Sedimentary Lifestyle

I have seen the seals

2011-11-24T22:10:00.016-05:00

I have returned from CA, where I had adventures. DP had invited me to join her and her parents on the coast for the weekend before Thanksgiving, then had to change her plans, leaving me alone in California for the first day of our trip. Rather than change my own plane ticket I decided I would just take a day to explore by myself. So I rented a car and drove out to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, from which you can see the famous bridge and the city of San Francisco as well.

This is the thing: San Francisco is a white city. Just that so many of the buildings have light-colored edifices. I don't know why. It is like a town on a hill in Greece or Yemen. Sometimes you go to a place not realizing you expected something different until you see that it's not what you didn't know you expected.

There is some high-caliber shipping traffic out there, which is fun to watch.

I stayed till after dark.

I had made very special sleeping arrangements. Two years ago a thing happened that I don't think I ever blogged about, which was that I was one of the year's lucky recipients of the Udall Scholarship for leadership in environmental studies. The Udall Foundation flies all the winners out to a resort in Tucson each year for a convention, at which a primary activity is networking, with each other, past winners, and policy-makers.

Me, on right, and the group I went camping with after the convention

Networking remains a primary activity for Udall alumni, who keep in touch through an online mailing list and other means. So it is through the Udall network that I met Bret, who offered me a bed in his student co-op at Berkeley.

In this large building near campus some 30 grad students were housed, and when I arrived they were all gathered in the dining room drinking and having so many conversations at such a decibel level that I can practically see the noise streaming out of this picture as I look at it now.

I stayed up too late talking with the students and of course it made me powerfully wish I was also a grad student at Berkeley, or at least a grad student, although I am sure in my wistfulness I am missing something important and non-romantic about being a grad student, possibly related to having to do work. But I enjoyed my stay there very much. The co-op was very interesting.

A room where people can give/get free stuff... click to read the labels on the boxes.

Physics Today.

Here is a sheet where people buy and sell their weekly chores.

The next morning I walked around Berkeley, which was very nice. My calling a place "very nice" usually means I liked the plant life and the architecture. The plants were weirdly lush and exotic to my East Coast eyes, and the architecture seemed to be mid-century, the sort of stuff that has character but not so much it makes you mumble, "What were they thinking back then?"

The bulletin boards on campus were a weird kind of art form. I don't know what exactly was going on here. Whoever was putting up any kind of flier seemed compelled to tile it across the face of the board at regular intervals, perhaps in the hope that if someone didn't want to read their flier, they might want to read the identical copy 2 inches over to the right. The effect was something like the intentional repetition of pattern in a sheet of wallpaper.

Then I went back to the airport to greet DP's arrival, and she showed me the house where she had grown up in Berkeley, which I couldn't really believe existed.

It had redwoods in the front yard, kiwi and lemon trees, and a view of the ocean, among other niceties. It was as if people had cobbled together all the nicest things you could have in a house and a yard, but which couldn't actually be together without causing a rift in the universe, or possibly exponentially expanding property values, but there they were. But soon we left there for the 3-hour drive up the coast to Sea Ranch, where we spent the next few days.

Sea Ranch is a planned community occupying a former ranch above the cliffs of the Northern CA coastline. It was very quiet.

The house we stayed in was very large, with many bedrooms, a fireplace and hot tub. It was very close to the beach.

DP and I went for walks along the shore, where we saw many things.

These are some kind of rotting Kelp Thing. For some reason, upon seeing them, the first thing out of DP's mouth was "We should fight with these!"

This was possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever done in my life. But there were also many other things to look at on the beach that were not rotting.

Sea anemones

A sea star

I have no idea what these are.

Here are some ichnofossils, probably burrows, lacing the rocks making up the cliffs over the beach.

A heron

Banana slug

The seals. When I saw the seals, I actually shrieked like a little girl. I have never done that before in my life, ever, not even as an actual little girl. I was so excited and happy. For four years I worked at an aquarium that had captive seals, and every day I would hear visitors talk about how you could see seals from the CT and RI coastline, but I never managed to see any wild ones. Ever. But now I have seen them.

3. Job

2011-11-08T19:37:00.018-05:00

Rose in an October snowstorm, Denver

I owe most of the very stressful periods in my life either partly or wholly to my own overactive mind, my worries. But a year ago was by far the most stressful period I've ever had to deal with that was actually and truly precipitated by outside circumstances. 11 months ago today, I wrote this blog post, in which I detailed my rescue from acute homelessness, when my carefree road trip of last fall was cut short by the demise of my old Corolla. That misfortune ate up most of my savings and left me in a city where I had nowhere to sleep, no transportation, no income, and 2 acquaintances.

People ask me why I chose to live in Denver and this was why, it was by default, because I needed to start again from nothing, where I was. In that other post, titled, "Two down," I listed these four goals:

1. Home
2. Car
3. Job
4. Relationship

My current car, which is not, in fact, the car I bought a year ago (which car only lasted a few months)

Much of my story for the past year is the same story being lived by many Americans right now. I spent half the year unemployed. Of the period I was employed, half was at an 8-hour-a-week job, and half was at a full-time but temporary internship with no benefits. It is an incredibly grinding and confidence-destroying thing to be out of work for months on end. I thought somehow I'd be immune. I'd never had much job security even before the recession, and had no expectations. But something about applying for a hundred jobs without getting a single interview had me so low I could barely stand to look at myself in the mirror, as they say.

The Capitol building in Denver, sunset

But anyway. I got a job last month, a real job, in my field, with good pay and benefits, and there is not very much to say about the job. I am doing geology at a computer. There are no stories in it. But many of the preoccupations of my previous life have disappeared. I am ready to trade in my old, poverty-driven worries (How can I afford to get my pneumonia treated? How long can I drive a car that only has 3 cylinders firing?) for new, middle-class worries.

I don't know what middle-class people worry about. How can I afford to go to France? Should I put this money in my 401(k) or my IRA? This is what I imagine.

And then there is #4. I go about dating the same way I go about everything. That is, I do not sit back and wait or hope that things will work out, but set aside time for it, and put thought and care into it. As if it were schoolwork, or job hunting, or a backpacking trip. It is not in my nature to not put effort into something I want.

Speaking of nature. Me, taken by Kris

I get out and meet people, I try new things, I talk to strangers. I eat healthy and stay fit and organize parties. If if I have achieved nothing else, at least now I can boast of having a large circle of friends, and of being able to approach attractive women in bars without choking on anxiety. I have been on so many dates now that I've forgotten more women than I can remember. (Er. I hope none of them are reading this.) But I am firmly and unmistakably single and have been so for a very long time. My friends say they admire me for not falling into the first thing that comes along. I couldn't do that if I wanted to, and admiration is not on my list of things I crave, right now, but it's nice of them.

And there you go. No stories to tell right now, but I will be on the California coast with DP before the holidays, and I am looking forward to the geology as much as anything else. The rest of this post is photos I have taken in the past couple months with the new camera.

This is my roommate, Abby, at her flag football game. I had a roommate Jess, who moved to Fort Collins to go to school. So now I have a new roommate named Abby.

Some mountains that are a half-hour drive from my home

Kris, camping

Rocky Mountain National Park, where DP and I went to see some elk

Elk

There was a snowstorm here a couple weeks ago that was the most beautiful snowstorm I have ever seen. The snow piled onto all the telephone wires and tree branches narrowly and very high like ribbons on edge, and was undisturbed by melting or wind all day.

A C750-UZ top 40

2011-09-22T19:18:00.025-04:00

So, my camera has basically died. The Olympus C-750 Ultra Zoom that I got something like ten years ago. All of the pictures of mine you have seen on this blog were taken with this 4 megapixel camera from the turn of the century.

It still takes pictures, but I can't change it from the Auto setting, and there's that crack in the middle of the lens that often made it look like people had a holy light shining out of their crotch.

So I have bought a new camera. But in memory of the years of wonderful pictures that the old camera brought me, I have compiled this list of the top 40 photos I took with it. Obviously this is somewhat arbitrary, and I wish it was worth the trouble to get other people to vote on what the top 40 really are, because I have very particular tastes and I'm probably keeping from you lots of photos that normal people would like very much but I don't. However, here are the photos. Please click on any you wish for a larger version.

A dewy-winged cicada on top of a trash container somewhere in the Midwest. Possibly the only photo I have of anything in the Midwest.

Chimney Rock, near my geology field camp in Shell, WY.

An upright piece of petrified wood in the wilderness, Petrified Forest National Park, AZ.

A cleft in the rock in Canyon de Chelly National Monument, AZ.

Me with guitar.

A shot from Many Glacier Hotel, Glacier National Park, MT.

A figure is dwarfed by the walls of the Great Wash, Capitol Reef National Park, UT.

Lots of little turtles for sale at a street fair, New London, CT.

Driving through the north part of Zion National Park, UT.

Backpacking in the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest National Park, AZ.

Sledding in Groton, CT.

White Sands National Monument in NM.

View from Sun Point, Glacier National Park, MT.

Collared lizard with spider on its chin, Petrified Forest National Park, AZ.

Morning glory on my balcony, New London, CT.

Canoer, Lake Ogontz, NH.

Cattle graze under the Bighorn Mountains, WY.

Sunset in the badlands, Petrified Forest National Park, AZ.

Candlestick Mesa, Canyonlands National Park, UT.

The Needles, Canyonlands National Park, UT.

A friend's pet crayfish.

Elk, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

Snails on a rock, Vieques, Puerto Rico.

Charles at Jackson Lake, Grand Teton National Park, WY.

A poppy outside my apartment, New London, CT.

Heading to work, Petrified Forest National Park, AZ.

Jess and friends, Green Mountain, CO.

Mountain biking in Sedona, AZ.

White Sands National Monument, NM.

Me and some other field camp students, Wind River Mountains, WY.

Sunset in the badlands, Petrified Forest National Park, AZ.

A clay head I made that is about 1 inch long.

Grand Canyon National Park, AZ.

Sunset at Chiricahua National Monument, AZ.

Midday in the badlands, Petrified Forest National Park, AZ.

Sunset at Ocean Beach Park, New London, CT.

The Rattlesnake. Dinosaur National Monument, UT.

A beluga whale up close, Mystic Aquarium, CT.

Logan Pass, Glacier National Park, MT.

Friends' shadows, Arches National Park, UT.

There are some interesting trends in these photos. One is location--I have broken down the locations of the 40 photos by state, below:

AZ: 11
CO: 2
CT: 8
MT: 3
NH: 1
NM: 2
OH: 1
PR: 1
RI: 1
UT: 6
WY: 4

Obviously, Arizona and Connecticut are the most beautiful states. Actually, I consider Utah the most beautiful state, but Petrified Forest National Park (AZ) is one of my favorite places on the planet, and I'm sure this has some correlation to the number of photos. As for Connecticut, I did live there for longer than anywhere else (yet).

Indoor photos: 3
Outdoor photos: 37

Not sure there's anything special about that. Perhaps 37 out of 40 of everyone's best photos are taken outdoors.

Outdoor photos taken in the morning: 3
Midday: 16
Evening: 18
Night: 0

It's hard not to take a good picture in late afternoon or evening light. But I think when I'm on vacation I'm more likely to be out and about during midday than anything else, so that accounts for all the midday ones.

Photos taken at home: 10
While traveling: 30

Despite the fact that for the past few years I've spent, I dunno, "only" 1/3 of the year traveling or otherwise away from home, 3/4 of my good pictures are from those periods. Part of that may be that I'm more likely to be carrying my camera when I'm traveling, but, plainly put, the nicest things to photograph tend to be "out there," not close to home.

Photos without people: 31
Photos with people: 9
Portraits: 0

I know I've taken at least one portrait, which was actually pretty good, but in general it's not something that even occurs to me. Taking pictures of people! People exist to provide a sense of scale in landscapes.

I think about what makes pictures good and I think about how so many of the nice pictures I've taken could have been taken by anybody. Were probably taken by other people who happened to be there at the same time as me. This photo, say, required the least amount of skill:

There's nothing special about the light, the weather... or even, from a particular point of view, the scenery, which probably looked like this on and off all summer. Thousands of people probably have this same exact photo. The only element of skill is that I made sure the horizon was (sort of) horizontal. It is very pretty, though, all the same.

Most of the nice photos I have incorporate a small element of skill in them, though, I suppose, in that I chose to take them between the hours of 5 and 9 PM when it's hard to take a bad picture of anything remotely pretty. Sometimes I even waited until the shadows of clouds were artfully arranged. And I guess I make some decisions about how to frame the photo--what to include in or exclude from the frame--and how to crop it later.

And then there are the photos in which I just got very lucky about what I stumbled on, like the snails, the lizard, the snake. In a way, anybody could have taken those too. But I suppose not everybody chooses to hike the backcountry of national parks or wander for hours along a deserted Puerto Rican beach.

But the only photos I really consider to have taken skill are the few that incorporate all those elements--light, framing, being in the right place at the right time--and also having seen a photo opportunity that was not completely obvious to everyone there. So of all the photos above I think the last one was, perhaps, the only one that really required skill.

Unique among all the moments I've captured above, this one was gone after only a second. (Even The Rattlesnake stuck around for a few minutes!)

Anyone can take amazing photos without an ounce of skill, if you follow three rules:

1. Have a camera that is at least pretty good quality and represents colors pretty accurately.
2. Put the time and money into traveling to see amazing things, things that make you say "wow" before you even remember you have a camera.
3. Take photos of these things in the low-angle light of morning or evening.

That's all you need. Obviously really great photographers often get stunning pictures without needing to follow rules 2 and 3. But they have skill. We may not!

But, my readers, I am curious: out of all the photos presented today, which is your favorite?

All of the other things

2011-09-09T16:48:00.013-04:00

My tenure at the park is over, but there remain a few photos of interesting things.

I don't have much to say about these, except for the rattlesnake. But I shall caption them.

A nighthawk.

A ponderosa pine. Ponderosa pines have a silhouette that is itself a classic icon of the west. They can be recognized by their rounded tops.

A damselfly. Damselflies are similar to dragonflies, but are slimmer, and fold their wings onto their backs when they rest.

The Yampa River after the big storm we had while rafting. The storm turned the waters reddish-brown beyond a certain point at which the reddish Phosphoria Formation, above the pale Weber Sandstone, was washing down the cliffs into the river. Here the water behind the sandbar is its original yellow color, the water beyond it more reddish, which color it remained for several hours.

Many ranches have posts over the entrance with various horses, cowboys, bulls, etc. upon them. This one near the park was a little more creative.

DP rides a captive brontosaurus.

A news item in Vernal.

The mineralogy book that my field partner found in the middle of nowhere, in a crevice in some rocks far from any trail. It had a name and a number. However, the number didn't have the right amount of digits to be a phone number. And I can't imagine why anyone would put their SSN in a mineralogy book.

Old juniper wood.

A flower. Obviously.

This cabin is on one of the county roads that allow access to the east end of the park. The sign reads: "$1,000 REWARD for information leading to the CONVICTION of anyone STEALING, MOLESTING or POACHING [illegible] or PROPERTY [illegible]."

My hat, and some scenery.

A worked point (i.e., Indian artifact) I found in the field.

My field partner at work.

A storm beyond the housing area.

Students and volunteers on the University of Utah team doing research in the park pause in trying to remember the Seven Dwarves to catch a Sharpie, here suspended in mid-flight.

DP in a slotty portion of what was generally a non-slot canyon.

Investigating the nicest track site we found. The prominent trackway stretching from foreground to background was made by a small mammal-like reptile walking up a dune 200 million years ago.

Not The Rattlesnake, but a rattlesnake we walked right past before realizing it was there, a foot from our feet.

Fantasy Canyon, south of the park.

Also Fantasy Canyon.

Sunset from Fantasy Canyon.

Flaming Gorge, north of the park.

Flaming Gorge Dam.

A sign below Flaming Gorge Dam that practically invites you to read it the wrong way.

There were many signs here.

Cross-bedding in sandstone.

The moon rises over Blue Mountain. As seen from the housing area.

