference a month makes. I lose over 1,000 feet in this descent; notice the difference in the scrub oak leafing out from top to bottom. Also check out 2:36 on the left and 4:10 on the right, both of which I plan to blog about this week. Oh man, this’ll be fun.
The weather in Northern Utah is doing its usual May shenanigans; one day it’s sunny and 70F, the next it’s drizzly and 40F. The upside is that the hillsides are turning a lovely green, with all sorts of spring blooms popping up. Up higher though, it’s still Winter, and recent snows have made skiing possible weeks after (nearly all of) the resorts have closed for the season.
Wednesday Morning I joined SkiBikeJunkie, Dug, Aaron, Rick and several others for a pre-work ski up in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I was time-challenged, and so accompanied the group up to the top of the ridge dividing Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons and then skied back down solo. Once at the bottom I realized I still had some extra time, so I re-climbed about 2/3 of the track for a second, shorter run. The snow was nice, if not exceptional, and it was a bit novel to ski in mid-May, and I skied back to the car feeling happy and upbeat about the day ahead. I unloaded my gear into the car, took off my boots and slid into the driver’s seat for the ride back down the canyon. As I did so, I glanced in the rear-view mirror, and…. pffffff…. my upbeat, happy mood slipped away: I was afflicted with Chronic Helmet-Head.
As I have mentioned previously, my place of work does not have a shower. When I ski or bike pre-work I shower the night before. In the summer I take along a sun-shower and do a quick Howie-Shower to mitigate the most severe Helmet-Head. Sometimes I do so after skiing as well, but due to a recent mishap involving a rear SUV-hatch, a bike rack and a fumble, I have been without an operable sunshower this last week and a half. So all day Wednesday I worked- in the office- with a bizarrely-spiky head of hair.
I wear a helmet- usually bike, sometimes ski- almost every day. Back in Life 1.0, I often wore a motorcycle helmet. Helmet-Head has been a constant throughout my entire adult life. What’s the deal with it, anyway?
Hair, the evolution of hair, and the evolution of modern human hair patterns, is absolutely fascinating. Hair- true hair- is unique to mammals*, and is one of the 5 defining characteristics** of the class.
*Insect “hairs”, BTW, are something completely different; they’re actually bristles made of chitin.
**The other 4 being mammary glands in females, sweat glands, 3 middle ear bones, and a brain with a neocortex region (which I explained in this post).
The protein that comprises our hair- keratin*- is the same protein that composes our fingernails and toenails. More interestingly, it’s nearly identical to a protein in the claws of birds and reptiles, suggesting that hair is a mammalian exaptation of an existing structure- in this case the proto-keratin protein- of our ~300 million-year-old common ancestor.
*I mentioned keratin last year, when I blogged about Porcupines, and specifically their quills.
Different peoples around the world have varying hair thicknesses and profiles, but all of our hair is composed of 3 concentric layers. The outermost is the cuticle. It’s thin and colorless, serves to protect the hair and consists of teeny-tiny, hard overlapping plates. The second, thicker, layer is the cortex, and this is the layer that contains melanin, giving hair its color. There are 2 kinds of melanin: eumelanin and pheomelanin*. Eumelanin produces brown or black hair, pheomelanin red. Blonde hair is the result of very little melanin (of either type.) Hairs with no melanin are gray.
*”Eu” of course = “good” and though I don’t know Latin, I know that “feo” = “ugly” in Spanish… That seems unfair. And wrong. I for one have always found red hair very attractive… Uh oh. I feel a tangent coming on in a footnote. In my younger years, I totally had a thing for redheads. I had 4 (that I recall) relationsh- well, “entanglements” I should say- with redheads in my early 20’s, all of which ended rather quickly and spectacularly poorly. I usually try to avoid stereotypes, but the “feisty redhead” was repeatedly true in my limited experience**.
**Although in fairness, if we were to consider all of the relationships in my 20’s that ended quickly and poorly, I’m not sure the proportion of those involving redheads would be all that much greater than the occurrence of redheads in the population as a whole.
The inner layer is the medulla and is light-reflecting, which is why hair often looks different in direct sunlight.
When I say modern human hair patterns, I am talking the pattern of hairs over our bodies. I am not talking about our hair-styles (or lack thereof.) The average European* adult has about 5 million hairs on their body, of which only about 100,000 – 150,000 occur on your head. Before you protest that you don’t have that much armpit or pubic hair, the 5 million number includes both terminal and vellus hair. Terminal hair is the (relatively) thick, dark visible hair on your head and elsewhere. Vellus hair is the teeny-tiny peach fuzz all over the rest of your body. Whether you are male or female, you’re almost totally covered in hair- it’s just vellus hair.
Tangent: Speaking of hair styles, in the break-room at work, people sometimes leave magazines. Right now, for whatever reason, there’s just one magazine: “Hair Style Guide”. The interior is filled with photos of- yes, that’s right- hair styles! Page after page- it’s like hair-porn! I know there are magazines for everything nowadays, but really? A whole monthly magazine about nothing but hair styles? Really? That’s what you’re reading??
Nested Tangent: So here’s my favorite break-room magazine story. We used to have a super-conservative “Christian” receptionist. At the time some of my female coworkers left a dozen or so women’s magazines in the break-room. Nothing racy- no Cosmo or even Redbook- just stuff like “Self” and maybe an issue of “Glamour.” The receptionist made actual covers for the magazines out of brown-paper bags, so that the cover-photos of bare-shouldered, cleavage-suggesting women would not be in plain view in the break-room.
A given hair follicle produces either terminal or vellus hair, but what’s interesting is that a follicle can change from producing one to the other. At puberty, we typically say that young people “start growing” hair in their groin and armpits, as well as their chests and faces if male. But they were already growing hair- vellus hair- in those regions for years. At puberty the follicles switched from producing vellus to terminal hair.