Some trees on the Ruple Point Trail.

A picture of me at Moonstone Arch outside the park, taken by a co-worker.

And me hiking back from a day of field work.

And me in front of the wall of bones at the visitor's center that will reopen this October.

I scale the stegosaurus model outside my office. For no good reason.

Also for no good reason.

Oh, yes, back to the beginning of the summer, when I was trying to get the frisbee off the roof with a grappling hook made of two pairs of salad tongs.

We take the pledge to become Junior Paleontologists.

Our album cover. Actually, this is the team I worked with for part of the summer.

Second album cover.

Third album cover. Obviously, this is after we fired our drummer.

My goofy field partner Keegan at the wall of bone.

We pose in some shots for my supervisor's blog.

I look up at the reverse image of some footprints.

Our evil supervisor watches over us as we slave to dust off a fossil trackway.

Me and femur.

Now, The Rattlesnake. My field partner and I were hiking through a wash on our way back from a hard day of field work when he told me I just stepped on something. I looked around. This is what I had just stepped on.

It was a baby midget faded rattlesnake eating a lizard. The rattlesnake did not do anything; it just sat there.

We watched it for a bit.

"It can't bite us," I said. "It has a giant lizard stuffed in its mouth. We can touch it. This could be the only time we're ever able to touch a rattlesnake."

I touched it. It sat there. After several minutes of gathering up his courage, my field partner touched it, wincingly.

Immediately after he withdrew his hand, the rattlesnake spat the lizard out with lightning speed and slithered away, keeping its head turned to watch us, shaking its not-quite-a-rattle-yet tail, to coil in some grass a couple feet away.

Okay, so it totally could have bitten us. One of the stupider things I've ever done. Still, we survived!

Dedicated to the god of electronics

2011-08-28T18:09:00.014-04:00

The backpacking trip. I'd been planning this trip in the park's wilderness all summer, which for me usually involves a lot of staring at maps, trying to imagine where would be the best place to go, how long it would take, how much water I'd need to bring. I had been thinking about this thing for three months. And I was pretty sure I was going to do it--pretty sure because my potential backpacking partner and I had only discussed the trip once, in a half-assed way, more than three months ago, and I generally consider it to be asking a lot of any human being to have them save a date and then drive six hours to meet you when the original conversation lasted barely a minute. But Kris was there.

We were going to be hiking into a mostly trailless area that included two tributary canyons of the Yampa River and the Yampa itself. I had been assured that the tributary canyons had been hiked by many others and that they contained no drop-offs too steep to navigate. I thought we would probably hike six miles the first afternoon.

But quite early we came to a series of large cliffs below us, twenty to sixty feet each, with no apparent way down into the rest of the canyon. No safe way, I should say. We might, from a distance, see a possible way down one drop, but have no clue how to get down from the ledge the first path might lead us to. We scouted for an hour in the August sun, climbing all over the rocks on the cliff edges, before finding what appeared to be a safe way down that would take us back and forth across the cliffs in a series of smaller drops.

Above, one of the sections of cliff to be navigated. (Once you get to the lower cliff, how do you get off it?)

We did not mean to take any risks. The only difficult part of this route was a drop of about four feet that we couldn't make with our big backpacks on, so we took them off and dropped them the four feet, then hopped down after them.

When I dropped my pack it hit the rock hard, and a small black thing flew off it and bounced off the edge of the next drop, which was about 10 feet away from us. As it was flying through the air I realized it was my camera. I waited for what seemed too long to hear it land and then Kris and I both heard a noise that was way too loud. It sounded like the camera had connected with solid rock at about 100 miles per hour.

At this time I must mention that my phone had jumped out of my pocket in the wilderness a few days before, and after an hour of searching had departed empty-handed, despondent and connectionless in the Middle of Nowhere, Utah, and unhappy to discover that T-Mobile will not ship to PO boxes. Now my camera had decided it would rather throw itself off a cliff than live with me any longer.

It took us a while to get down to the bottom of that cliff, and then another while to find the camera. It was beneath a big rock that I assumed it had hit. I opened the case and saw that the camera was not dented. I turned it on and it turned on. I took a picture with it.

Kris, on the hunt.

MY CAMERA survived a 60 foot fall, landed on a rock, and still took pictures. I have since discovered that it now can't be changed from the auto setting, but still. It reminds me of the pen I lost in the Wyoming wilderness one summer and then found more than a year later when I was fossil-hunting in the area. Did it still write? YES.

Here is me below the cliff, which was 50 or 60 feet high.

We wandered down the canyon for another hour or so before stopping for the night. It was very quiet, no hint of civilization anywhere.

The sun setting on the canyon walls

The next day, while hiking toward the Yampa, Kris and I discussed the merits of hiking in trailless areas. I generally prefer hiking where there's no trail... at least, I do in the West, where there's less vegetation... because it keeps your mind so busy trying to figure out how to get where you want to go. There is much less boredom, and also less pain, as I don't notice my feet hurting. But it certainly wasn't easy. We whacked many bushes, and had to squeeze through crevices in the rock, or make jumps difficult to make with 30 pounds of pack on. Or both of the latter, at the same time. At one point I was held with my feet dangling in the air by my pack which was still wedged between the rocks above and behind me.

Kris squeezes through a crevice

But this was real wilderness. We saw many elk antlers, including these, still attached to the skull:

The canyon walls towered above us.

Finally we made it to the Yampa River. We needed to proceed downstream to the next tributary canyon, where we would climb out, but the river (which, you may recall, was much swollen this year with snowmelt and Spring rains) had not dropped as much as it usually does by August and was bordered by steep cliffs instead of rocky beaches. We needed to find a way up onto the tops of the cliffs in order to get safely downstream. Another hour of scouting in the rain provided a path.

Up on the cliff, looking down at the river

Kris, unable to resist, pushes against the rock on the edge of the cliff. It won't budge.

Here is a shot of the bend in the Yampa where we camped that night. I had expected to see rafters on the river, but we never saw a soul, on the water or off it. I assume that no trips had been planned because often, by this time of year, the river is too low to run.

We took a little hike up into a massive alcove in the cliffs over the river. I turned back to take a shot of some of the terrain we'd just crossed:
For a sense of scale, look for Kris in this shot, reclining above the sheer drop. Click for detail:

By the time we set up camp, the sun decided to come out, and it was everything you might ask for, warm and breezy and quiet and lovely, and with good food too:

Fresh sauteed squash and zucchini with basil and parmesan. On the beach, no less. Again, not a soul in sight. That night the full moon came up, first turning the high rock faces across the river white for an hour before it finally appeared above the cliffs over our heads.

The next morning we took a dip and lounged around in our hammocks before making the short hike up and out to the car.

Once on top, we paused for some photos of where we'd been...

And, of course, of ourselves--

and Kris drove the six hours back to Denver--she had to get back, you know, she had to get up the next morning and drive another three hours to a whitewater rafting trip--and I spent one more night at the park, a stormy night in which a pint of dust blew into my tent, and the next day went hunting for plant fossils with some of the park staff.

We found many things. Here are a couple of the better items I found. A leaf:

Fossil insect. Click for detail.

On the way back, I noticed that something very special was about to happen to my car, and took a picture!

Unfortunately, I was a split second too late. So now I have a picture of my odometer with 111,112 miles on it.

I am getting settled back in Denver now, but there will be more posts to come!

Weekend adventures

2011-08-03T22:07:00.003-04:00

A couple weekends ago, I went to Park City, Utah, to visit a friend from URI who was doing her master's thesis research in the area. There were balloons.
Her field area was quite different from mine. It was about 5,000 feet higher, for one; also a bit cooler.
She was there to study how the rocks making up the mountains had affected the way the glaciers had sculpted out the valleys, when there were glaciers. Here, she and a fellow student use a tool for testing concrete hardness to measure the hardness of the rocks. It had a piston that slammed against the rock.

I wanted to use it to test the hardness of my thighs, after hiking all summer, but they were afraid I was going to break my leg.

I also visited Park City itself, which is an extremely wealthy-looking ski resort town.
I was surrounded by all the things I couldn't get in Vernal, like gourmet food, and in my deprivation and weakness spent a little more than I had intended to.

The following week we found some 200 million year old scorpion tracks, the first we have seen. They look a lot like the scorpion tracks on my (modern-day) track identification card... though they may be difficult to see in the picture, as the light was not very good for photographing them.

Me in the field!
That ichthyosaur I found earlier in the summer... a team doing research in the park who had a permit to collect on BLM returned to it, and found many more bones, dozens of pieces. Here some of them are applying a consolidant to bone fragments that have been excavated, while others search for more bones that have weathered out and rolled down the hill:

Then, this past weekend, a visit from a dear friend!

DP and I had many fine hikes and discovered many interesting things in the wilds of Utah, such as this:
At the last park I worked at, one of the rules for field work was "No matter how far you are from civilization, you will always find some discarded can or bottle." Well, here were dozens of them, in the middle of nowhere. Along with some boot heels. The rule is true, though. If you are ever hiking in the backcountry you can test it for yourself.

A mountain lion print. Somewhat disconcertingly, these prints were only seen on our path during the hike out; they hadn't been there on the hike in. No sight of the lion though.

I will be wrapping up here next week, and I'm not sure I'll have time for another entry then, but there are still many more photos and stories!

Ichnology

2011-07-22T11:43:00.005-04:00

Ichnology, from the root word ichnus, meaning "trace," is the study of trace fossils. Traces are what's left behind by living organisms. They could be burrows, footprints, trails, borings in wood (or rock or shell or bone), an impression left where an animal rested, or even tooth marks. Above, you can see a footprint left by a three-toed creature from the Triassic. In many ways, ichnology is more exciting than regular paleontology, as you are not just looking at the bones of a dead thing, but at where the living animal walked and what it did.
A trackway showing several three-toed prints.

Since it is impossible to know for sure what kind of animal made each ancient trace, we don't speak of Ankylosaurus tracks or shrimp burrows, but instead give each kind of trace its own scientific name and classification; its own ichnotaxon. One variety of burrow is named Ophiomorpha (meaning "snake-shaped"), and it is similar to the burrows made by modern shrimp; one type of track I have seen this summer is called Brachychirotherium ("short-handed beast"), and it may have been made by aetosaurs.

Ichnology is informed by neoichnology, the study of modern traces. If you happen to live near sand or mud, then you are surrounded by traces. Here are some I have seen in the park this summer. You may distinguish the bird, mammal, reptile, and insect traces. Click pictures for detail.
Unlike body fossils, which are best preserved by being buried quickly, tracks seem best preserved if buried slowly. A dinosaur may walk across a damp sandbar in a river; if the sand is fine-grained, or has some mud in it, the tracks may show up nicely. They may dry out a little and start to harden, before the rains come, the river rises and slowly more sand or mud is deposited on top of the tracks. (To learn more about dinosaur tracks, check out this very interesting site.)

It is not always easy to find, or recognize, trace fossils. Often we must look on the underside of ledges, for the "negative" of a footprint, made from the sand that washed into the print after it was made:

And some traces are impossible to see unless you know what you're looking for.
These are Brasilichnium ("trace from Brasil") tracks, made by a mammal-like reptile walking up a dune face. We know they are tracks because of the "push-up," or crescent of sand behind them that modern trackmakers also leave. (Click here to see some better Brasilichnium tracks.)

The Navajo Formation, where I am working, was formed in an erg, or sand sea, one superficially like the modern Sahara. There are not a lot of creatures in the Sahara--at least, not, say, as compared to the Amazon rainforest, or even your backyard. So there are not a lot of traces. Most of what we've found are arthropod burrows. They are distinguished by how they cut across the bedding of the sand in which they're found:

The first two were, perhaps, made by beetle or fly larvae feeding in the sands. The third may have been a spider or scorpion burrow.

Some burrows can be seen right on the top of a bed, and may contain "menisci" made by a creature pushing sand behind it as it tunneled:
And some burrows may be seen in relief as the sand weathers:
But so far, the only tracks I and my partner have found have been the tracks of arthropods (perhaps spiders)--no dinosaurs, no early mammals. They are shown here:

In the second, only the orangish stripe was exposed above the sand, and I saw some dots on it. scraping the sand away revealed a trackway.

So what good is ichnology? Dinosaur or mammal tracks can tell us about stride length, and possibly whether dinosaurs traveled in herds, but probably the most useful aspect of ichnology is the study of invertebrate traces. Since scorpions or shrimp or worms can't travel great distances, we know that they belonged in whatever environment we find their traces in, and thus they allow us to infer a great deal about the environments in which different rocks were deposited. This adds to our knowledge of previous environments and climates on our continents, and also helps the oil industry find oil.

Here, we help a team from the university carry out a slab with traces on it made by a swimming reptile.

Nothing I've found this summer has been at all spectacular, sadly, and the nicest things weren't even in the formation I'm supposed to be working in, but from the Chinle Formation, which was formed in a river system and had a lot more things living in it.
Very small tracks, presumably from an arthropod! That is my compass in the corner.
Very nicely preserved burrows.

Lizard footprints. There are three of them in the picture, though they are a bit difficult to see.

You my readers, who are mostly Connecticut and Denver, have wonderful places to view dinosaur tracks close to home. Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut and Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison are both world-class sites and enjoyable day trips.

Till next time!

A river trip

2011-07-13T22:15:00.006-04:00

I have been back from my river trip for some time, but only now do I have a moment to write about it. On the last entry, I spoke of the desirability of the Yampa trip, the wild untamed river that few get to see, and how it was at a much higher flow than usual due to the heavy snowpack and unusually enthusiastic spring rains.

When we put in at the east end of the park, the Yampa was flowing at 16,000 cubic feet of water per second; its usual flow this time of year is 4,000 cubic feet per second. The river was yellow-brown with all the silt in it and it was impossible to see your hand in it past a depth of a few inches. All of the sand bars usually present in the river were submerged, along with most of the plants on the sandbars, including the ones we were there to look at.

The purpose of the trip was to record the numbers of tamarisk beetles present on the tamarisk in the river corridor. My eastern readers probably won't recognize the name tamarisk, but it's a major invasive species that costs the US massive amounts of money each year. When cattle grazing was introduced to the west, the cattle trampled and destabilized riverbanks, and tamarisk were imported from Eurasia to stabilize the banks. You could say the invasion is a case of the plant doing its job too well; it now forms impenetrable thickets along riverbanks all around the west, replacing the native foliage that animals like to eat or nest in, and preventing anyone recreating in a boat from being able to get to shore (or anyone recreating on land from being able to get to the water). Tamarisk also has very deep roots, and draws up far more water from the ground than it needs for survival. This lowers the water table, causing some streams to disappear completely.

Every time I tell people that the US released beetles from Eurasia to combat the tamarisk, their natural food, someone says, "Oh, I hate when they do that." Because most people have heard of stories in which a species deliberately introduced for some (seemingly) good reason finding new prey, interbreeding with native populations, et cetera, and in general causing some kind of ecological havoc. But the truth is that of all foreign species introduced, the majority don't survive or flourish, and of those that do, only a handful will go on to become problem species. Perhaps one out of ten "exotics" brought to the US will ever spread outside of where they are originally planted, and only one in ten of those will ever become a problem. Considering these odds, and the fact that we lose so much money on tamarisk issues each year, introducing the beetles was simply a better solution than not introducing them. Of course, many studies were performed to determine whether the beetles would like to eat other, native US plants (they would not) before they were released. And now here we are to monitor how they and the tamarisk are doing, several years after being released in the park.

I took this picture while drifting past some teammates who had found tamarisk to sample. The insect net was swept agains the plant and the number of beetles and larvae in it recorded. We tried to do this at least once per mile of river. More on how the beetles are doing later!

Here are our two boats, tied up at a campsite. If you have done whitewater rafting before, you may have ridden in a paddleboat, propelled by six or so paddlers; these are oarboats, propelled by a single oarman, and they are much heavier than paddleboats, housing an internal frame and some metal dryboxes and coolers. Also, during the day, they carry all of our drybags with our gear, and 2-3 people each.

The river goes through canyons. Some pictures:

Camp:

On our second day we went through my first set of rapids, the Tepee rapids, which were lovely. Several things cause rapids; one is a change in gradient, or how steep the river is. The most exhilarating moment on the rapids was when I could see that the boat in front of us was also far below us, as down a hill. (I'm used to water being, well, horizontal.)

We got to do many things besides sampling beetles on the trip, including looking at pictographs. What is the difference between a petroglyph and a pictograph? Petroglyphs are pecked or scrached into the rock, but pictographs are painted. Here, a strange figure and some writing. I assume both of these are modern; the human figure looks nothing like any of the other art of ancient peoples around the area.

Our third morning on the river, it stormed and many waterfalls began spouting off the cliffs far above us. It was fascinating to watch; there would be nothing for a long time, as it rained and rained, and then all of a sudden water would begin pouring off somewhere. The land above the canyon walls, so much bare rock with nowhere for the water to seep in, had gathered the rain up and channeled it into a stream that finally made it to the canyon edge.

Another group's campsite, showing the magnificent canyon wall behind.

More canyon photos.

In the second is the Grand Overhang, beneath which we were subjected to a ritual in which we lay down on the boat and were spun about:

It became stormy again later that day. As the clouds came in I took a picture of our other boat's occupants trying to kiss the Tiger Wall. Kissing the tiger wall was supposed to bring you good luck at Warm Springs, the most dangerous rapid on the river, which we would face later that day.

Shortly after the attempted kiss, it began to look quite stormy, and we pulled the boats together and discussed whether to take lunch on land, sheltered under an overhanging ledge, or on the river. Due to the frightening number of mosquitoes we'd been experiencing on land, we decided to stay on the river, exposed as we were. We tried to eat very quickly but all the same we weren't quite finished when a wind whipped up, upstream of us. We could see it beating the water to a froth. I was confused why it wasn't windy where we were, but then it was, and rain was pelting us. Then hail was pelting us. The hail was the size of peas; then it was the size of macadamia nuts. The water was frothing all around us with the hail falling into it and then the wind got faster, and then faster, until gusts of 50 or 60 miles per hour made the hail feel like rocks on our body, anywhere that wasn't protected by the life jacket.

I had gloves on and I put my hands over my head to stop the feeling of rocks hitting it, but the gloves were no help protecting my tender finger bones and I decided it was better for my skull to bear the impact. It went on for some minutes and I looked back to see our oarman, one of the park botanists, still pulling on the oars, although we weren't moving at all. We could see no more than 20 feet in any direction; the banks were lost in the rain of hail, and all he could do was keep our backs turned to the wind.

After seven, or ten, or fifteen minutes I noticed we were right next to the bank. The hail and the wind were already lessening but we pulled under an overhang and waited until it stopped. Everyone was very cold and bruised. As we waited more streams and waterfalls formed around us, as the waters from above came together and reached the canyon's edge, which was fascinating to watch.

I spent most of the rest of the day very cold. I had full rain gear on and wasn't wet, but still, I had been covered in ice and water and the sun didn't come out for a long time. We reached Warm Springs, the mighty rapid. When we got out to hike down the shore and scout the rapid, I ran in place for 15 minutes to try to bring feeling back into my hands and feet.

The rapid here was created when the canyon wall collapsed in a massive landslide in the 60s (on a day just like this, no doubt, when mighty storms saturated the ground with water). Our guides had been thinking about the rapid all day and our trip was planned so that we would go through it with plenty of time remaining until nightfall, in case anything went wrong.

Warm Springs rapid is dangerous because it has several "holes" that will flip a boat quickly. A hole is formed where water pours over the top of a submerged object and, below it, swirls to flow back upstream toward the object. Sometimes they quite literally look like holes also; the water at the bottom may be five feet or more below the water surging before and after it. The steep slide into a hole may capsize a boat, or the confused currents may do so; in some holes a person, overboard, may become trapped under the water and drown.

It took only a few moments to get through Warm Springs and we were wet but umharmed. It was almost nothing. But the only reason it had seemed almost nothing was that our oarmen had been both skilled and lucky at steering the boat through the rapids without getting pulled into any of the holes.

We pulled into camp about 3 PM and almost immediately afterward, the sun "set" behind the high canyon wall. Not much chance to warm up!

I wandered over to the camp next to ours that night and spent some time talking with the private rafting party there. Many of them had been rafting for 30 years and said they had never seen a storm as bad as the one we'd just been through. They also sang me happy birthday (my birthday was the next day); it is an oddly touching thing to be sung to by 15 strangers.

The next day we had some real sun. Here is Mitten Park Fault (as seen in a previous blog entry), this time from the water.

Me in my odd outfit of swim shirt, gloves to prevent sunburt hands, and rain pantaloons. After sitting all the first day in water I decided I didn't want to endure any more wet butt. It was odd being on the river... I am so used to the ocean. Every time I got splashed I was dismayed, thinking I would be wet forever. But no, of course the sun would dry me... I wasn't going to be covered with salt for the rest of the day, which attracts moisture right out of the air and keeps you continually damp and sticky.

There are many interesting things to see on the river. An inscription of a fur trader from the 1830s!

Here is the contact between two formations. The darker, blockier one, on the bottom, was on the edge of the sea and was eroded into sea stacks, or pinnacles at the shoreline. Then sea level dropped and sand blew in and surrounded the sea stack here, and became the lighter formation above it.

Another sea stack inundated by sand.

On our last evening in the canyon we hiked to a funny waterfall that one of our guides called "butt dam falls." See the video:

Me:

And some nearby pictographs:

Finally, a view back down toward the river:

All of my wilderness trips have previously been varieties of backpacking, and I am used to being able to carry and use only certain things. But on a river trip, with those big oarboats, we carried quite a lot of gear. Here is our kitchen, with table, stove, compost bucket, handwashing station, and more:

We washed our hands and dishes in river water with bleach added, but brought many gallons of potable water for drinking and cooking with. The coolers allowed us to bring meat to cook. We even had a toilet that we had to use for solid waste, because with thousands of people enjoying the river corridor every year, people would soon run out of places to dig latrines.

That afternoon as I stood on the riverbank, the party I had met on the previous night drifted by on their own boats, in ones and twos, each of them yelling out happy birthday when they saw me. And that night I went to visit another group, a commercial trip, who also sang to me. This was very nice.

On our last day we sampled yet more tamarisk... the beetles are fine. They have plenty of tamarisk to eat. They will never rid the land of tamarisk, only weaken it (although we did see at least one tree that seemed to have been killed by the beetles). Many populations had moved on from where they were first released. The high water of this year had also killed many tamarisk, with drowning or battering with driftwood and such.

As we neared the canyon exit (and the boat ramp) I was allowed to "ride the bull," or sit on the front of the raft gripping where the ropes attached. I went over several sections of whitewater this way. Here is a picture of my teammate doing the same, on flat water:

I also got to practice rowing. The oars are ridiculously heavy and I don't know how our guides managed to row all that way. (Thankfully, the river was flowing so fast they didn't really have to row the whole way, just steer us.)

I enjoyed the trip very much but was happy to be back on land at the end. I did not really like being wet so much. However, I would recommend a river trip to anyone.

Grabbing the porcupine

2011-06-25T17:57:00.006-04:00

Every town has its own character. For this reason, I like to talk a little bit about the places I've visited or stayed (or stayed near). Each little town is like a person, with its own quirks, history, and look. Vernal, UT would be a very bland, noisy person, whose main distinguishing characteristic was that he was obsessed with dinosaurs.

In some cases the dinosaurs are anatomically correct museum representations, but mainly they seem to exist for the purposes of advertising the hotel swimming pool, or the possibility of Eggs any style, Bacon, Cinnamon Rolls and much more.

Vernal is noisy because the main street in town is a four-lane highway down which trucks continually rumble. The town is not particularly pedestrian friendly nor charming in any way, but there are three bookstores within a couple blocks of each other downtown, which is more than I have known many... possibly any... other small towns to have, and which hopefully speaks well of the populace.

The angel Moroni, who tops Mormon churches and temples. I have heard that the Uinta Basin, in which Vernal rests, is especially insular; that Mormons traveling from elsewhere, used to receiving a warm welcome in whatever LDS church they find themselves, will be met by stares upon entering a church in the basin. But I haven't experienced anything like unfriendliness myself. Everyone in town has been very nice to me, and for some reason everyone apologizes compulsively and repeatedly whenever they or their shopping cart could be construed as being the slightest bit in your way in the grocery store.

A business near the grocery store. I don't know why you would give a dog cats too... possibly in the interests of choice... but the fellow on the sign looks satisfied.

This van advertises that you can get all of your "I love drilling" materials here.

This is the only gas station I have ever seen with "tacos" in the name.

Finally, Zions Bank, perhaps the most interesting thing about Vernal. Back in 1916, the clever builders of this bank found that it would cost less to mail every brick from Salt Lake City to Vernal than to ship it conventionally--so that's what they did. Each of the 250,000 pounds of brick were mailed via USPS to Vernal, at seven cents a pound, after which the USPS wisely decided to change its policies.

While out hiking the next day, I found these:

They are ichthyosaur vertebrae. Ichthyosaurs were giant marine reptiles that looked a lot like angry dolphins. Since these bones were found on BLM land, I documented the location and we later called the local BLM geologist to see what he wanted to do about them. No answer yet!

A few pictures from around the park:

The last picture is swirly because it was taken through the heat of a campfire, to which I was invited by some random campers who were next to where I was reading in my hammock. They offered me beer and elk steak fajitas, but I was perversely looking forward to the spam and baked beans that I had at home and declined the latter.

An amusing set of instructions for a new hard drive in the office. Please click and read the first four instructions. My favorite is buried in #18, a commandment absolutely Biblical in its sweep and tone: "And the apparatus shall not be exposed to dripping or splashing, and that no objects filled with liquids, such as vases, shall be placed upon the apparatus."

Part of our job here has been to perform an inventory in the park's collections of specimens. The National Park Service's method of ensuring the integrity of its collections is to generate a random list of specimens for each park each year, and two (2) pairs of eyes must then verify that each of the specimens remains in the collection and undamaged. Equipped with a printout, my field partner and I began opening drawers. Some of what we found:

Each of those is a tooth, glued to a pin that is stuck into the cork of a tiny vial.

Actual size.

The park has all kinds of things in its collection. I opened this drawer to find two unknown rodents that were stretched in such funny positions, so endearingly loaf-of-bread-like, that I was compelled to immediately pick up the nearer and take a closer look at it. After a moment I realized that my fingertips hurt badly. I had just picked up a baby porcupine. The tiny barbs in its hairs were on the verge of puncturing my skin in about a hundred places, but I managed to put it back delicately without experiencing any damage.

Last weekend I didn't put up a blog entry because I was back in Denver visiting friends. I had a wonderful time. The first wonderful thing was this bit of graffiti, on the way:

Jesus is comming.

I was in town for Pride, which is a weekend filled with extravagant outfits and episodes of public drunkenness that are alternately amusing and disturbing.

I most enjoyed dancing in the open-air country tent. Here I have a clip of the dancers, which does not include myself, but does include a very dashing DP (in cap and capris).

This coming Tuesday I am headed off on a great adventure, my first river rafting trip. We are going down the Yampa River to monitor the beetles that have been introduced to combat invasive tamarisk trees. It will be a five-day trip down what is one of the most desirable rivers for rafting in the country. The Yampa is the only major tributary of the Colorado River that remains wild and undammed. Relatively few permits are granted, with only 5% of applicants accepted. It flows through gorgeous thousand-foot canyons. Because there is no dam to control flows, the river is, well, out-of-control right now, with near-record discharge levels. This is a ride that many rafting afficionados would pay a great deal to take. I do not know anything about rafting and would be happy just drifting down some lazy creek on a pool toy, but it seems instead that I am actually being paid to go on a once-on-a-lifetime excursion. For my birthday, no less.

For some images of the Yampa River, its canyons and rapids, simply check out these results from Google.

I don't know when I will next be able to do a blog entry, but I hope to have good stories and pictures!

Fat cacti

2011-06-10T16:17:00.010-04:00

This is one of the birds that likes to sit and sing to itself in my side view mirrors. These birds--I think they are western kingbirds--also like to poop down the driver and passenger doors. Here, one, looking a bit smug, takes a break to perch on top of the mirror.

A picture of the housing area, where I share a two-bedroom apartment with one of my paleo teammates:
I came across this on one of my bike rides through the park...
The Green River appears to have reached such a high stage that it has flooded the campfire circle at which rangers give evening programs.

Last weekend I climbed Split Mountain, the prominent feature on the west end of the park where I am staying. This is a truly remarkable feature that must be seen in person, but it is approximately what it sounds like. The mountain has been cut down the center by a tremendous river gorge. Here is a satellite image from Google maps:

There are no trails up Split Mountain, but I chose to take a day to climb up the north side, 2000 steep feet to the summit. My hike was approximately three hours of agony followed by two hours of blissfully enjoying the amazing views and meadows of wildflowers at the top, followed by three hours of agony. (If you've never spent several hours hiking down a slope so steep it looks like the ground is simply dropping away beneath your feet, well, it's almost as difficult as spending several hours hiking up a slope that looks like it forms a vertical wall above you.)

Here is a view to the northwest from 1/3 the way up, the Uinta mountains in the far distance:
And a view into the Green River gorge from the summit:
A view to the south, where the river makes a bend before exiting the mountan/canyon:
And a lone rounded rock on a mountain of jagged rocks.
This cobble is probably a remnant of the sediment that allowed the mountain to be split in the first place. Split Mountain formed, intact, long ago and was buried beneath sediment shed by nearby mountains. Rivers crossed this sediment, one of them flowing over the buried mountain. As the river eroded the sediment away, it eventually ate down to the level of the mountain--but now it was trapped in its own ravine and had no choice but to keep course, beginning to cut through the much harder rock beneath it. Thus we end up with a river that cut through a mountain, when it looks much more efficient for the river to have simply flowed around it.

Wildflowers on Split Mountain:
A live hawk!
This is my hunting picture. I'm holding an elk antler, which was surprisingly heavy. These, like any other artifact or piece of nature, cannot be removed from the park--however, I have heard that people will enter national parks and poach antlers, which are sold to the aphrodisiac trade in the east.
More hiking around the park, this time as part of my job, revealed evidence of the very wet spring we're having:
The Green River has flooded its nearby fields. In the post office this morning two women were talking about how one wouldn't be going on vacation if the water keeps rising--her house is in danger.

Fat cacti!
Yesterday one of my teammates and I had our first day alone out in the field, ten hours of searching for trace fossils in sandstone. We didn't find anything we could confirm as a fossil. We did find traces of humans, like flakes of chert and petrified wood shaped by prehistoric tool makers...

And, up in a difficult-to-access area, a slot in the rock that had initials carved into it.
To finish, I have some pictures I took yesterday that are representative of how pretty the park is, such as the deep box canyons in the distance of this picture--dead ends that an early settler once used to store livestock in, simply erecting a fence across the entrance.
See you next week!

Get the tongs

2011-06-04T13:30:00.004-04:00

Last weekend I traveled to Glenwood Springs, midway between here and Denver, to go camping with DP. While there I forced her to cut my hair. We took "before" and "after" photos. Here I am, unhappy, with my mop of hair (which actually doesn't look that bad in this picture, but the problem was that it only looked good about 10% of the time, and when it chose to look good was totally random and I could not figure out how to deliberately get it into that state).
I gave various instructions to DP regarding my hair, the only ironclad injunction being "Don't make me look like Vanilla Ice," but in the end the haircut was her own creation and she did astoundingly well for having no idea how to cut someone's hair, and basically being forced into doing so at scissorpoint.
We then hiked to Hanging Lake, one of the most popular trails in Colorado. It was definitely more entertaining than usual this weekend as there has been so much rain, and there is so much snowpack to be melted this spring, that the stream beside the trail was overflowing and for half of the hike it had taken over the trail itself, requiring creative scrambling on rocks. Here, DP examines the trail (to her left) down which water is shooting... note the water breaking high against the tree on right:
Hanging Lake. We were innocently eating lunch here when a wind whipped up and blew our paper grocery bag out onto the lake, where it could not be retrieved. The 20 tourists who had just arrived had to wait for it to drift away before they could get a bag-free picture of the falls. Whoops.
Back in Utah, the rain has brought out an unusual profusion of mosquitoes, and also wildflowers.
The cacti have absorbed so much water that their pads look like footballs, ready to pop. We will come upon one when hiking and burst into laughter spontaneously because they look so funny, like a small child that has decided to hold its breath. I should get a picture to show you all. I would also like to get a picture of the bird that keeps singing to its reflection in my car's side-view mirror, but it's so hard to get pictures of birds when they're moving.