A bit later, we often say that many men “lose” their hair. But they generally don’t lose it; rather the follicles on their heads stop producing terminal and switch to producing vellus hairs. We have very few truly hairless patches of skin: our palms, lips, soles of feet, behind the ears, some scars and certain areas of our genitals.
Tangent: Here’s another example of follicle-switching: ear-hair in old men. Ear-hairs in old guys fascinate me because they’re follicles switching from vellus to terminal production late in life. Here’s my prediction: within 50 years scientists will develop a true “cure” for baldness, and the key breakthrough will come about as the result of research into the ear-hair of old guys. You heard it here first.
The evolution of human hair pattern, texture and color is a way fascinating topic, and way beyond the scope of this post. There are all kinds of hypotheses as to why most of our follicles produce vellus, making us effectively “hairless”, but they all have problems/inconsistencies. Almost all other land-based mammals our size are covered with terminal hairs. Marine mammals aren’t, but they have an obvious reason to be hairless- drag in the water*- and so generally compensate for the lack of warming fur with a special layer of fat. A number of really big mammals, such as elephants and rhinos, are “hairless”, but their greater mass makes heat-loss less of an issue.
*Plus, wet hair doesn’t retain heat as well as dry hair.
Humans are thought to have become hairless around 1.5 – 2.0 million years ago, and the reason anthropologists think this is the case is because that’s when they believe the genetic mutation came about in a gene called MC1R which resulted in darker skin pigment. Prior to dark skin, it’s thought that naked*, hairless humans would fair poorly under the equatorial sun**.
*And it’s pretty certain we were naked for a long time. The best guess as to when the use of clothing became widespread is way more recent, like maybe only 70,000 years ago, a key piece of evidence being the genetically-determined date of divergence between head lice and body lice (which reside in clothing) which we looked at in this post.
**Not necessarily because of sunburn and skin cancer, but possibly because of folate-damage, as we covered in this post. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.
Why our ancestors “lost” their hair is unresolved. One long-standing hypothesis is that the loss coincided with the general drying or large areas of Africa and the formation of savanna, and may have come about to facilitate sweating and heat-dissipation. But hair also mitigates heat-accumulation, which is thought to be why we retained it on our heads…. Another, more recent, hypothesis is that hairlessness evolved as a countermeasure against parasites. Once the trend started, sexual selection could have amplified the tendency, with hairless suitors advertising their relatively parasite-free fitness. But if that were the case, why aren’t lots of other land-based animals our size hairless? And why are female humans more hairless than male humans?
OK, lots of questions here, and I’m not going to resolve them in this post, so let’s just focus on what’s really important- my hair. Referring again to my style-afflicted photo, you’ll notice 2 things. First, I am of European descent, and second, my hair is pretty straight.
Tangent: You may also have noticed that my hairstyle is pretty lame. In fact, I have had- no kidding- essentially the same hairstyle since 1971 (minus the beard.) Certainly, as an adult man of reasonable means, I could afford to invest in some professional, modern-day hairstyling. But the truth is that at a gut level- I just feel that there is something fundamentally and distinctly un-masculine about paying more than $10 for a haircut. There, I said it.
The straight hair part is the thing I want to zero in on. Our closest relatives- chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans- are covered with straight hair. But modern day Africans have tightly-coiled hair. A covering of tightly-coiled hair has more airspaces and airflow than a pile of flat hairs lying on top of one another, and so may well be cooler under a hot sun. And sweaty tightly-coiled hair doesn’t cling to the scalp, neck and forehead nearly as badly as sweaty straight hair. Of course, like so much in human appearance- skin color, eye color, beards- such hair form might be the result of sexual selection, but there’s a strong tendency for peoples with tightly-coiled hair to be found at equatorial latitudes. So it’s suspected that our common African ancestors also had tightly-coiled hair, but that groups that migrated elsewhere- say Europe or East Asia- subsequently re-evolved straight hair.
The question is why? Was it just the case that straight hair, no longer being a liability, happened to catch on and spread through those populations? Or was there some benefit to straight hair in Northern climates? Perhaps a flat-lying head of straight hair was a bit warmer, but the most far-out hypothesis is that straight hair helps absorb UV light, which is though to be the same driver of the evolution of light skin pigment in cold/un-sunny climates. Human hair can actually transmit UV light along its length in a manner similar to a fiber optic tube!
The problem with the straight-hair/fiber-optic-UV hypothesis is that unless you have a buzz-cut- or extremely bad Watcher-style Helmet-Head- the ends of your hairs are not pointed up toward the sun. But the counter-counter-hypothesis points out that downward-pointing hair-ends are well-positioned to received UV light reflected upward from snow. See what I mean? There are like a gazillion hair hypotheses!
Back to me and my fashion-crisis. The reason my Helmet-Head is so problematic is not just because I am wearing a helmet, but because I am wearing a helmet and sweating, thereby make my compressed, mushed-up hair wet.
When wet, hair holds water and expands. The old adage about not weighing yourself when your hair is wet is technically true; wet hair weighs about 30% more- even heavier if your hair is dried/damaged beforehand. The diameter of the strands increases by 15-20%, and- we are finally getting to the point here, so pay attention- the cuticle-flakes separate a bit and don’t overlap quite so tightly. This relaxing of the cuticle means two things. First, your hair is more susceptible to damage- specifically sun-damage- when wet, and second, your hair is more malleable when wet, which of course is the operative principle behind hair-curlers.
Your hair can be freely and easily bent into different shapes when wet, and as the hair subsequently dries, the strands contract, and the cuticle-plates close up and tightly overlap again, locking the strands into their new shape. And that’s why my Helmet-Head so stubbornly persists until I can get my head back under a shower.