We are working in the Navajo Formation. I have talked about formations before in this blog, but I don't expect anyone who's not a geology student to remember these things. Though normal people use the words "rock formation" to describe any interesting rock feature ("Look at the rock formations in that cave!"), geologically speaking, the word "formation" has a very specific definition. It is a distinct unit of rock that is mappable over large distances. Here is a picture of three formations in the park, which were originally deposited horizontally but which have been tilted by tectonic activity:
The cliffs on the left are the Entrada Formation (sandstone; this formation forms the arches at Arches NP). The red rock in the center is the Carmel Formation (mostly mudstone) and the light slope on the right is the Navajo Formation (sandstone). They are distinct (you can tell them apart from each other) and mappable over large areas, cropping out in many places over Utah and Arizona.

Generally, the rocks in a formation were deposited in the same environment, but not necessarily at the same time. All of the Navajo was deposited in an erg, or sand sea (like today's Sahara). But this erg may have grown, shrunk, or migrated over time, so that--for instance--the Navajo in northeast Utah may not be from the same time at all as the Navajo in Zion National Park, and they might have different fossils. So formations are "time-transgressive." They also vary in thickness; the Navajo might reach to 200 feet here, but forms cliffs 1,000 feet high in Zion.

There aren't many fossils in the Navajo. Many things must happen for a bone to be found as a fossil; it must escape decay or being eaten or trampled to bits by other creatures, must escape being eroded away by tumbling in a stream; it must be impregnated by minerals dissolved in the groundwater. Eventually the earth's surface must be eroded again so that the fossil is brought near the surface, but not left out too long before being found, or it will be weathered away and lost. Only a handful of fossil sites have ever been found in the Navajo (as opposed to, say, thousands in the Morrison Formation, one of the most famous fossil-producing formations). Not many things live in a sand sea to begin with, and those that do may not have their bones locked away from scavenging and decay upon death, as a creature who sank to the bottom of a lake or swamp might. But there are still tracks and traces. Yesterday we looked at some dinosaur footprints.

Here we are looking at a section of the Navajo that was not built into dunes, but was flat-lying, and where the sand built up in layers containing different amounts of iron-bearing minerals. The layers with more iron "rusted" to a red color. A dinosaur stepped here, pushing down several layers at once, but they have since eroded flat. You can faintly see the red layer, in the shape of a three-toed footprint, peeking out between layers of pale sand. (The toes point downwards.)
Here is another print made in the same fashion, also with toes pointing downwards. It is from a smaller creature and is imperfect, with part of the heel obscured. You can also see some toe- and claw-marks from another print that was closer to my hand.
The study of fossil traces is called ichnology, and I will talk more about it in the future, including what it can be used for (other than filling up blog space).

Last night we played frisbee and one of us got the frisbee on the roof. After a couple other plans for retrieving it failed, I constructed this grappling hook made of two sets of tongs and eventually managed to snag the frisbee with it. That was the most excitement we had all week.

Tracks

2011-05-28T12:19:00.016-04:00

Well, many things have happened since my last blog entry. I have simply been too busy to write anything about them. I traveled out-of-state on three consecutive four-day weekends, using the remainder of each shortened week to work extra hours, buy and sell a car, and pack up and move to Utah to begin my new job.

My first trip was to Canyonlands National Park, with Jess. On the way there, we stopped and looked at some dinosaur tracks; the three dark spots in the pic below are the indentations made by the dinosaur's three toes.

Me at the trailhead. We intend to hike to the Colorado River, 10.8 miles away and 2000 feet down.

Some lovely patterns in the Navajo Formation on our trail. The Navajo is the formation I will be studying this summer, many miles to the north of Canyonlands.

Jess and I were backpacking down off the Island in the Sky toward the Colorado River, which you can see at one point in the distance in the upper-right quadrant of the picture. We had to climb down more than a thousand feet to get into the canyon you can see in the middle of the picture.

The view up towards where we came from, from our campsite that night. We only got about 7 miles before it got dark, still several miles shy of the river. It was perfectly quiet and very peaceful there, until a strong wind whipped up in the night that lasted most of the rest of the weekend, turning the 70-80 degrees forecast when I was planning the trip into more like 40-50 degrees, which we weren't really dressed for.

I make a pizza dinner. This picture nicely shows the appaling state of my hair, which is probably more of a mop right now than it's ever been in my life.

Me eating, and on the hike back out.

Two different sizes of ripples preserved in two pieces of sandstone along the trail.Jess hiking out. Climbing the more than 1000 feet needed to get out actually proved to be less stressful to our bodies than the unrelenting downhill hike in, but the damage was done. Jess's thighs were so ruined by the backpack that the rest of the weekend she was able only to totter about, holding on to me if we had to descend stairs. (She did manage one handicapped-accessible trail in Arches on her own.)

The next morning we drove into Arches National Park and cooked breakfast, with a view of Balanced Rock...

...and the Fiery Furnace...

in the distance. The Fiery Furnace is a labyrinth of sandstone fins through which you are allowed to wander if you purchase a permit at the park visitor center. It is very nice, quiet and pretty, with no marked trails.

I took this picture of a beetle at the end of a set of beetle tracks because I am always delighted to find the maker of tracks. Looking for tracks is part of what I will be doing this summer.

More shots from Arches, with the La Sal Mountains in the background.

On the way back home, Jess and I stopped at the Thompson Springs petroglyph site, at which can be found many petroglyphs and pictograms from many different periods, starting many thousands of years ago.

Then we came home. I bought the car on the left to replace the car on the right. They both happen to be Mazda Proteges. I wasn't looking for another Protege, but the nicest-looking car I found happened to be one.

The weekend after that, I went to Houston to visit Jordan, my friend from field camp. Remember Jordan? Jordan's boyfriend had paid for a friend to come visit her, and she chose me, so I must say thank you Niall (and Jordan!) for allowing my visit.

Jordan's car's tire exploded as she was driving me home from the airport. We sat on the side of the highway for an hour, cars passing other cars on the right and whizzing past us at 75 mph, as AAA struggled to figure out where we were.

Houston has a small and extremely unexciting downtown compared to Denver. But that's all I know about it as mostly I hung out by the pool and played with Jordan's cat, Mr. Peppernut. Jordan and I:

Also, we went to a Thai restaurant that had some very strangely named dishes. Below, find: "Broccoli is a Push not Bush" and "Paeneng is Curry so Hurry," among other gems. Click for detail.

Then. The next weekend, I went with DP to NM. We stopped first in Taos, where visited the Rio Grande gorge and bridge...
...and stayed at a hostel called the Abominable Snowmansion. We got a private room, the bed of which happened to have a memory foam topped mattress, which I thought was a very fine deal.

We also went to Santa Fe, which I have no pictures of... everybody knows what Santa Fe looks like, right? ...but I do have this video of a male pigeon trying to get noticed by a female:

And we did some fossil hunting outside of Santa Fe, where DP gets her first practice using a rock hammer, trying to break an ancient brachiopod out of some limestone.

Mostly in New Mexico we ate good food and slept.

On the way back we stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park, where DP took these excellent pictures of me:

...and then we came home, and I had a few days to prepare to leave for the summer. In the meantime I was working (manning a booth doing science demonstrations) at Elitch Gardens, which is a large amusement park right next to downtown Denver. I took this shot from the ferris wheel. (I had to text my boss to say I would be a few minutes late that day as I was stuck on a ferris wheel.)

On my drive to Utah I noticed that there was still a great deal of snow in the Rockies. This shot was taken from the interior of a rest stop.

It has been very cloudy and rainy here, and cold, though the sun peeked out briefly a couple nights ago to allow this shot of the swollen Green River, Blue Mountain and a farm which are all across from the housing area where I am staying.
Right now I and my fellow interns are in a house--which has delightful things like NPS signs in the garage--

but will be moving into smaller apartments once they are ready for us. Which is too bad, because from the current house I can watch a colony of prairie dogs that begins 20 feet from the windows. As I write this in the growing dusk of Friday night, one is picking up pieces of grass in its little paws and putting them in its little mouth.

There are also a lot of birds here...

...perhaps Abby can tell me what these are. I tried to catch them in nice, still poses.

We have been out in the field a couple times. Here, my supervisor, the park paleontologist, points out one of things we are looking for, which are traces of burrows in the Jurassic sandstone.

Also, see if you can see the tracks made by a large scorpion on this slab. The scorpion put down its feet close together as it walked, leaving sets of three dots on either side of its body.

One day we also went to look at the dinosaur quarry, for which the park was created, but which has been closed for several years as the building housing it was condemned. I will be telling more about that in a future post, but if you would like more information right now, check out this blog.

The quarry face is enclosed in a plywood sarcophagus to keep it from harm as a new building is being constructed around it. We went inside the sarcophagus to see the stunning number of dinosaur bones preserved in the rock. I have seen photos of the quarry from when it was open and they simply didn't convey to me the sheer size of the face and number of bones. This picture, taken in the dim light available, only hints at the full picture in the gleam of a few bone surfaces, from a partial spine and a limb bone, both on the right side of the frame.

We received the very exciting news that later on in the summer, once the building is up and the sarcophagus is down, we will be assigned the task of vacuuming the construction dust off the bones to prepare them for display once more. It is a huge surface to cover and should take most of a week. (The new building will reopen to the public in October.)

Today we drove up one of the scenic drives in the park, taking in views of the Yampa River,

Green River,

and Mitten Park Fault.

This is a truly beautiful park that is mostly wilderness and I encourage all my willing friends to make the drive out to experience it.

Finally, I leave you with a final piece of arcana, which you must click on and read for yourself:

Western triptych

2011-04-05T23:19:00.006-04:00

I am going to talk about three things today. The first is very brief. Some of you may remember that in my last post, I spoke of waiting an hour at the DMV to find out that they wouldn't accept my CT birth certificate and told me to order a new one. My mother graciously got me one from the town I was born in and sent it out to me. Today, I waited at the DMV for four and a half hours and then, finally, shuffled up to the counter where I proudly presented all of my proper documentation.

I was told they couldn't accept my birth certificate because it was from the town. They needed one from the state.

My first thought was, no lie: "I am so glad I write a blog." Because writing a blog means there's a silver lining to every awful situation. Everything terrible that happens is fodder for a story. My sorrow is your entertainment. Hurrah, Colorado DMV, for bringing color to the lives of blog readers everywhere.

The second thing to talk about is the dance competition. Despite the fact that we had practiced constantly and improved a lot since the last competition, I and my dance partner (whom I'll call DP, which amuses me because it bears absolutely no resemblance to her actual name or her personality) were nervous. We had been watching one of the couples we would be competing against, and they looked very good. I had actually taken to referring to the lead as Darth Vader, because any great, evil figure always calls to mind the Star Wars nemesis for me.

I nearly keeled over when our Darth Vader showed up at the competition dressed in black with a giant black hat. It seemed to be an omen.

Here, DP pins on my number. I am wearing my new brown hat. If the bad guys wear black hats and the good guys wear white, what does brown signify? Morally ambiguous?

In this picture, I am exactly as tired as I look.

It was the organizers' second time running a competition and everything was tighter and more official. The contestants stood in the dimly lit basement, where you could hear a pin drop but for the committee head reciting the rules. We drew letters out of a hat to determine the order we'd dance our freestyle dance in. In the last competition, only the advanced couples were invited to perform a freestyle (any type of dance to any piece of their choice, as long as it had a country theme); this time, everyone was invited to. I had gone to bed the night before ready to improvise to our chosen song come game day, but the day of the competition, DP convinced me to come over and choreograph and actual routine to it, which we worked on for two and a half hours.

Above, our bar; below, close-up of the mirrored boots.

At six o'clock, the competition began, with an "open dance" in which everyone watching could participate and the contestants could warm up. Unfortunately, it was a line dance, and one I didn't know. I'm sure everyone knows what line dancing looks like, but in case anyone doesn't:

When the couples portion of the competition commenced, we danced the two-step and the waltz, sharing the floor with our nemeses, who were the only other couple signed up in our division. (At least we were guaranteed a ribbon again.)

Then we waited while Darth and partner performed their freestyle. They not only had it choreographed, they'd made a show of it, complete with rudimentary storyline, acted out with gestures and expressions. We hadn't done that! The crowd was going crazy for their act; the hooting and clapping was earsplitting and nearly constant. Oh dear.

When it was our turn, we stood in our pre-planned location on the dance floor and waited. And waited. And then the organizer came up to us and told us something was wrong with the .mp3 file we'd handed them earlier in the evening; only 45 seconds of the song were present. Thankfully, the DJ had it (of course he did; they play it all the time); it was KT Tunstall's Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.

We tripped all over each other for the first 30 seconds. Whether we were shaken up from our technical difficulties or whether we'd have had nerves anyway, we once again danced a lot worse than we'd been doing in practice. The latter part of the dance went smoothly, and we enjoyed watching the higher-level couples perform... but toward the end of the night, when the judges were asked to choose a couple they'd enjoy seeing again, and they chose our competitors, I was sure we'd gotten second. Until I saw their encore. I might have watched it more carefully this second time--what I saw was that while they danced with more charisma than we did, I think (indeed, with more than most of the intermediate couples), they just didn't have as many moves as DP and I.

And so we won.

You will notice in this picture that the sole of my boot has pulled away from the upper. After the competition was over, I stayed and danced for another couple of hours, until I noticed my foot felt funny. I looked down and saw my boot coming apart. (In fact, both of them were broken, though I didn't notice till the next day.) Remember, I got these vinyl-and-plastic boots for $8 at a thrift store. They were glued and not stitched. I am shortly going to toss them in the dumpster; I don't see any point in repairing them. They will be casualties of battle.

I had tremendous fun at this competition. The audience was really into it, it was tightly run without much standing around or confusion (beside our own technical issue, really) and I feel we worked really hard and were rewarded for it. I don't know when I'll next be able to compete, but I'd like to move up to a higher division. As for the question posed in my last competition-related entry--can I enter a competition and dance just for fun?--the answer turns out to be that if I relax at least a little, the question itself becomes unimportant. I certainly cared about winning, but I cared more that we'd put together a great routine and danced very well in practice, whether or not we did in competition. We knew what we were capable of.

The third thing to talk about is this summer. I've accepted a summer position in one of the parks I passed through last fall, about which I wrote: "...the whole place is like a giant, beautiful puzzle in rainbow colors... I am quite sincere in my wish to work there and if that happens you will have a whole summer of posts and pictures of the place."

This is Dinosaur National Monument, whose beauty and complexity stunned me last September and where I became determined to get a job this summer. I have. I'll be doing geology and paleontology in settings like those below:

To see more, revisit my previous post on Dinosaur. Those of you who like to travel, take note: Dinosaur is about 6 hours from Denver, has a lovely campground just down the road from the housing I'll be staying in, and is, well, gorgeous. The nearby Uinta mountains offer even more hiking and sightseeing opportunities. I will be there May 23 through August 12 or so. Come out and I may even take you fossil hunting. Start making plans now!

Dance and disease are the same

2011-03-17T21:29:00.015-04:00

I haven't made a blog post in a long time, so I want to make a blog post. But I haven't had any adventures. Except this: the worst week I have had in forever.

We will start with the pneumonia, my second bout in as many winters. I've been told that people with lupus are especially at risk for pneumonia, but I wouldn't know if it's really the lupus that's the problem. Nobody I know has had very good luck with germs this year.