There’s of course an easy solution to my dilemma: a buzz cut. Many cyclists have short/buzzed/shave heads, thereby wonderfully avoiding the stylistic angst of Helmet-Head. But I’m fundamentally reluctant to do so, not out of vanity, but out of… well, let me try to explain…
Say you knew someone who was a total natural-born athlete. Some who was strong, agile, fast, with superb endurance, balance and eye-hand coordination. Now if that person just spent all day on the couch watching TV and eating Cheetoes, wouldn’t we all agree what a tremendous waste of potential that was?
That’s the deal with my hair. Because really, when you get down to it, I am a Natural Hair Athlete. I’m 46 years old, probably 80% of my friends are bald/balding/receding, but my hair is fantastically thick and healthy. Wouldn’t it be a crime- a waste of natural talent even- to buzz-cut that mane?
After I got to the office, changed, and checked email/voicemail, I walked over to the break-room for a cup of coffee. A female coworker- let’s call her “Karen”- was there and I said hi. She turned to me, and- I swear to God I am not making this up- said, “Hey your hair looks great! Did you do something different?”
And you know what? She was totally serious.
Note about sources: Info on the evolution of “hairlessness” and dark skin pigment in humans came from here. Info on the evolution and origins of hair came from here. General info on the structure of hair came from here, here, and here. Info on the fiber-optic/UV transmitting properties of hair came from here. Additional info on hair, hair evolution, and specifically vellus hair came from Wikipedia.
Last week was long- Monday through Friday on the road, multiple cities, not enough sleep, too much food, not enough exercise. I spent the last 3 days in Southern Florida, which sounds nice, except that a) I was barely outside, and b) I wasn’t near the water. Well, not the ocean water, anyway. As the plane descended toward the Ft. Myers airport, I saw a flat plain of dark green pine forest stretching off in the distance. You don’t usually think of pines when you think of Florida, but huge portions of the state are carpeted with them.
Tangent: The photo right I snapped Wednesday AM at the Philadelphia* airport. Here’s something odd: I’ve seen countless spectacular sunrises from airport concourses. Airports are often in areas with significant air pollution, which enhances the orange tint, and somehow even the ugliest concrete landscape becomes beautiful for just a moment when bathed in that light. Unless I’m super-tight on a departure/connection, I stop for a minute or so to check out airport sunrises. When I do, I’m always the only guy doing so; everyone else just speed-waddles on by with their rollers-bags, laptop cases and Starbucks in hand. I want to say, “Hey, wait- check it out! There’s a huge ball of fire rising up in the sky!” But of course I don’t, and everyone else just zips by the most amazing thing any of us ever see in this life.
*Yes, I was in Philadelphia as well last week. As longtime readers know, I attended college in Philadelphia and so lived there for 4 years in the 1980s. From time to time my travels take me to the city. In the old days I used to do little nostalgic stopovers to see the campus, or maybe one of the crappy apartments I lived in. Nowadays, older, wiser and less nostalgic, I skip memory lane and head for the important stuff- a cheesesteak at Jim’s.
My knowledge of trees in the continental US is weakest in the Southeast. I’ve spent little time there, and nearly all the time I have spent there has been in urban areas, and before I became plant-aware. As I’ve read about and researched various North American plants, and specifically trees, I’ve noticed how much diversity there is in that portion of the country, and have started hoping for an opportunity to revisit the region. Looking out the plane window, I was pretty sure whatever pines were growing below were new to me.
For the first day and half I was stuck indoors, but Thursday before dinner I managed to break away for a run. I ran, clueless, through and across a series of shopping plazas until coming upon another pair of runners who directed me onto a dirt path off into the brush, which made a loop around a moderate-size pond. I left the asphalt, following the path through the high brush, and son saw the route would take me to the line of pines on the far shore.
Tangent: I’m going to come clean and state right up front that I’ve never had any desire to live in Florida. Too flat, too humid, too buggy, too, well… Florida. But what’s interesting about visiting Florida is that so many of the residents you meet there are obviously wildly enthusiastic about the place, how great it is, the climate, quality of life, etc. It’s almost as though they’re all moonlighting for the tourism board or something, and it’s funny, because I guess that’s how I- and many of my outdoorhead friends- come off when talking about Utah. Many of the Floridians I met are as high on life in Florida as I am on life in Utah, and yet we’d each be horrified at the prospect of living in the other place. Different strokes, I guess.
This brings up something I’ve been meaning to mention for a while: the relative “rooted-ness” of native Utahns.
One of the big differences between the Northeast-Midwest and the West/Sunbelt parts of the US are how long people have lived there. If you go to say Ohio or Indiana or even Massachusetts and walk into an office and start talking to people who’ve worked there, most of them grew up there. But if you go into an office in Phoenix or Seattle or Ft. Myers, almost no one grew up there. In general, there’s a higher level of “transience” or lack of “rooted-ness” in the more recently-settled, higher-growth states.
Side Note: As an East Coast Transplant moved West, this effect leads to the strange head-scratcher for me of people who live in kind-of-yucky places but never move. I can never understand why; anytime I try to engage them in a conversation about it, it devolves into (a more polite version of) this:
ME: Why do you live here in Cleveland?
THEM: Oh I grew up here.
ME: But why are you still here?
THEM: Oh my family’s here, and my wife’s family’s* here…
ME: But doesn’t this place kind of suck?
THEM: Yes, but my family’s here, and my wife’s family’s here…
*Guys will often pass the blame to their wives in these types of conversations. “Yeah, I’d like to move out West, but my wife, she likes to be close to her mother…” they’ll say. Really? For me, finding out that your fiancée required you to live in Cleveland to be near her mother for the next 50 years would be one of those deal-breaker things I would’ve found out before I proposed to her, like finding out if she’s gay, a Jesus Freak, a Singlespeeder, a Republican or poisoned her first husband or something…
But Utah is a surprising island of rooted-ness in the American West. Utah natives, especially- but not always- Mormons, don’t like to leave. After my company was acquired, the new company pitched 6 of the inside sales folks who worked for me on moving down to Ft. Myers. Not one of them had the slightest interest*. None of the 6 skis, bikes, or to my knowledge has climbed a mountain in the last decade, but leaving Utah was out of the question.
*Not even the single guy who loves to golf and hates the cold.
This isn’t the case BTW, with non-native Utahns, who are about as transient and un-rooted as Westerners elsewhere.
Nested Tangent: AW and I have been here 15 years now, and we seem to be pretty dug in. It seems as though if newcomers get past the ~7 year itch here, they tend to stay. In our case, the closest we came to leaving was back in 2001. My previous employer had been acquired, I’d done my year of indentured servitude integration support, and took nearly a year off before looking for my next gig. We spent a fair amount of time and discussion thinking about other areas, with Portland, OR being the leading contender*, but ended up staying.
*I am convinced that every liberal non-LDS couple in Utah goes through a “Let’s move to Portland” fantasy-phase. It’s a similar-sized city in a beautiful part of the country with great outdoor access. But unlike Salt Lake, it’s green, it’s liberal, it’s got a real city center where you’d actually want to walk around, and it’s not smack-dab in the middle of a state where the “politically moderate” means just a half a degree left of batshit-crazy**. In the end I vetoed Portland. Rain gets me down, and the closest legal singletrack was an hour’s drive out of town.
**Speaking of which, did any other local readers check out the matrix showing the issue-positions of the Republican Senatorial candidates in Saturday’s Salt Lake Tribune? The thing reads like a Spectrum Of Craziness. I just love Republican primary races in Utah. It’s like, “Hey, the incumbent isn’t crazy enough- vote for me, I’m crazier!” And the next guy is like, “No way- I’m crazier! Vote for me!”
Slash Pine, Pinus elliotti, (pic left, not mine) is a common pine native to the Southeastern US, stretching across Southern Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, the very Eastern “toe” of Louisiana, and throughout Florida. Its range also stretches through much of the Caribbean and Central America, and this highlights one of the most interesting things about Florida: it shares so many species with the Caribbean/Central America. A small population of actual Crocodiles (not just alligators) live in Florida, and it’s also within the native range of the irritating-bark Manzanillo tree (though it’s largely been eradicated from the state.) The state’s full of tropical birds and all sorts of interesting reptiles; the peninsula is like this little outlier of Central America in the lower 48.
Tangent: Speaking of birds, I recorded this amazing bird song one morning by my hotel. At the time I couldn’t see the bird, and assumed it was hidden among the palm fronds. But, when I played the video at home, it turned out the singing bird was visible, and you can see him along the left side of the trunk intermittently from about 0:26 on. Anyone have any idea what bird this is? (Alexis?)
Slash Pine is named for the “slashes”- stretches of swampy ground- on which is grows, and that brings me to the one of the most interesting things I noticed about the Ft. Myers area; every time I poked into a wooded area, the ground was either sodden, or filled with standing water. And according to the locals, the rainy season has yet to begin! The tree has longish (5” – 11”), slightly-drooping needles in bundles (pic right) of 2 or 3 (on the same tree/branch/twig) and fairly ordinary-looking, modest-size (4” – 8”) cones. The bark (pic left) has an orange-brown tone and is sort of flaky, like peeling plates. Although the tree can grow to over 100 feet further North in the sate, from South Florida southward, it almost never grows taller than 60 feet. The Southern trees- which I saw in Ft. Myers- are considered a different variety. P. elliotti var. densa (and formerly were considered a separate species.) Besides height, another difference between Northern and Southern varieties is that seedlings of the Southern version go through a “grass stage”, where they look like little clumps of grass (like many Mexican pines) Slash Pine often hybridizes with other native Florida pines, including Loblolly, P. taeda, and Longleaf, P. palustris. (Pic below right, not mine = Longleaf Pine seedlings in grass stage.)
Slash Pine is fast-growing and short-lived, reaching a maximum age of ~200 years. It’s often grown on pine plantations, both within and beyond its native range, as far a field as Texas and Kentucky in the US. It’s also been introduced elsewhere around the world. In South Africa it’s escaped cultivation, and now grows wild as far North as Zimbabwe (!) It grows well in acidic soils (which waterlogged soils often are.)
Friday morning I awoke before dawn to check out other trees and birds around the hotel. I’d noticed a clump of pines not far from the lot that looked different than the common slash pines and walked over for a look. But when I got up close, I saw they weren’t pines at all, but something completely different. They were Cypresses, specifically Pond Cypress, Taxodium ascendens.
Cypresses are a taxonomically confusing series of trees in the family Cupressaceae, the family that includes everything from Junipers to Redwoods to Western Red Cedar. We’ve seen Cypress only once in the wild, 2 years ago in Mendocino (Mendocino Cypress.) Pond Cypress is way different from Mendocino Cypress, and of course completely unlike anything we see in Utah.
T. ascendens is closely-related to (and some feel it is actually just a variety of) Bald Cypress, T. distichum, the better-known Cypress from swampy areas across the Southeast. The 2 trees have similar leaves and peeling, papery bark, but there are some significant differences, beyond the obvious difference in size. Bald Cypress grows in large, extended swampy areas, in which there is significant (if slow) water flow. Pond Cypress grows in isolated swampy pockets/depressions, in which there is almost no water flow, and in which the water and soil are much more acidic.
In this shot (above) you can see the standing water the trees are growing out of. The whole “pool” is only maybe 60-70 feet across. Like Slash Pine, Pond Cypress is well-adapted to the wet, acidic conditions of the Ft. Myers area. Interestingly, when viewed from afar, stands of Pond Cypress often are domed in profile. The trees toward the center of the pocket/depression, in deeper water, grow tallest.