What do you get when you kiss a guy?
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia
After you do, he'll never phone ya
I'll never fall in love again

...pneumonia in popular culture, courtesy of Dionne Warwick.

The thing is that I have no insurance, and also nothing like a sick day policy at my little part-time job. Illness costs. After sitting for several hours at a clinic I got the antibiotics prescription and I got a prescription for cough syrup with codeine, which was welcome as I'd slept 10 hours total in the previous 3 nights, but in her effort to find something affordable for me the doctor managed to write an Rx for a drug that is no longer available for purchase. So, no codeine. Meanwhile the antibiotics, while affordable, typically cause, er, particular changes in my body that require other medications to take care of, which is another expenditure... all in all, even without the cough syrup, things added up.

The next day I got my first parking ticket in Denver. I just didn't see the sign saying 1 hour parking only. But, hey, I was already having a profligate week... why the hell not?

The next day, the researchers canceled on me. Craigslist is a wonderful repository of opportunities to make money, which includes job postings but also includes postings for research studies that you may or may not qualify for, that may or may not compensate you for your time. I had applied to a number of these and had finally qualified for one, and they were going to pay me $175 for my time. Until their preliminary research led them toward a different demographic and I was told I was no longer needed.

Then a couple of the odd jobs I'd lined up fell through.

Friday... well, I've been trying to get on unemployment for a long time now. This has been hampered by the fact that I worked for the federal government, from which I needed documentation of my wages to show to the state before I could qualify. For some reason, the federal government has been averse to sending me a W-2, perhaps in a noble attempt to save three cents. But my third request was a charm, and it finally arrived. I plunged forward with my unemployment application to find that I also needed a Colorado driver's license to qualify.

I waited for an hour at the DMV before being told that I couldn't get one, because my CT birth certificate didn't meet their specifications. I would need to order another one from CT. Okay.

Research revealed that Connecticut takes six weeks to process birth certificate requests, and I couldn't afford the fee for an expedited request.

Hm.

Also, I got another parking ticket on Saturday. I was three minutes too late coming back to my meter. I have no problem with the parking regulations here in Denver--honestly, how hard is it to plan to get back to your car in 1 hour or 2 hours?--but I have been in a pneumonia-induced haze the past week and have simply not been lucky. Or perhaps the universe in its infinite wisdom has decided that with far more money leaving my bank account than is coming in each month, and an evil bacterium general building an army in my lungs, the thing I needed most was not a job interview or even a nice cup of tea but two parking tickets. Because the universe is mysterious.

Also, I just got a medical bill for stuff that happened over a year ago in Rhode Island. My response to this is not important but it contained lots of exclamation points.

I was almost glad I got the second parking ticket, though, because it pushed last week from the realm of the tragic into the realm of the absurd. I'm going to blame last week on the moon. THE SUPERMOON. I have been told I'm supposed to be especially susceptible to the effects of the moon because I'm a cancer. I happen to think astrology is total horse hockey, but I'll suspend my derision for a moment if it allows me to make some kind of coherent story about the last 8 days of my life.

For the record, I am about as sensitive as a rhinoceros in a kevlar burka. I won't talk about nice. Someone at the hospital must have confused my birthdate with that of... I don't know, the door mat. I'm going to invent my own astrology sign. It could be called "the squiggly thing" and people (such as myself) under this sign would have the following traits:

Unlucky
Cranky
Brilliant
Tall
Prone to pneumonia
Middling fashion sense
Good at Bananagrams
Obnoxious

This would be our symbol:

People ask me if I like Denver and I say that I like it very much, but I don't know anything about it. All I know is that I like the people I've met. It's been a rough winter. Also, I can't find my three-legged pig necklace, which is supposed to be good luck in Chile. The only thing that has kept me sane are my friends, who are extraordinarily kind and generous and interesting people.

They offered me space in their homes when I was homeless, car rides when I was carless, jobs when I was jobless (it's not their fault I don't know CAD), Starbucks gift cards when I was internetless, as well as separate offers from a onetime nurse and almost-doctor to come listen to my chest with a stethoscope. My friends have covered countless lunches and brunches and dinners out, lunches and brunches and dinners in, drinks at the bar, herbal tea and vitamins and cold medicine, show tickets, parking fees, and gas to make it to the snowshoeing trail. They made sure I had somewhere to eat for Thanksgiving (gluten-free stuffing and Arabian coffee) and St. Patrick's (corned beef and cabbage, natch). They have passed my resume on to their boss and taken my list of requirements for a mate and they keep their eyes open. Mostly they keep me company and distract me from my problems.

I would like to honor all this somehow, but I won't list names for fear of leaving anyone out. I am enamored of those of you I met last summer and those of you I met last weekend.

I have been thinking about poetry lately and I shall share some here, partly as a gift, but mostly because people who have been sick for four weeks straight ought to be allowed to inflict poetry on others, quality be damned.

First, a note: I have not missed a night of dancing. There were a couple nights I only danced to a few songs and then went home, because pneumonia is a terrible thing. But pneumonia is a terrible thing. I was so demoralized by the end of each week that I could not manage to wish for anything other than the comfort of my friends (who were at the bar) and the rehabilitation of losing myself for a few moments in a beloved pastime. I tried to capture this in a weird conversation I had a couple weeks ago... weird partly, but not wholly, because the conversation was composed of limericks... and I adapt that effort for you here:

You say managing germs is the game,
But I've got this fever to tame--
And the follows I know
Who now share my cold show
Us that dance and disease are the same.

And lastly I leave you in the company of A.E. Housman, who is my favorite poet, because the ardent melancholy of his works approaches beauty in its totality... much in the way that, say, the movie Open Water warmed my heart with its keen commitment to being totally and incredibly depressing.

Are these things cathartic, or are they simply lovely for not trying to be anything other than what they are? (Some of you who have seen Open Water might argue that it is not, in fact, lovely at all, but whatever! It's my blog post.) In either case, Housman's Terence, this is stupid stuff ends with the tale of the king who deliberately built a tolerance to poison by taking it in small doses, and:

They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

I don't mean to suggest that the tribulations of my week were all to the good, as they will inure me to future trials; I think in the end they just sucked. I also don't mean to say that this rather depressing blog post was somehow good, in that it will shore you up to face the harsh reality of the world. Just poetry, man. Poetry's great.

Zen in the art of two-step

2011-01-31T22:31:00.007-05:00

So, I participated in the first dance competition of my life on Saturday. It was Country/Western two-step and waltz, which strikes me as strange even as I type it. I always wanted to learn to dance, but I had it in my head that I would learn swing, someday, and that I and a willing boyfriend would make a dashing and skillful couple who would turn the heads of everyone else on the floor.

That wasn't what happened.

What happened was that I moved to Denver and then I got involved in the gay community, and then a date took me to a dance lesson at the local gay country bar. And then after a couple weeks I was no longer seeing the woman but I was still going to the dance lessons, which happened not only to be free but to offer a free drink to attendees, so really, it made more sense to go than not to go.

And then I was completing a writing exercise in which the idea was to write out all my goals as fast as possible, without stopping to think too much about them, and I saw "To be very good at two-step" coming out of my pen. Seriously?

And then I heard about the competition. This would be the first ever organized by the Colorado Gay Rodeo Association. It would have a division for first-time dancers. I desperately wanted to do this. It sounded like tremendous fun.

It did not sound like tremendous fun to everyone, which was unfortunate because I needed a partner. Somebody with some skill, and with a lot of commitment, because this was important to me. I fished around, bringing up the competition to anyone I knew was a reasonably good dancer, but everyone was either uninterested, too busy, too chicken, or already had a partner. After a few weeks, I finally got a bite. More than a bite, when a woman I knew was good (I'd previously done a lesson with her) was going on about what a great idea the competition was, and how awesome it would be to do it, if only she could find a partner as committed as she.

That was how I ended up staying out till 2 in the morning on a Wednesday night, practicing to "just one more song" until my throat was raw with the oncoming cold that would wipe me out on my visit to D.C. While I was away I researched two-step patterns on the internet; she danced solo to the radio. When I returned to Denver, practice became mandatory. We went out too often and stayed out too late and, at the end, moved all the furniture in her dining and living room in order to practice on the hardwood floors, ducking beneath the chandeliers whose heavy metal tips hung menacingly at forehead-level.

In the end it wasn't the dance but the rules of dress that proved hardest for me (as excerpted in my previous post):

Country/Western Dress Style.

1. Contestants will compete in western style fashions.

2. Footwear will be western style boots.

3. A western–style hat is required to be worn by at least one (1) partner of each couple in the two–step and waltz.

4. Loss of hat during competition shall result in no scoring until the hat is retrieved.

I had no boots and no hat. And no job. The impracticality of spending my savings on boots and a hat (which can start at $50 each, new) needled me a little, but that was nothing compared to the indignation I felt at being required to dress this way in the first place. I have no fondness for country & western culture, but that wasn't really the issue... it was that C&W culture is, well, very hetero, it encompasses a lot of very strict ideas about the roles of men and women, and, let's face it, a certain amount of misogyny and homophobia. Why should we be so keen on imitating that? It struck me as slightly perverse.

However, it may be an indictment of my character that my desire to win was easily more important than any desire to buck the imposition of heteronormative dress and roles. It took me another couple of weeks, but I found some boots at a thrift store that fit me. They were eight dollars. They aren't even leather, but vinyl, though you can't tell until you're within a couple feet of them. I was unable to find a suitable hat at a thrift store but got one at JC Penney. I had one sort-of-country shirt.

The competition went by so fast. All that practice for four minutes of performance: two minutes of two-step and two of waltz. We didn't do badly, though I know we've danced better; the most difficult thing was the slowness of the pieces chosen. It's a hard thing to dance to a slow song. Two-step wants to scoot along the floor, and it's nearly impossible to force yourself to chain all your steps and moves to a slow rhythm. In the end we got 2nd place in our division. I have been telling all my friends that we got 2nd without mentioning that there were only 3 couples in the division. You won't tell, will you?

Here we are, slowly two-stepping around the floor.

Afterward we got to watch the rest of the performers; besides the first-time category there were beginners, intermediate, and advanced. Here is a video of the advanced couples:

The bar where all this happens is a lovely place, with mirror-mantled cowboy boots in place of a disco ball in the ceiling. For me it has a perpetually unfinished and very friendly feel to it; the former from all the exposed two-by-fours, the latter probably from its being a gay bar. Its very existence rests on a foundation of tolerance. And it is a fine thing to learn how to dance here; most people learn both to lead and to follow, and even when men ask me to dance, they ask if I want to lead. I happen to think real life would work better if it were a little more like this.

Another photo taken by Jess on competition night

There will be another competition in March, and I assume I'll compete again, though I don't know yet. When I dance I think sometimes about aikido, the martial art I studied one summer ages ago. They say in aikido that whatever issues you have in life will, sooner or later, turn up on the mat; that if you have a problem being assertive, or a problem with your temper, or a problem finishing what you start, at some point it will be an obstacle in your training and you'll need to work through it to continue with the practice. This is not going to happen with dance; I suspect I can keep getting out there, and probably improving, indefinitely without having to stare down any demons. Still, I can sense a couple sort of whiningly nipping at my heels.

One is that I LIKE TO DO THINGS THE RIGHT WAY. I always have. Not everyday things like my taxes, um, but difficult things like singing and yoga and dance. It's an irresistible challenge to try to be technically perfect. (I chose aikido because I'd heard it was the most difficult martial art, which is probably as good an illustration of my basic mindset as anything.) Also, I LIKE TO WIN. I work very hard; I love it. Two of my favorite things in life are to learn and to excel.

So it's damn hard for me that the number one thing I hear about my dancing is "You need to loosen up." This always makes me groan inwardly. Tell me there's something wrong with my timing or my technique or my work ethic or anything but that, because I can fix any of those things but I'm pretty clueless about how to loosen up (unless it involves a trip to the bar). I'm laughing as I type this because it's so ridiculous and terrible, but it's basically true.

And that's why I'm debating the next contest. If I'm going to spend another two months practicing and getting all my forms correct and my timing right so that I can go in again and... basically repeat the past, then I might as well not do it. Because it suddenly seems a lot harder to dance just for fun, without worrying whether I'm doing it right, and by default that makes the challenge of no-challenge so compelling as to be irresistible. (I recognize that such a shift in mindset could take me the next 60 years to pull off, but whatever.) Of course, theoretically it's possible to enter a competition and dance just for fun. But can I?

The arrival of the fourth horse

2011-01-20T00:41:00.005-05:00

I started this blog as a fiction blog, to get me writing, back in 2005. I want to speed-write again, but I didn't want to confuse my new readers who only know this as a travel blog, so I've split SedLife in two. My fiction, including two new entries, can now be found at The Fourth Horse.

Loyal followers, carry on. While after returning to Denver and talking to various friends and acquaintances I now realize that there are far more people than my mother reading my blog, I cannot encourage you enough to leave a comment now and then... it gives me a cheery feeling and keeps me going!

Extra-medium post

2011-01-16T19:12:00.010-05:00

No joke. I got this spork for Christmas. Crazy Swedes. What will they think of next? Extra-medium, by the way, is my word of 2011. I hope to use it as much as possible. What for, I'm not sure, as its meaning is completely unfathomable, which is why it's so amusing in the first place. Perhaps it can simply be used for everything. Much like a spork.

I will not be having geology-related adventures until the summer, I expect, but I will make a post when I do something interesting. Such as the forthcoming contest to which this rule pertains:

4. Loss of hat during competition shall result in no scoring until the hat is retrieved.

LOSS OF HAT DURING COMPETITION SHALL RESULT IN NO SCORING UNTIL THE HAT IS RETRIEVED. What have I gotten myself into? What kind of a rule is that?

As for the adventures I've had since returning to Denver, they've mostly been snowshoeing. I had never been snowshoeing before, but I immediately loved it. There is not much to it, but it was quiet and beautiful, which is really all that matters.

Driving into the mountains

That is me, sitting down, trying to figure out why I have no feeling in my right foot (bindings too tight)

I lead the way.

A wide-angle shot

The scenery at Brainard Lake. It was very cold. The drinking tube on my hydration bladder froze so I couldn't drink my water.

Me and Jess, on ends, and a mutual friend cower in the ice-particle-laden gusts coming off the lake.

On the count of 3, we look up for a split second so a photo can be taken.

The clouds were doing strange things.

We also saw a moose on the drive back home.

I went on another trip the next weekend, from which I have a couple good shots:

There were some people doing telemark skiing on this mountainside, down which the wind was blowing so hard I couldn't lift my head to see where I was going. We turned back before getting to the top.

Well, that has all been a lot of fun, and I am also very excited to have a social life, after four years of school work and work work occupying all my time.

Eight-player Bananagrams at the apartment

In parting, I would like to point you all to the wonderful new blog Did You Kill That Badger (linked to under "One degree of separation" at top right), in which a museum of natural history worker reflects on some of the more interesting questions she has received from children and adults.

That worker is Kate, who--seen here at the Grand Canyon with a hot dog on a chopstick--was the very tall, clever, and British roommate that Katie and I shared during the summer of 2008. Kate is now in London working on an advanced degree in science communication, though if her blog is any indication, she is already ready for her own TV show.

Monument to October

2011-01-09T21:54:00.009-05:00

When I learned, sometime in November, that I wouldn't be able to keep traveling, I was pretty much crushed. I'm not going to talk about it... there's nothing I could say that would do any justice to how I felt. But when I look back on what feels like the two lifetimes I already spent, in September and October, I realize that all the good memories are from October. I did many things in September, and it was all interesting, but they were just things I did. I camped by a field of sunflowers in Wyoming, I rounded a hill to find a herd of buffalo in the North Dakota wilderness, but these memories have no emotional component, no fondness attached to them. They simply happened. And yet everything from October is charged with fondness, down to the mundane minutes of doing laundry in the windowless little laundry room of an Idaho hotel.