Though the bark of the 2 trees is similar, that of T. ascendens is thicker, a possible adaptation for increased fire resistance, which makes sense as fires are likelier to reach their isolated stands than the expansive swamps where Bald Cypress grows.
Work travel’s always a bit of a drag, but when you’re a tree geek you can salvage a trip by finding a new species or two. That’s 2 new pines so far this year. I have to go back to Ft. Myers next month. I’m adding bird guide, supernoculars and headlamp* to my packing list.
*I’m thinking night-bug-hunting in the swamp. How cool does that sound?
Fast forward 2 ½ weeks. As I traditionally do in Spring and Fall, this past weekend I headed down to Gooseberry Mesa with friends. The timing and the group was a little different; OCRick, Clean Colin, Vicente & Coryalis went down in March, when I was unable to join. This was the make-up trip, attended by me, KanyonKris, SkiBikeJunkie and Hunky Neighbor, joined Saturday night and Sunday on Little Creek by Special Guest Star Coryalis and his Wife-2.0-the-Excellent-Upgrade*.
*A long pseudonym, but totally true. We all love her.
It was an excellent group, in that we were well-matched in riding preferences, ability and endurance, and also in that we are all Excellent Campers. The relatively late date meant plenty of daylight, enabling us to pack 4 great rides into 2 days and 2 evenings.
Tangent: I must say that SBJ, who- astoundingly- had never ridden anywhere in the St. George/Hurricane area before this trip, seriously raised the bar on the culinary aspect of the trip. Here he is in action, preparing a delicious meal of steelhead salmon, baked in foil over campfire coals. He put my rather simpleton-breakfast-burritos somewhat to shame, though my fireside martinis seemed to at least partially redeem me in the eyes of my campmates.
On Saturday we rode Gooseberry Mesa, which is always a great time. Here’s a snippet from the Hidden Canyon section, in the interior of the mesa, following Hunky Neighbor:
Gooseberry Mesa is a blast because the slickrock outcrops provide all sorts of ramps, chutes, sidehills and gullies on a high-traction surface. The rock is clearly different than the “traditional” slickrock of the Navajo formation that you ride around Moab, on the Slickrock or Porcupine Rim trails, for example. The Gooseberry slickrock, while (at least) as high-traction as the Navajo, is much grayer/whiter, generally a bit rougher, and interestingly, often has small pebbles- up to 2” in diameter- embedded in it. Its geologic name is the Shinarump Conglomerate. Here’s another fun section of Hidden Canyon, and if you look at the gully sidewalls at about 0:29 – 0:33, you can make out bands of embedded pebbles about mid-way up the gully walls on either side.
All About the Shinarump
All around the greater St. George area, and in fact across much of Southwest Utah, Northern Arizona, Southern Nevada and (I hear) Northwest New Mexico, you’ll see mesas capped by Shinarump. This is because it’s harder and more erosion-resistant that the layers immediately below it- which we’ll come back to in just a moment. The Shinarump marks a transition from the Moenkopi formation, laid down around 240 million years ago, and the Chinle formation, deposited around 200 million years ago.
Extra Detail: The Navajo formation is more recent (maybe ~175 million years ago), and therefore “above” than the Chinle, so you won’t see it on Gooseberry Mesa, but you will see it up the road (and higher up) at Zion. To my knowledge there’s no Navajo-slickrock mtn biking in the St. George/Hurricane area. In between the Chinle and the Navajo are the Wingate and Kayenta formations, the former of which produces some of the spectacular cliffs by and above the White Rim trail in Canyonlands, as well as the deep side-canyons of the lower Dirty Devil*.
*Specifically Twin Corral Box, Sam’s Mesa Box, and (the middle stretch of) Happy Canyons. The Robber’s Roost complex is Navajo.
A couple layers above the Navajo is the Entrada formation, laid down ~160 million years ago, and consisting of smooth, fine-grained, easily-weathered sandstone. Both St. George (Church Rocks) and the Moab area (Bartlett Wash) have Entrada-slickrock mtn biking, which is often the smoothest slickrock around, though not as high-traction as either Navajo or Shinarump*. (The arches of Arches National Park are Entrada sandstone.)
*Especially the occasional- and super-smooth- whitish bands of Entrada, which can be tempting but treacherous. The darker Entrada is higher traction. Maybe the iron oxide in the rock binds the grains together?
I should be careful when I say “above”, BTW. What I should say is “deposited on top of.” Subsequent crustal faulting has raised, lowered and tilted layers all over Southern Utah. This is why you can also ride Shinarump on Zen trail down in St. George, 2,000 feet below Gooseberry, and why the Entrada sandstone of Church Rocks is 2,200 feet (!) lower than the Gooseberry Shinarump as well- because the Hurricane Fault* has raised everything East of La Verkin/Hurricane. And other local, smaller upheavals have also mixed things up; Nearby Slickrock Swamp Trail North of Rockville is also Shinarump, and 1,200 feet below Gooseberry, despite being on the same side of the Hurricane Fault.
*Which I explained in this post. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.
I’ve read 2 possible explanations of the formation of the Shinarump. The first is that it’s the result of a shallow, receding sea, and that the pebble bands are the results of beach/shallows deposits. The second is that it was laid down by the sediment deposits of braided streams, which explains the bands of pebbles well enough, but seems to me hard to swallow given the huge area covered by the member, and the relative uniformity of it. The Shinarump is almost always between 40 and 100 feet thick, and is present over a good chunk of 4 states. How could braided streams cover such an area for so long?
Interestingly, nearby Little Creek Mountain, also capped by Shinarump, seems to show pebble bands much less frequently. Many of the Shinarump areas on Little Creek are pink-ish in hue- something you almost never see on Gooseberry- due to the presence of iron oxide in the stone.
I mentioned that the layer just below the Shinarump is the Moenkopi formation, easily eroded, and not high/sheer-cliff-forming. You see it frequently from the Mesa rim, forming beautiful red and what bands on the slopes below. Geologists divide it into 6 alternating layers, 3 red, and 3 grayish-white, but there are varying sub-bands within the layers, so it’s not always easy to pick them out. The topmost layer though is easy to pick out. It’s a red layer, called the Upper Red Member. It’s usually about 250 – 300 feet thick, and if you pay attention you’ll notice that the rock/soil immediately below the Shinarump is almost always deep red.
You can get good glimpses of the Moenkopi color-banding in the background of this clip, at 0:03, 0:09 and again at 0:19.
Tangent: I had my helmet-cam rolling at the time, so here’s what it looked like from my POV.
Nested Tangent: I was the only one of our group- and the several other groups hanging out by the point at the time- who rode the little point loop. The exposure there never bothers me, but, oddly (to me, anyway) it seems to make most other folks uneasy. After I rode it, SBJ claimed he “couldn’t even watch.” I thought he was joking, but check him out at 0:25 – 0:28, standing by is bike on the left in a pink Fat Cyclist jersey. He really is looking away! (Then again, so is Hunky Neighbor. Maybe they’re just pretending they’re not with me…)
Riding Moenkopi
You never ride on Moenkopi on the mesas, but that’s exactly what you ride on down on the bench level, on say JEM or Gould Rim trails. Here’s a cool clip of descending upper JEM*. At the start, I’m riding on soil of the Upper Red Member (#6 out of 6, going from bottom to top.) At 0:21, you’ll see the soil change suddenly to white as I transition down into the Shnabkaib Member (#5 of 6) consisting of friable shale with plenty of gypsum. The Shnabkaib is usually about 270-300 feet thick, and although I didn’t have an altimeter, this seems to be ballpark-roughly how much I descend before crossing the thin capstone layer at 1:39 and transitioning over the next 20 second down into the Middle Red Member (#4 or 6).
*Back in March I had a clip of part of this stretch, but starting from lower down and so not showing the transitions.
Seriously, how cool was that?
Another interesting thing about Shinarump slickrock- and something you see frequently on both Gooseberry and Little Creek, as well as nearby Guacamole- is petrified wood. It’s all over the place, and I’ve read (again!) 2 different explanations for its presence. The first is that its petrified driftwood deposited when the conglomerate was deposited, either as shallow sea or braided streams. But the alternative is that it’s from a higher, now-eroded layer. The Chinle formation consists of 4 layers above the Shinarump, the 2nd (from the bottom) is known as the Petrified Forest Member, consisting of shales, limestone and volcanic ash, and containing numerous deposits of… wait for it… petrified wood*. The wood is harder and more erosion-resistant than the surrounding soil, which could have left it deposited on subsequently-exposed Shinarump.
*This same Petrified Forest member is what you’re looking at when you visit Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
I’m not aware of any spot where one rides through the Petrified Forest member on Gooseberry, but you do ride through the layer below it in spots. On the mesa, one of the faster and more dramatic sections is moving East along the South Rim. In a couple of spots the trail actually moves up onto a layer of beige-ish-white clay/soil overlying the Shinarump, which is the Lower Sandstone Member (#1 of the 4 layers, counting up), consisting mainly of fine quartz grains mixed with gypsum, iron and lime, and usually about 100 feet thick. In this clip you can see Hunky Neighbor climb up of the Shinarump and onto soils of the Chinle/Lower Sandstone at 1:08. At 1:35 – 1:40 he rolls back down onto the Shinarump, where we continue for several more seconds in the series of drops known as “Rattlesnake” before I violently (and audibly) flat.
Man, what a great weekend. Who would’ve thought geology could be so fun*?
*Well, Jube, obviously. But I mean a non-geologist… Hey Jube, how about some more geo-posts??
We headed home Sunday afternoon after revisiting Little Creek, and I quickly un-packed and re-packed before flying out for a week on the road the following morning. Looking forward to finally getting home this weekend, and catching up on the Spring that’s been flying by. AW called me here in Florida last night; the Lazulis are back.
About 100 or so miles later, I followed a rolling dirt road through the desert night until I came to a long steep downhill. I couldn’t see ahead in the dark, but the drop indicated the descent into Beaver Dam Wash. I dropped into the wash, crossed a (surprisingly) fast-running stream, pulled over by some cottonwoods and stopped for the night. I slept under the brightest stars I remembered seeing in years, listening to the rushing water 20 feet away, and watching shooting stars until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. In the morning I woke* a little while before sunrise, and felt- for the first time in a while- like myself.
*In my lazy middle age I’ve taken to camping in the open with stove, lighter, coffee & pot o’ water 3 feet from my head. No middle-aged camper should have to extricate him/herself from a sleeping bag before the first sip of coffee.
Side Note: 2 years ago, during Monocot Week, following my failed attempt on Mormon Peak, I drove backroads for about 2 hours to reconnect with pavement in Utah on the West slope of the Beaver Dam Mtns. It was a long drive, I was tired, and in a let’s-get-this-done mood. But about 10 miles from pavement, the land before me fell away into a deep draw, lined by lush, leafed-out cottonwoods- the first bright green I’d seen in a full day. The road wound down to the bottom, into the trees, and across the running stream in the bottom. As I drove across I leaned my head out the open window and saw dozens of tadpoles scattering away from my rolling tires. I thought about stopping and exploring, but I had a long drive back to Salt Lake and kept going, arriving home late that evening.
The next morning I awoke, thought of the cottonwoods and the tadpoles, and immediately regretted not stopping. I’d been thinking about going back to Beaver Dam Wash ever since.