I didn't completely appreciate how much my love for the land is really a love for my friends. All the places I love best are places I visited with good people. And it's not so much that doing laundry with Katie is enjoyable because we're such good friends, as that--and this is a fine distinction--she has become such a good friend because even doing laundry with her is enjoyable. And as I can't do that subject justice either, I'm going to stop talking about it, and present instead this monument I have to October.

Our first day on the road, I asked Katie to write down the name of every RV we saw. I can't remember why I wanted her to do this. I suppose I thought it would make an interesting anthropological study, or maybe I just wanted to give her something to do. I didn't know at that time whether the task I'd set would become annoying, or whether we might run out of names on the second day. What in fact happened is that it never got boring. We always had something to interest us on the road, and never found an end to the new names.

I have in front of me three notebook pages of RV brand and model names. So much a part of our daily life was writing these down that even after Katie left me, I could not stop looking at every RV I passed on the road, with that little flicker of excitement that it'd be something new. Something hilarious. I present now our list of RV names as a poem, because it might as well be. It is illustrated by a few photos I haven't yet shared. It is simultaneously boring and hysterical. When you read it, I invite you to imagine what these monsters look like. I invite you to imagine what their designers were thinking. I also invite you to imagine what kind of sick people Katie and I must be to be so fascinated by this for a whole month. This poem is about America and it is about us.

I also invite you to take a liking to the name that tickles you most, and leave a comment telling me which it is.

Poem of RV names of America

Superchief
Flagstaff
Intruder
Alpenlite
Allegro
Excel
Phaeton
Hichhiker
Jamboree
Cougar
Lance
Komfort
Ameri-lite
Puma
View
Real-lite
Condor
Escapade
Tiger
Wildcat
Bigfoot
Outback
Okanagan
Sports Master
Montana
Cruiser
Topaz
Allegro Bay
Sundance
Admiral
Arctic Fox

The Narrows, Zion National Park

Open Range
Layton
Raptor
Fun Finder
Salem
Shadow Cruiser
Bounder
BigHorn
Quantum
Dutch Star
Cameo
Razor Adventurer
Flair
Kountry Star
Prevost
Carriage Cameo
River Canyon
Mako
Aerolite
Chateau Sport
Durango
Mallard
Wilderness Yukon
Calay
Trav-L-Mate
Frontier
Alliance
Rockwood Signature
Lite Craft
Kodiak
King of the Road
Sandpiper
Southwind
Escaper
Road Ranger
El Dorado
Outlook
Pursuit
Chalet
Suncruiser

First snow, Katie's hair

Rialta
Lazy Daze
Eagle Cap
Pleasure Way
Chinook
Lexington
Sonoma
Shamrock
Trailblazer
Zinger
Alfa Gold
Rockwood
Inferno
Seneca
Spirit
Alumascape
Palomino
North Star
Challenger
Wolf Pack
Cub
Montara
Skamper
Super Condo
Hurricane
Ranier
Walkabout
Odyssey
Chaparral
Ambassador
Sightseer
Cherokee
Prairie Schooner
Holiday Rambler
Ideal
Potomac
Laredo
Arista
Santara
Caribou
Surveyor
All American
Sunrise
Independence
Passport
Prowler
MB Cruiser
Hi-Lo
Free Spirit
Springer
Tango
J Flight
Outfitter
Journey
Freelander
Safari Condo
Travel Supreme
Fuzion
See Ya'

Lake in the Sawtooths, Idaho

Aspect
Flite
Sunseeker
Alaskan
Cruise Master
Starcraft
Hornet
Taurus
Attitude
Titan
Fiesta
Georgetown
Jazz
Titanium
Sun Dog
Eagle
Brookside
Americana
Ameriscape
Fourwinds Breeze
Crossover
Vortex
Meridian
Brave
Companion
Commander
Sunset Creek
Searcher
Leprechaun
Voyager
Elkridge
Pace Arrow
Snow Villa
Everest
Ultrasport
Lakota
Fun Runner
Royalite
Shockwave
Grey Hawk

Hoodoos, Bryce Canyon

Access
Experience

Esprie
Fireball
Designer
Spree
Grey Wolf
Streamline
Executive
Lexington
Nomad
Snowbird
Carri-Lite
Resort
Casita
Bristol Bay
Escalade
Centurion
Monaco
Diplomat
Overland
North Shore
Northern Lite
Crusader
Open Road
Hideout
Baja
Autumn Ridge
Infinity
Knight
Dynasty
Antique
Desert Fox
Six-Pac
Jet
Ultra Super C
Stellar
Squire
Heritage
Thumper

Me, Great Salt Lake

The end. Of the poem, and of my reminiscences of the trip. There are new adventures to write about as well as a change coming to the blog, but that will all have to wait until later this week.

Two down

2010-12-08T21:23:00.010-05:00

Well, here I am. I still don't have internet at home [or, didn't, at the time I wrote this section of the blog], so I am writing this from a Starbucks, but the internet should be coming soon.

When we last left me, I was homeless and carless, uncertain of where exactly I was going to go that night. Some phone calls revealed that I did in fact have a long-lost cousin living in Denver, and cousin Kate, whom I had not seen in a decade or so, took me in for a few nights. Here, a photo of grey Denver as seen from near Kate's house. Incidentally, this is the same location from which I watched that sunny jazz concert over the summer...

The woman at left is Jess (also seen in the tubing photos of the "Golden intermission" post), who has rescued me from the streets! She happened to need a roommate, and I am very grateful to have forged this particular friendship over the summer (as if I wasn't already... who else was going to go tubing with me?). So, I am no longer homeless. However, the day after I moved in, Jess left town for a week, and I had to rely on buses for a bit longer.

I spent Thanksgiving with the folks I lived with in Golden over the summer, with three students from the Middle East, and after dinner we had Arabian coffee with cardamom and baklava. Then I went to say goodbye to my car.

To recap, the car, which (after $1100 of repairs) had basically become undrivable and would require hundreds of dollars' more work to even diagnose the remaining problems, was sitting on the lot of a mechanic in Golden. I brought my backpacking pack with me to Thanksgiving and the next day I was at the mechanic's, packing up all the camping crap that was still in the car. I couldn't fit it all in and hid some stuff in the bushes. As it was, my pack probably weighed about 40 pounds. I took the bus home.

Not only is my backpack full of crap, but there is also crap strapped to the outside, and more crap in the milk crate by the bench, all mine. But note the mountains in the background. It is nice to come over a rise in the city and see them there, a reminder of how close the wilderness is.

My new home is exceedingly nice on the inside, with 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, laundry room, fireplace, etc. It is also very nicely decorated (which I had nothing to do with... okay, everything except for my room is very nicely decorated).

Within a few days, while searching the internet from the library (an hour's walk away from home), I had found a car on Craigslist that I could afford. I called the owner and she said I could come on by. I put the address in to Google maps; it was a 20 minute drive. Oh, wait, I need to take the bus. Two and a half hours by bus. Two and a half hours??

For me, the bus system in Denver was life-saving, in that, well, I had no car. Also, there are bus stops absolutely everywhere, and the fares, while not cheap, are at least manageable. But the bus system was also soul-destroying, because... come on, two and a half hours to go ten miles? (That is precisely my walking speed on level ground with no weight in my pack, now that I think about it.) It takes so long because there's no direct route; I needed three buses to get there (thankfully, transfers are free).

Counting out money to buy the car.

Anyway, I liked the car, a Mazda Protege, and returned again the next day to take it to a mechanic, and the next day to buy it. These days were gruelling. In fact, any day I wanted to get something done involved getting up at sunrise to walk to Starbucks (half an hour away on foot) so I could look up location and bus route information, another half-hour walk back to the apartment, a walk to the bus stop, a 2.5-3 hour ride on multiple buses, a couple hours to do what I wanted, and another 2.5-3 hour ride back home. By the time I bought the car I was just about tearing my hair out. The first thing I did with it was go up to my storage unit and get my bike, so that even if my luck remained bad and something horrible happened to the car, I wouldn't be so dependent on the bus again.

This remains my most reliable vehicle. Also see my new apartment building, with the highway in the background. Not the most ideal location, but it is exceedingly cheap. Also, hey. Quick access to the highway.

This is the car. It is the most generic-looking car ever. I have been having special trouble finding it in parking lots. Once I tried for some time to get my key to work in the lock only to realize I was attempting to unlock someone else's car.

But the main thing is, two down--the first two in this elegant grand plan for my life:

1. Home
2. Car
3. Job
4. Relationship
5. ???
6. Profit!

I am writing this section of the blog from Connecticut, to which I have returned for the holidays, and have learned that we now have internet back at the apartment. This is a hard-won development that required a week and a half of misery, at least twelve calls to customer service, and four (4) visits by technicians. I drew the above cartoon (on which you should be able to click for more detail) in an attempt to reinvigorate Jess, who at the time was sprawled prone on the floor, her head turned slightly to one side so that she could continue to say "uh huh" to the customer service rep on speakerphone some distance away.

The problem turned out to be very simple--Dish Network had made use of the cable line that was last used by Comcast, but there was another line Comcast could hook up to--but the fact that not a single Comcast customer service rep nor technician could figure this out was slightly disturbing. It took Jess and I compiling the various scattered bits of info offered us, plus the insight of a Dish technician who also came out, to figure out the solution ourselves and instruct yet another technician in how to implement it. (Per our genius, our internet now comes down through a hole in the ceiling of the laundry room, rather than out through a cable outlet, but that's okay.)

The weather in Denver has been quite warm and I have ridden my bike a lot; here, a hawk at the state park that is a 15 minute ride from my apartment.

But I left Denver a few days ago for D.C., which is not warm.

Despite the bitter cold, there were still insane half-naked people who insisted on playing soccer in the snow of the mall.

I was there to visit some friends...

With me above are Katie's friend from middle school, Katie, and my friend from elementary through high school (whom some of you will recognize as Diana). Though I was impossibly sick with a cold while in D.C., I managed to see many things, like the Natural History Museum, three art museums, the cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Botanical Gardens, the Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center, and the Library of Congress. I also saw Pink Floyd's The Wall. Now I am in Connecticut for the holidays, but before I left D.C. I obtained from Katie a very important document that is necessary to complete the story of our October travels, and which I hope to treat in my next post.

Worst-case scenario

2010-11-20T15:30:00.003-05:00

When the oil leak was first discovered in my car a couple weeks ago the outcome I dreaded most was not an expensive repair, specifically, nor even the need to find a new car, but a scenario that dragged on for weeks of waiting without a place to live, false diagnoses, and struggling to find somebody in Denver who knows how to take apart a Toyota carburetor. This was the worst thing I could imagine, the last thing I wanted to happen. Of course, this is now what is happening.

And of course, it's not really the worst thing that could happen to me. I am in good health, my family and friends are well, and I have yet to be the victim of a theft or assault, or even a really bad joke. Unless you count the past couple weeks, I mean... the car troubles are only one source of misfortune, but I don't think it's prudent to get into all the details at this time. I have simply found myself at the end of a string of misfortunes.

My car was rendered into a drivable state by the 2nd mechanic I took it to, and so, having basically worn out the kind friend who took me in for 2 days and ended up having me for 2 weeks, I determined I'd return to camping for a little while. Not the most comfortable thing in the world now that temperatures are below freezing some nights, but with my 0 degree bag I'm not exactly in danger of hypothermia, just a certain amount of tossing and turning. Anyway, it's free, and with more car expenses on the horizon, saving money has become even more important to me.

However, as I drove around yesterday checking out places to camp, the car became more and more sluggish, until I couldn't get it to top 15 mph. So I gave up and had it towed to the garage of a Toyota expert whose name had been passed to me. He is the 5th mechanic. I know he can't take a look at it for a few days and, if the repairs are affordable, won't be able to get them in until the following week at least. Spent last night with friends who don't really have room for me, and at the moment am, phone in hand, proceeding through the (very short) list of other people I know in the Denver area.

Temporarily carless, homeless and jobless, which is not a situation I've ever found myself in, it's kind of a struggle for me to keep in mind the fact that I am not particularly down and out, comparatively speaking. I am not ill, broke, saddled with debt or children, in jail, or addicted to anything, just enough of a control freak to be as stressed out as if I did have those problems... the fact that it's easier for me to endure camping in the snow than to endure asking a friend for couch space is kind of a silly issue, but what can I say? I am perhaps too attached to the goal of self-reliance. If the goal I'd had in mind all this time were, say, to become a more flexible person, then I could pass all of these travails off as fodder for the crusade.

Another excellent goal would have been "to be very comfortable with waiting and uncertainty." (Of course, it is not too late to adopt either of these. My forebrain is quite aware that life is about learning how to let go of control, not learning how to control everything; it's the other bits of me that have a problem recognizing this.)

Anyway. Whether the Toyota is fixable or I must buy a new car, my travel money will be wiped out, so this is the end of the travel blogging (for this year!). My current "adventures" don't have quite the same photo-readiness, but I will continue to blog on them. I did a funny thing and attached some more photos from last month to the previous blog entry, instead of writing a new one, so if you've already read it, go through it again to see the new photos.

Now, back to finding a place to sleep tonight.

Down and out in Denver

2010-11-10T21:32:00.007-05:00

I was supposed to be in the Grand Canyon at this time, but shortly after the last blog post was written a large oil leak was discovered in my car. I am trying to get BP to pay, but in the meantime I have been stuck at a friend's place waiting to hear estimates back from various shops and then waiting for the parts to be ordered... work will commence tomorrow... I suppose I could have my car back tomorrow night, but there is the additional problem that it suddenly became very hard to start the morning I took it in to the shop and this problem has not yet been diagnosed, let alone worked on. So I do not know how long I will be here in limbo.

Watching the snow fall on Denver from my little prison. Katie and I took all of last month to get through Harry Potter 3, taking turns reading to each other in the evenings. I read Harry Potter 4 in two days, waiting, then read Krakauer's Into Thin Air today (it's very good, by the way). It took a long time to decide whether to repair the car (which has 175,000 miles on it... yeah, I know it's a Corolla) or to take my remaining money and buy a new one. In the end it seemed to make more sense, economically, to repair this one... it is remarkable what even another used car with only 150,000 miles would cost if I wanted to replace mine... and it means I will still have money to continue traveling, if I wish.

I am reevaluating the scope of my November/December travel plans in light of the repair expenses but at this time am still hoping to visit at least a couple more parks before the holidays. Best case scenario, the car and I will be ready to go tomorrow evening; worst, it will still take a couple more weeks to diagnose and fix the starting problem. I have been really languishing, mostly just reading to try to keep from worrying, not really taking advantage of being in Denver. Because I wanted to be in Arizona right now. I spoke of flexibility in the last entry... apparently I'm only able to be flexible if I'm already on the road. Right now I'm just sad and angry at being stuck here.

But, while I am posting, here are a bunch of photos from the first half of last month that got cut from my previous posts.

Our initial drive into Canyonlands.

A picture Katie took of me doing a yoga pose in front of some odd blocks of sandstone at Canyonlands.

A strange wall at Canyonlands. This was in the backcountry, I thought it might have been some kind of horse corral. The hilarious thing about it was that the builder(s) had used five different materials. From left to right, they are: barbed wire (difficult to see on far left); wooden boards; corrugated metal; sandstone slabs stood on end; and sandstone blocks piled into a wall.

One of the interesting geologic features we found on the trail. Katie said she thinks these are mud cracks (seen in side view) filled in with sand (all of which was later distorted, giving some of the cracks a lightning-bolt shape). The climate at this time, more than 200 million years ago, may have been becoming dryer.

On one of our long hikes, while I keep rushing on because of the thunderheads building on the horizon, Katie keeps stopping to look at fossil wood and bone in the Chinle Formation, the same formation she did her master's thesis work in in Arizona.

Katie and a pile of petrified wood.

Me and a view of the White Rim, which stands above the inner canyon.

A picture Katie took of me in the Joint in Canyonlands.

Katie in the Joint. I don't think I included this one in my previous post, though now I'm not sure why, as it's a great shot of the narrow canyon. Perhaps it was because Katie's expression didn't match the pure geologic delight of our surroundings. As far as that goes...