I spent about an hour exploring and poking around, walking through the little forest of cottonwoods and willows alongside the stream. I’m always struck by 2 things in desert cottonwood groves. The first is how leafy green trees that seem so ordinary and ubiquitous in parks or suburbs or Eastern forests seem so absolutely wonderful and garden-of-eden-like in the desert- each grove a little oasis of coolness and color. The second is how dramatic the division is between the forested riparian zone and the adjacent desert. It’s as if you can walk back and forth between worlds. One moment you’re picking your way through cottonwoods and willows, 20 steps later you’re walking past Joshua trees and creosote.
Side Note: About a year and a half ago I blogged about the 3 levels of the St. George area- Floor, Bench and Mesa. Beaver Dam Wash, and other nearby low areas such as the Virgin River Gorge, are a 4th level, a weird underworld. And there are really at least 2 more levels going up, either in the Pine Valley Mountains, or onto the Markagunt Plateau behind Zion.
Eventually I loaded back up, drove back across the wash…
and worked my way into St. George, where I caught up on calls and email*, before continuing East and up, through Hurricane, Apple Valley and onto Little Creek Mountain.
*Because yes, I was working. This wasn’t a vacation day. It was a travel day. Remember, it isn’t a boondoggle if you’re taking the day off.
I’ve blogged a couple of times about Little Creek, and I always love riding and exploring there. This time I had the helmet cam with me, so you can get a little feel for the place. This clip is some of the windy singletrack out onto the North rim.
And this clip, while not great biking footage, takes you through the “big trees”- an area where relic ponderosas grow out of cracks and crevices across a weird, wide pink sandstone draw. I’ve never come across any other place quite like this
When I first rode Little Creek I was guided by the trail-builders, who told me only about 20 people had ridden the mesa. Today that’s not the case. Though much less visited than nearby Gooseberry Mesa, Little Creek gets ridden regularly, and this last year actual signs have been placed at a couple of key trail junctions. But there’s about a mile of trail that almost never gets ridden, and which I always ride when I visit.
Originally the Harris brothers intended the trail to go clear to the South Rim* of the mesa. But about a mile from the rim they reached a sandy area that never packed in well. Around this time another local trail-builder** put in a trailhead-rim connector that turned the Harris bros. trail into a loop, and this loop became the main trail. But the loop left off about a mile-long stub of excellent trail that was soon forgotten, and now hardly gets ridden. When I rode it 2 weeks ago, there wasn’t a tire-track on it. When I rode it again this past weekend, there was one, very faint set in spots- mine.
*Years ago I had some time to kill and poked around old 4WD tracks till I found a way to the South Rim. Beautiful views South into Arizona, and a pleasant rim to walk, or possibly bike, in spots.
**The former proprietor of Bike Zion, Dean Whatshisbucket…
The Stub was never well-marked to begin with, and now, with nearly a decade of no traffic, it’s even harder to follow. When I ride it, I do so with my mind fully engaged, looking for present-day clues, and yet drawing connections out of memory at the same time, remembering a particular ramp, or tree, or crevice. You can’t just look for the trail, and you can’t just remember it- you have to look and remember, at the same time.
Looking and remembering- particularly when alone- gives you a weird out-of-time feeling. Am I thinking about now or 10 years ago? Usually we think about one or the other. We’re thinking about say, work, or what we need to pick up for dinner, and then for whatever reason we shift gears and think about last summer’s vacation, or the girl we took to the prom for a bit, before jumping back to the present. We don’t usually think- and think hard- about present and past at the same time, much less ride a semi-technical trail at the same time. That’s why I like the Stub. It breaks the mold of my thinking.
The Stub’s an out-and-back, and when it rejoins the main loop, the trail drops down to, joins, and then follows the rim for a ways. There are a series of open terraces here, where I like to stop for a snack and a view West into the Virgin River Gorge, and the Virgin and Mormon Mountains beyond, my mind cleared from the Stub. I sat down on the warm rock, no one else around… except for- whoosh!- the sudden slicing of wind a dozen feet from my head. If you’ve spent time hiking or climbing in the West, you know what I’m talking about- those crazy, swooping, super-fast “swallows” that always show up out of nowhere when you’re on some exposed peak. Only they’re not swallows; they’re Swifts.
Swifts are a worldwide family (Apodidae) of some 90+ species of birds that look more or less like swallows, but aren’t at all closely-related, and in fact aren’t even Passerines, or perching birds, but are more closely-related to hummingbirds. Their resemblance to swallows is an example of convergent evolution; both make a living by catching and consuming insects in mid-air. The Swifts I watched on Little Creek, and which you’ve almost certainly seen*, were White-Throated Swifts, Aeronautes saxatalis, the most common swift in Western North America.
*Assuming that is that you’ve spent some time on high peaks and exposed ridges in the Western US. And if you haven’t, well really, what are you waiting for?
Side Note: Passerines, order Passeriformes are the “perching birds”, so named for their common foot architecture- 3 toes forward, 1 backward, which allows them to easily perch on branches. They’re sometimes called the “songbirds”, but since they also include things like the corvids- which definitely do not sing- that’s not really accurate. Pigeons, buntings, cardinals, icterids, sparrows, finches, wrens, robins, thrushes and the majority of birds you’re probably familiar with are all passerines, descended from a common ancestor some 55-60 million years ago*. Today they comprise some 6,000 of the world’s >10,000 species of birds.
*Guess where it might have lived? That’s right – Gondwanaland!
Swifts (pic left, not mine) are beautiful flyers, breathtakingly fast and maneuverable. Their boomerang-shaped wings provide strong, quick lift, and their short forked (usually closed) tails enable rapid changes of direction. They can remain aloft not just for hours- but even days (while migrating) and even, apparently, months, in the case of the European Common Swift, Apus apus. Swifts dine on the wing; migrating swifts pick up the food they need while in flight. European Common Swifts migrate annually to North Africa, and it’s believed that they sleep in flight, and possibly never land for as long as 9 months!