Katie threatens me for taking a picture of her painting her nails. I was fascinated with the process, never having painted my own nails, and especially with the fact that she was choosing to do this the night before we were going backpacking. And that she was choosing to paint them bright canary yellow.

Our good friend The Car, in Gobin Valley State Park at sunrise. I actually took this picture because of the guy sitting in his chair at the top of the hill who was watching the sun rise.

A shot of Little Wild Horse Canyon. When I was there I kept wanting to say Little Dead Horse Canyon, because we'd driven past Dead Horse Point State Park not long before. The story of how the state park got its name is predictably gruesome, but somehow the idea of a little dead horse is even worse.

Small eroded holes in the wall of Little Wild Horse Canyon. I believe there's a name for these, and I'm disappointed I've forgotten this one piece of geologic arcana.

A gigantic dog footprint at our campsite near Capitol Reef National Park. These huge prints were interspersed with human prints, leading Katie to decide that the site was most likely previously occupied by a werewolf. The other spooky thing about the site was that we were right next to a creek that was cutting into a bank of shale, and it was eroding fast enough that all night long we could hear chunks of rock breaking off and falling into the creek with great plops.

Strawberry-rhubarb pie and afternoon tea at the werewolf campsite. It was very civilized, except for the fact that we were sitting on chunks of wood in the dirt. Another thing about this site was that it was in the 70s while the sun was out--we'd be sweating in our t-shirts--and then the moment it set, the temperature would drop about 30 degrees.

The making of pizza on a pita. When we didn't have a picnic table, as was the case at undeveloped or "dispersed" camping sites, the trunk of the car sufficed. By the end of the month it had remnants of every meal stuck to it, as well as a good smattering of coffee grounds and cocoa powder from breakfast.

If I'm stuck here another week I'll do another post with more previously unseen photos!

Off again

2010-11-06T15:01:00.005-04:00

Here's a shot from the convention center. I attended a lot of interesting presentations during the four days I was there, many of which were about geoscience education. Some particularly interesting ones involved eye-tracking cameras to see how students differ from experts in where they looked when examining photos of rock outcrops. I also found this at one of the technical poster presentation sessions:

In this study, students were interviewed on their knowledge about plate tectonics. As I read this, I realized that I'd been one of the interviewed students back at URI (as you can see, the poster's primary author is from Rhode Island) and that I was actually in the majority who got some significant concepts wrong during the interview. Oops. The poster went on to show how simple line drawings were much more comprehensible by students, as opposed to detailed, full-color 3D drawings of the type that textbook makers now seem to prefer. (Oops for them!)

I am heading now for the Grand Canyon, where it will be extremely cold on the rim. I want to hike to the bottom, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to do so... there are a limited number of permits given out for camping at the bottom, and I'm not really in good enough shape to make going to the bottom and back in one day an enjoyable experience. But after that, it's on to Death Valley and 90 degrees, then southern CA, AZ, NM and TX. I could continue traveling through the spring, but don't currently plan to... the places I won't have been yet will either be very cold or rainy, and I'm not sure I would enjoy the experience as much.

Spending two months on the road has not really been difficult... some things have been different than I expected them to be... everything is farther away than I expect it to be, and I don't really feel good after sitting for several hours, nor after seeing how much I've spent on gas; so these long drives have been the hardest part. My other expenses have been more what I expected. Sleeping on the ground every night has been no trouble at all, and living with so few possessions has been great; while it's true I used almost everything I brought with me when I traveled alone, when I put 1/3 of that stuff into storage to make room for Katie, I didn't actually miss anything I'd ditched.

Sleeping in the freezing cold is not a huge problem as I have an appropriate sleeping bag, but it is annoying dealing with the cold and darkness in the morning and evening. What exactly can you do with your time when it's freezing and pitch black from 7 in the evening till 8 in the morning? Katie and I had been sitting in the car to read at night, going to sleep at 9 and getting up at 8 AM... and my body seemed to have no problem with the sleeping, perhaps because there was little electric light to tamper with my biological clock, but it's hard to manage to not have to go to the bathroom for 11 hours straight.

Anyway, here I've been in Denver for the past week, thinking about what I'll do when I'm done traveling. This is really up to me; I could travel virtually indefinitely, if "travel" meant staying at one free campsite for the maximum 14 days and then moving on to the next closest one, as retirees with campers sometimes do, making food the only significant expense, but I imagine I'd be a bit bored with that. So I expect I shall settle somewhere, either volunteering for one of the national parks that provides housing for volunteers, or coming back to Denver here.

All these thoughts of settling have been a bit depressing, not so much because travel is necessarily more fun than living and working somewhere particular, but because travel is itself a buffer against depression that I am happy to have. Travel--at least, the kind of travel I am doing--requires constant decisions about where to go, which route to take, where to try to find a campsite, et cetera. More importantly, the consequences of those decisions are fairly immediate. If I choose wrong I am usually going to be cold, or wet, or waste time and gas driving around.

(Choosing a campsite, for instance; BLM land is usually much warmer than National Forest land, being usually at lower elevation, but it's often harder to find a place to pull my little car off the road and camp on BLM land. Their roads are either hugely built up into a mountainous ribbon of gravel bordered by monster ditches, or they're tiny threads of barely passable mud and soft sand. So do I want to risk being cold in the forest, or losing two hours of my day driving around the featureless scrub, perhaps ending up heading to the forest anyway?)

Anyway, all these decisions and their immediate consequences lend a kind of interactivity and vitality to life that it usually lacks, for us here in the developed world, with our schedules and our houses sheltering us from the weather. I think the concept of agency is essential to happiness; we need to feel that our actions affect our environment and vice versa, and we need timely feedback on our decisions to be able to recognize our own agency. Being able to choose where to camp at night, even though it may be a choice between being cold and wasting time, keeps me in the present and connected with my environment in a way that, say, choosing whether to invest in McDonald's or Exxon doesn't. And this can be much more effective at preventing depression than any kind of invented treatment.

Today I have felt good, getting all my stuff together and deciding what to take and where to go for the coming month. Though I have been unemployed since the end of summer, I've gotten tremendous practice at certain skills--well, okay, mostly how to plan for cheap camping. I've also become a lot more flexible (weather is the darndest thing) and I care less what people think of me (we can't all afford campgrounds with showers!) than before I started. I feel good about things today because I have become good at what I am doing, and so, armed with both a sense of agency and a sense of competence, I go forth happily.

I am sad, of course, that Katie has left for the east coast. A funny thing happened before we left. She had contacted the cousin she was going to stay with on her way back, in Kansas, and he said he wouldn't be there--he was at a conference. In Denver. He was staying at the Sheraton--which was where we were staying. So we went out to dinner with him, and then he said he was getting to fly home early, and would in fact be in Kansas to welcome Katie when she drove in the next day.

There have been many other things that happened that I'm sure I forgot to write about... like the deer that hit our car, or how the mountains bordering Hells Canyon may be rising due to erosion (how's that for some geology?), but a blog post can only be so long. Especially without pictures. But here's the final photo from the conference:

in which Katie and I gaze hopefully toward the future, our rainbow glasses on. Or perhaps we are just goofing around.

Splendor

2010-10-25T23:14:00.013-04:00

I am writing from the Geological Society of America conference at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, where I’m currently taking a break from watching presentations on geocognition, or how people think about the geosciences. Time for an update on our latest adventures.

When I last left off, we were driving north through Utah after having visited the five national parks in the southern part of the state. We camped the next couple nights at Antelope Island State Park, in the Great Salt Lake. This place is beautiful, an unspoiled island with a lot of wildlife and great views of the salt lake and the mountains beyond.

The next day, we went to Salt Lake City, to see what there was to do. The answer is: not much. The downtown was almost empty, and (perhaps most tellingly) the city was full of free parking, with even the most centrally located lots costing only $3 a day. We went to a small art museum and to the Mormon temple, which was a very interesting experience in which we spoke to many missionaries without particularly wanting to.

Above, the temple; below, the tabernacle, where the famous choir sings. I had a chance to flip through a free independent newspaper and saw that the Red Iguana had won Best Mexican for the nth year in a row, so we went there for lunch.

Somehow we spent over $60 on lunch there, though I don’t remember exactly why, because I collapsed in a kind of nap-coma later and slept for a while in my tent. But that evening and the next morning we had a good time exploring the island.

Shorebirds on the lake, which is quite shallow.

Antelope. There are antelope on antelope island, but mostly we saw buffalo. I thought I was done with buffalo! These were introduced to the island and are the most famous residents.

We also saw this guy. Katie was extremely disappointed because the driver of this vehicle was not, in fact, wearing a vest.

Eventually, we got ready to go for a dip. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity; neither of us had been in the salt lake before. The air was about 70 degrees with a light breeze, which was just enough to stand around in our bathing suits (and goosebumps), though the water temperature was in the 60s. It took quite a while to walk across the beach to the water. It felt like about 10 minutes. The lake basin is extremely shallow. Even once we got to the water, we had to keep walking for a while to get to a place that was deep enough to float. I stopped to take a look at the sand, which is very interesting:

It is made of ooids, or spheres composed of layers of carbonate that have precipitated around a central nucleus (such as a shrimp poop). The only other place I’m familiar with that also has oolitic sand is the Bahamas (though I’m sure there are others).

Katie actually got into the water first… well, I was taken off guard by her courage, I’ve never been able to drag her swimming with me anywhere if it was less than about 95 degrees.

Then I got in. It was quite cold, of course, but we floated around for a few minutes. It is actually a very fun sensation and quite noticeably different from being in regular salt water (the actual ocean averages 3.5%… this section of the salt lake averaged maybe 14%. (Some sections of the lake, cut off by causeways, are up to 25% salt). Despite the cold we had tremendous fun.

On the long walk back to the parking lot I dried off and the salt made my skin sparkly. I looked like a donut dusted with sugar.

Before we left, we went on a drive around the island. Though we had just come from what was obviously a very geologically interesting area (that being southern Utah), the Salt Lake area is also fascinating. In this less-than-fascinating picture, you might be able to see horizontal lines on the hillside:

These lines are terraces that mark the former levels of the lake. During what is colloquially known as the Ice Age, the continent was much wetter, and a huge lake—called Lake Bonneville—occupied this and surrounding basins, with some of the local mountain peaks just small islands in its expanse. Click here (http://www.greaterthings.com/News/daily/2005/09/06/6600916_Bush_behind_Katrina/Lake-Bonneville-and-Utah.jpg) to see a graphic. At its deepest, the lake would have covered all of Salt Lake City, lapping against the mountains above it.

About 14,500 years ago, the lake breached through a pass in Idaho and its level fell 350 feet in a year, releasing perhaps 1,000 cubic miles of water in the first few weeks. The water rushed through the Hells Canyon of the Snake, leaving gravel bars that can still be seen there now—100 feet above the present river level.

Buffalo butts.

We came upon a couple coyotes that were hunting along the road… I guess they were pretty used to cars. Below, an extraordinary video I was lucky enough to capture of a coyote crossing the road in front of our car and pouncing on prey in the scrub:

Not only is the area interesting for its Lake Bonneville history, but Antelope Island also has some of the oldest and some of the youngest rocks on earth. Above is a very old rock: 1.7 billion years old. The youngest rocks, deposited as Lake Bonneville retreated, are less than 15,000 years old.

When we got to Twin Falls, ID, to visit one of Katie’s aunts, we found she had put us up in a hotel. Mostly we were interested in the showers as we were still very salty. We visited Craters of the Moon National Monument while we were there. Here is some pahoehoe (ropy) lava frozen in the form of basalt:

And here is a kind of volcanic bomb that cooled in such a way to give it a “bread crust” appearance:

And one of the craters out of which cinders erupted:

And a less-than-illuminating shot from inside one of the (empty!) lava tubes:

All this was a big departure for us, as nearly all of our previous explorations had been made in sedimentary rock. Large sections of Idaho, however, are covered in basalt, some of which has come from the same hot spot that has been migrating east over time to where it now sits beneath Yellowstone. (By the way, one of the displays at Craters of the Moon informed us that the area is due for another eruption sometime in the next 1,000 years, so “now is a particularly pertinent time to visit the park.” I suppose so, if by “now” you mean “sometime in the next 1,000 years.” We should be able to manage that.)

Some of the other basalt in Idaho is part of the Columbia River Basalt Group, which formed in a serious of lava floods that eventually covered 63,000 square miles of the northwest and is, in places, more than a mile thick. This is one of the largest flood basalt events on the planet.

Twin Falls is in an odd setting. Driving around most of it, all you can see are flattish yellow fields stretching to the horizon. It seems like a very flat place. And then you come upon this:

There are giant, gaping canyons here. People use them for recreation, as we saw.

Above, the “terraces” visible on the canyon wall may be from separate basalt flows.

Next we drove into the Sawtooth mountains, which have been said to rival the Tetons in beauty. We didn’t see very much of them, unfortunately, because we didn’t know what we were doing, but we did go on a short hike that took us up to a couple of mountain lakes. It smelled like winter in the forest, which was completely silent and had patches of snow and ice already. The sky was a heavy grey. When we came upon Washington Lake it was so silent and still I thought the scene only required snow to perfect it. But it wasn’t going to snow because the temperature still felt like it was in the 50s. Then it started to snow.

You may be able to see the snow in these pictures if you click for detail.

We camped that night a bit lower in elevation, though it was still quite cold. One of Katie’s cousins had given her a device called Mr. Heater. Mr. Heater ran on propane and got extremely hot, and we never did find a way to use it in such a way that it actually kept us warm at night without melting the tent or suffocating us from carbon monoxide.

Next we went to visit another aunt who lives in Clarkston, WA, on the ID border. She took us to see some petroglyphs. I think this one is evidence that indigenous peoples developed weightlifting long ago.

The hills here are all basalt too. While here we went to visit the U of Idaho at Moscow, where my brother went to school. The most important thing we saw, though, was her aunt’s kitten, Kato, who was excruciatingly cute and with whom we played quite a bit.

Next we camped outside Riggins, ID. Here, we have made the tent with two backs, in an attempt to use Mr. Heater without melting any nylon, but unfortunately the heat wanted to escape out the sides and not go into either tent.

We were here because we wanted to see the Hells Canyon of the Snake, the deepest canyon in North America, with a drop of over 8,000 feet from the highest point on the rim. Despite these distinctions, neither Oregon nor Idaho has made much of an effort to turn the canyon into any kind of tourist attraction. The quickest way to get to the canyon involved a winding dirt road that was going to take us, by various accounts, either an hour or half a day to ascend to the canyon overlook. The scenery was beautiful on the way up…

Unfortunately, as we climbed in elevation the snow became too deep to proceed through. We were just a couple days too late to see the canyon. We had to turn back. So much for that particular geological wonder.

Next we visited a third aunt in Boise. Boise seems to be a very nice town. It has many beautiful, old houses, and the trees were turning orange… I could have believed I was in New London or Westerly again. It is surrounded by mountains that were just getting their first snow.

A shot of downtown Boise. (Note: the real Boise is not slanted like that.)

When we camped that night on the ID-UT border, I had what was to me one of the funnier moments of the trip.

It’s not immediately evident what has happened in these pictures, but in fact Katie zipped up her jacket without looking and didn’t realize until a bit later that she’d made a mistake. I suspect this is how trends get started. Unfortunately, no one else was around to see it, because it was in the 20s that night and nobody in their right mind was going camping.

Our final bit of the drive back to Denver saw plenty of snow on the Front Range…

But once we got into Denver it was quite temperate. It scarcely matters, though, because we’re spending all our time inside. Here, a shot of the convention’s exhibit hall on opening night:

We were enjoying all the free things that the various companies and organizations were giving away (and the free beer registered conventiongoers got). My favorite were the rainbow glasses. Here, Katie (full name blurred to protect her reputation) and another former URI student show off their frames:

And finally, to revisit that shot through the rainbow glasses, allowing you to enjoy the convention with me in all its splendor:

No post today

2010-10-15T11:37:00.002-04:00

I was going to make a post today, but we've had sunny weather the past week and it continues today, so there is no appeal in sitting inside for three hours at the computer when we could be getting to Zion. Maybe I will have a chance in another five days or so, I don't know!