Extra detail: Their inner wing feathers produce most of the lift from the wing-stroke, while the outer feathers generate the forward propulsion.
White-throated Swifts (pic rleft, not mine) do land to sleep, but never voluntarily on the ground. Their short weak legs and specialized feet* aren’t suitable for either walking or branch-perching, but rather for hanging/clinging to walls, cliff faces and wires. Because their nesting sites- which are large and communal- are typically in inaccessible cliff-sites, not as much is known about their family lives as is known about many other common birds. Their actual nests are half-cups constructed of twigs and plant matter cemented together and to the cliff-wall by the bird’s saliva, which hardens, epoxy-like, when dry. They’re thought to be the fastest-flying birds in North America, regularly cruising at 30-40 MPH, and hitting top speeds estimated at anywhere from 130-200 MPH.
*4 toes, all facing forward.
Extra Detail: The nests of some Asian species (specifically Swiftlets) are the main ingredient in Bird’s Nest Soup. There are a number of other Swiftlet species- again in Asia- that use echolocation- sonar- to help navigate in the dark, cave-like recesses of their communal nesting sites. And recently it’s been discovered that at least two species hunt insects at dusk using echolocation to hunt insects at night, just like a bats.
Tangent: This brings up something that has always bugged me- why aren’t there more echo-locating, night-flying, insect-hunting birds? There are about 1,100 different species of bats- something like ¼ of all mammal species- the majority (3/4) of which use echolocation to hunt insects. But among birds sonar appears rare and/or limited in use and function. Why? Or let me turn it around another way: Why are there bats at all, anyway?
You may well have heard the standard “reason” why bats don’t fly in the day: Because hawks- and other birds- prey upon them*. This in turn raises the question of why we have birds preying on bats instead of the other way around (on the ground, mammals routinely prey upon birds), to which the answer may be in part that birds just fly a lot better, due maybe to their feathers, superior lungs, different musculature** and/or vision.
*I’m not sure this is the case, BTW Maybe bats haven’t evolved into bat-raptors is because birds filled those niches first. I don’t think there were many (any?) large mammalian carnivores until the dinosaurs disappeared, creating opportunities for entelodonts and such… Maybe, just maybe, if all the birds in the world suddenly dropped dead tomorrow of Killer Bird Flu, in a couple million years the skies would be patrolled by soaring Bat-Eagles. Or maybe not. Just thinking aloud here…
**Bats “flap” like we do; pectoral muscles pull the arm down, and deltoids pull it back up. Birds have 2 different sets of pecs, one for the downstroke, one for the upstroke, and the 2 muscles overlay each other and are both firmly anchored to the keel of the bird’s breastbone. The up-pulling pecs are connected to the back/shoulder of the wind by a tendon routed through a special groove.
Whatever the case, let’s assume birds fly better than mammals/bats. So why aren’t there hundreds of different species, worldwide, of echo-locating, night-flying, insect-eating birds? Birds have evolved into almost every other niche imaginable: waterfowl, raptors, penguins, vultures, loons, hummingbirds- you name it. Why no (or rather so few) bat-lifestyle-birds? And if birds are such better flyers than bats, you’d think they’d totally out-compete them by night as well as day, and there’d be, well, no bats, right?
The obvious explanation would seem to be that, for whatever reason, birds don’t or can’t evolve sonar as readily as mammals. Why not? Can they not make the sounds? That’s hard to imagine. As we’ve already seen, syrinx-equipped birds are far more vocally capable than the vast grunting majority of mammals. Maybe they can’t hear the sounds? At first thought, this idea seems to have a bit more legs. Mammals and bird ears are both evolved in part from “spare” (re-purposed) bones in the reptilian jaw, but they evolved independently and along different architectures. Maybe ours is better? But that doesn’t hold up either; think of owls, and their amazing, directionally-sensitive hearing, capable of detecting a mouse scuffling through the grass…
I even thought of faces. Bats have crazy-ugly faces (pic left, not mine), with all kinds of weird bumps and ridges, that serve to funnel/directionalize ultrasonic peeps. Maybe the face of a bird I less morphologically “plastic” and can’t easily develop the features and contours to optimize sonar performance. But then, when you think about ducks, auks and turkeys, birds do seem to have a fair amount of facial variation. The whole bird-bat/day-night thing just bugs me.
Anyway, here’s another thing about Swifts: they are almost impossible to photograph. They’re always flying, and flying fast; they never sit or perch or hang or pose anyplace you’re likely to see them. Here’s my best shot- lame, I know:
And here’s the only helmet-cam video I managed to catch- watch the top of the screen at 0:05.
I love watching Swifts, and when I do there are always 2 head-scratchers I always wonder about*. The first is- how far ahead do they see the insect they’re trying to catch? Think about it. We know birds have awesome vision, but they’re flying along at maybe 30 – 50 MPH, and the bugs they’re catching are tiny. How far ahead do they see them? 10 feet? 50? 100? And how do they react in time to alter their flight course and catch them?
*Besides the whole tangential bird-bat-sonar thing, I mean.
Which in turn brings me to the second thing: how fast do Swifts think? They move so fast, and react, and change course, speed and direction so quickly, faster than we can practically register that they’re even around. I’m not suggesting they’re thinking about art or literature or anything, but what must it be like to think, decide, react and perceive reality that fast? Usually I feel a bit smug when comparing my mental faculties to those of another animal. But when I think of Swifts I feel slow, dense and heavy, both physically and mentally.
I packed up and rolled on along the rim, through the woodlands, across the slickrock and eventually back to the trailhead for the long drive home. As I loaded up and headed out I found myself thinking wistfully, as I always do when leaving Little Creek, that I’d like to get back down sooner rather than later.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what I did.
Next up: Oodles of singletrack, slickrock, exposure and helmet-cam video filler!