Rain delay

2010-10-06T17:07:00.010-04:00

Katie and I left the Denver area on Saturday, after she put most of her stuff into my storage unit.

Top, the 5x5 storage unit, which now holds 2 bicycles and lots of other stuff; bottom, the car. As we were leaving Denver we saw this lovely piece of street art:

We drove to Great Sand Dunes, which I went to a couple months ago, but we needed to stop somewhere on our way out to southern Utah, so it might as well be somewhere another geologist might get something out of. (Though I think what Katie mostly got out of it was a tent full of sand.)

Katie slogs through the dunes ahead of me. The setting prompted a lot of quotes from movies such as The Hill, Lawrence of Arabia, and Star Wars, which had me in stitches, but when I decided that a movie of us would probably illustrate our dorkiness more than our cleverness, I kept to the pictures.

Some guy climbs the dunes.

It was so windy that night after dinner that my tent was being flattened by the gusts. The poles bent and the fabric was pressed down so that the outline of my sleeping bag could be seen through the nylon. Thankfully, things calmed down a little before I went to sleep.

The next day we went to Durango, which is where I realized that towns are not a good place to visit on a budget vacation. The pleasures of Durango... shopping, eating out, train rides... were pretty much inaccessible to us, and it's only so much fun wandering past things you can't spend money on.

That evening, the rains started. I was talking to my dad on the phone the other day and he said, all I see is good weather in your pictures... hasn't there been any rain? Well, yes, there were a few rainy days and some overnight storms last month. But it has been rainy for the past few days here now.

The sun came out for a while when we were at Mesa Verde National Park, which preserves a remarkable 600 cliff dwellings from 800+ years ago. We toured a couple of them.

Cliff Palace, which may have sheltered 150 people.

We climb to Balcony House.

A view of a ranger and boy through a window at Balcony House.

Spruce Tree House.

Neither Katie nor I is very much interested in archaeology... unlike the other 300 million people in America, it seems, most of whom Mesa Verde appears to provide summertime parking for... so a half a day was enough to enjoy this park. Then we continued on to Canyonlands in southern Utah.

Canyonlands is very popular in the fall, when it's not 110 degrees, and the campsites can fill before noon. It was six PM when we were approaching the park, so we found a spot in the nearby National Forest to camp. In the rain.

After I had set up supper on the trunk I realized that all my bottle opening implements were in the trunk, so I had to be inventive. I soon discovered that part of the door latching mechanism can be used as a bottle opener.

Try this at home.

It was sunny as we drove into Canyonlands the next morning...

Unfortunately, rain soon threatened, so we decided to do several small hikes... the type that not-so-fit people and families with small children like to go on... to see ruins, an old cowboy camp, and potholes filled with aquatic life, instead of the backcountry hikes I would have liked to go on to see some of the geology in the photo above. I have full rain gear and can hike comfortably in the rain, but assuming it's going to stop raining at some point, isn't it better to postpone the long, beautiful hikes for tomorrow?

Katie peers into a pothole, in which there are supposed to be shrimp. There were no shrimp. I was going to complain to a ranger about the lack of shrimp in this desert park but we found some in a larger pothole, two kinds of shrimp whose eggs hatch when it rains. I didn't get a very good picture of them, so here's a picture of a lizard.

That night, I sat in my hammock until it started to rain.

Katie, lacking the full rain gear thing, helped make that night's pizza from inside her tent. I had told her it should be fine to cook right next to the tent because I hadn't seen any warnings about bears at Canyonlands. Only ravens. (The next morning, I saw a warning about bears... well, it would have been an honest accident if she'd been eaten in the middle of the night.)

Click to read the warning about ravens. The best part of this is at the very bottom, where it says, "Experience your America." Apparently, the full American experience involves having your sandwich stolen by ravens.

We had planned an 11-mile hike through the backcountry, including a section through a slot canyon, for the next day... that is, today... getting everything set last night so that we could hit the trail early and be out before afternoon thunderstorms struck. However, the forecast this morning said there would also be storms in the morning and a flash flood warning would be in effect all day. So, no hiking in canyons today. We decided to go up to Moab and check our email instead.

We got a slow start this morning because of many things... including the fact that my small backpacking stove takes about half an hour to cook a pancake... but most amusingly because when we went to take down the tents, Katie could not get one of her stakes out.

I saw her travel back to the tent area with the shovel, and I went to go wash my hair in the campground restroom. When I returned 20 minutes later, she was still chipping around the stake with her knife. She had found another stake in the hole. She had not even begun to wash all the dishes I left her from breakfast. So. Small delay there.

Ironically, the storms did not hit until just now (about 3:30 mountain time). We certainly would have been finished with our hike. It's been beautiful, sunny and temperate. Oh well. But now, boy, the wind just whipped up and it has started pouring rain. We are wondering if we staked our tents down well enough. Oh, there is also a tornado watch in effect.

I have been very much looking forward to this section of the trip, in what may be the most beautiful area of the whole country, and to doing many hikes, and backpacking. Today has only involved a lot of driving and typing. But I could be driving and typing at home instead of in southern Utah.

Golden intermission

2010-09-30T15:08:00.004-04:00

I have some free time at the moment, and I have these photos that were taken when I went tubing on Clear Creek in Golden a month ago. They were taken with a waterproof disposable camera. I won't include all of the pictures... I am assuming that pictures of, say, Jess's feet mostly of interest only to Jess, and she already knows what her own feet look like... but I will put up the ones of me, for my adoring family.

I was wearing my "swim shirt" (or "rash guard" if I want to sound like a surfer), which I put on so that I wouldn't have to use so much sunscreen, but perhaps it also has some insulating value as I was able to tolerate the cold water of the river much better than my companions, who are my Denver friend Jess (leg on right) and her friend Jeremy (leg on left).

Jess is not so much smiling in this picture as grimacing through the icy cold. I suppose it was not much colder than the ocean off Connecticut in the summer, but we were mostly sitting, not swimming, and the clouds were over the sun more often than not.

A shot of the many people enjoying the river on this weekend day at the end of August. And my white legs.

Jeremy and Jess rescue a flip flop. Also, my thumb, which I managed to insert into the picture after warning the other two that it was easy to get their thumbs in the picture. The camera came with a sort of recessed lens that just invited you to put your thumb over it.

Me with one of Golden's 10,000 bronze statues. Someone had put a polo shirt on this statue of a little boy playing baseball, both of his arms through one arm of the shirt, and it looked bizarre. And we needed to use up photos on the camera.

Tubing was a tremendous amount of fun... the river was quite low, so that I ended up with a couple of huge purple bruises on my butt from hitting rocks. But most of it was still tubable... what a great word... and there were several rapids to go over. You would dip down over a smooth slide of water, and then gasp with cold as the wave at the bottom splashed up over the tube and onto your previously dry torso. We went down one and a half times until certain people in the group got too cold. They exhorted me to go down again by myself if I liked it so gosh darned much, but I refused. Half the fun was trying to keep hold of their feet and elbows as we went down.

Well, today Katie and I went antique shopping in Denver. Tomorrow we leave. I am exhausted and have nothing else left to say.

This post contains SPECIAL ELK

2010-09-29T21:39:00.012-04:00

The plant is dead.

Long live the plant? I bought this little pot with five bamboo stalks in it when I moved to Rhode Island five years ago. One by one the stalks slowly died, until only the tallest remained. I brought it with me to Colorado and then on my trip. It has been suffering since that 20-something-degree night in Glacier and all its leaves died a few days ago; I spent another 20-something-degree night in the Rockies a couple nights ago and the plant has turned white like a ghost. I now have no dependents at all.

I haven't had a chance to write for a while, so there will be a lot in this post. But more time putting up pictures means less time writing, so perhaps it will actually take you less time to read. But first, a picture Josiah took of me and posted on his blog:

I journeyed from the Bighorn Basin down toward Utah, bypassing Yellowstone and the Tetons. Everyone I met, or heard talking at any tourist attraction, was either coming from or going to Yellowstone. So why wasn't I? I'd already been there, for one (and can report that it is probably the nation's smelliest national park); for two, it was cold up there!

The land from Lander, WY down to Utah was incredibly boring, but as soon as the Utah border was crossed, it got interesting.

This is near (or in?) the Flaming Gorge... the bit of land in the background looked like a red barge sinking stern-first into the Green River. After passing the gorge I climbed into the Uinta Mountains, which were beautiful and full of wildlife:

I was heading for Dinosaur National Monument, which straddles the UT-CO border. I wanted to see this place because I'd applied for a job here... I had actually applied for six internships last winter, in the hopes that I'd get just one. I did six phone interviews; five of the parties were interested in employing me. At that point all my applications seemed a bit of overkill. Three of the jobs were GeoCorps positions, in which geologists (at any point in their career) may work in national parks and on other public lands; three of the jobs were for the US Geological Survey, as part of a special internship program I could only do this year. For the sake of practicality I took one of the latter jobs; however, my heart would rather I had gone to work for the BLM in Montrose, or for Dinosaur National Monument, doing a survey of fossils in their exposures of the Chinle Formation.

Remember the Chinle? That's the formation that makes up nearly all of Petrified Forest National Park, which I spent ten weeks working in a couple years ago.

You can only take one GeoCorps position in your lifetime--but since I haven't used mine up yet, I can apply again for next year, or down the road. So while I had a chance I wanted to see Dinosaur, to see if I might like working there. The first thing I noticed as I drove down toward the monument is that the geology is totally messed-up.

Here is the west end of Dinosaur, looking like some giant egg that has hatched. I would like to describe the geology here but I'm not sure I can. The park has 23 formations exposed in it. I'm not sure that sentence means anything to most of my readers... well, depending how you classify things, that's about twice as many as the Grand Canyon. If sedimentary geology starts out as a layer cake, with sediments of different character representing different times and environments deposited in horizontal layers before being cemented into rock, then perhaps Dinosaur is a layer cake that's been squeezed in a vise, cut up by a five-year-old and then run over by a unicycle.

In the west end of the park, Split Mountain makes a large hump where the earth's crust has been folded, and above you can see the south flank, where several formations lie stacked against each other.

Here is the vista from Ruple Point, where you can see how the Green River splits Split Mountain. (Why didn't the river just go around the mountain instead of cutting through it? Well, what if the river was there before the mountain began to rise?) This mighty canyon reminds me of an interesting idea; where we have great gorges and canyons, it isn't so much that the river is really low down as that the land around it is high. You have to climb quite a bit to get up to the rim of the Grand Canyon, or, for that matter, any of the other canyons I've traveled to this year--the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the Wind River Canyon, Shell Creek Canyon, et cetera. In the case of our famous canyons, the river was often there first, before the land was lifted. And the land was lifted slowly enough that it was more efficient for the river to cut down into it than be rerouted. Below, Split Mountain at dawn, and some other of the park's sights:

Some more views of Dinosaur... bottom-most is a view of the Mitten Park Fault. Can you find it? The rocks on the right side of the fault went down in relation to those on the left. They were bent until they finally broke. Imagine the forces that must be at work to do this to such large chunks of the earth's crust!

So. I could have been working here all this summer; I have to say that I was absolutely fascinated by the complexity of the geology in the monument... I scarcely noticed the dinosaur fossils you can go see, and in fact, am not even going to bother including a picture of them... the whole place is like a giant, beautiful puzzle in rainbow colors.

It was the one-armed geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell who named many of the features in the monument on his way through to his more famous conquest of the Grand Canyon. Places that bear his inspiration include Rainbow Park, site of the monument's free campground, where I stayed 2 nights all by myself, at a bend in the Green River.

Sunset from the campsite, and a prairie dog and fossil, both located just behind the campground.

Top, a petroglyph near the campground; bottom, a sign on the dirt road leading out to it. I was perplexed by this sign. If it was so dangerous I couldn't stop, wasn't it too dangerous to drive through at all? Would I be safer if I drove through at, say, 30 mph instead of 25?

Top, a fossil of bryozoans--tiny colonial sea-creatures--I stumbled over on my hike to Ruple Point, when for once I wasn't even looking for fossils; bottom, the old visitor's center at Dinosaur, which is now condemned as a result of having been built partly on bentonite. The shrinking and swelling of the soil over the years eventually rendered the building unstable.

I would like to have written more about Dinosaur--for instance, what I actually did there--but I have only so much time and space, and anyway, I am quite sincere in my wish to work there and if that happens you will have a whole summer of posts and pictures of the place.

So. I could not continue westward, because I had only a few days left before I needed to go back to Denver to pick Katie up. Katie was in Montrose, but she was going to be in Denver, because she was putting her stuff and her car in Denver, where I had my storage space, because that was economical and because we needed to be in Denver anyway at the end of October for the Geological Society of America conference. But she was in Montrose. Which was only a few hours away from Dinosaur. So, despite the slight absurdity in visiting someone I was going to be spending every waking moment of the next month with, I went to Montrose.

I saw this fellow on my way. So far on this trip I have seen an RV towing a helicopter and an RV towing a golf cart, among many other odd vehicle combinations, but this is my first motorcycle-with-bicycle-on-board sighting.

As I think I have mentioned before, the job Katie had this summer, working for the BLM, was the job we had both (inadvertently) applied for, and interviewed for, and were both told we were a top candidate for. They had called our advisor to hear his opinion on each of us. We don't know who they would have picked because before they decided, I made my own decision to be all practical with the USGS thing. Katie spent the summer being paid to look for dinosaur footprints. While she went in to the office on friday, I followed in her footsteps, and did in fact find some:

Don't look like much, do they? Footprints I've shown on this blog in the past have been seen from the top down. These are seen from the side (and a little below).

Here they are seen more squarely from the side. They are lumps that protrude down from an overhang. Sometime in the Cretaceous Period, there was a river here, where some sand was deposited on top of some mud. A dinosaur walked over the sand and pushed it down into the mud. The whole package was lithified, or turned into rock, and then in modern times the mudstone eroded away, leaving the tougher sandstone to stand as this overhang with lumps coming down from it.

For real? Are those lumps really dinosaur footprints? Couldn't they be anything? Couldn't I be making all this up? Well, try to come up with an alternative hypothesis. What pushed the sand down into the mud? Falling Cretaceous coconuts, maybe? (If so, there should be some fossil coconuts in there!)

After finding the footprints, I hiked up to the rim of the Gunnison Gorge, where the black metamorphic rock that gives the nearby national park its name can be seen at the lip of the inner canyon:

I had meant to be out for only a few hours, but it turned into a 6 1/2-hour hike. This was thanks to my assuming that the trail I chose, which was 3 miles out to the footprints as the crow flies, would travel in something like a straight line. Considering it was called the Sidewinder Trail, I probably should have known better. (The trail was just completed this summer and still isn't on maps.)

That weekend, Katie and I did stuff. There is a Mennonite buffet restaurant in the town of Delta. I had never been to a Mennonite restaurant. Now I have. We went to the Mountain Harvest Festival in the little town of Paonia near the West Elk Mountains (which may be seen in the distance in the above picture). I was startled to see people dressed fashionably... you know, moms in yoga pants and such... more hipsters even than in Cody. I think there is a kind of positive correlation between hipness and proximity to mountains. Nobody wore yoga pants in Bowman, North Dakota.

At the Harvest Festival they had a slow bicycle race...

And a grape stomping contest...

Above, a team of child superheroes stomps grapes; below, a team of Lucy look-alikes stomps, watched over by a couple of the judges, who were also dressed like Lucy. (And as I write this, my host and a roommate are actually watching I Love Lucy upstairs. So there you go.)

An adorable small child examines a stick. We watched him play with this stick for about half an hour.

They have some strange butterflies out Paonia way.

Now... this thing we are about to do, this kind of experiment wherein Katie and I will share the same compact car for a month, has provoked a certain amount of thought on my behalf, because I have never had so much sustained contact with another human being as I am about to endure. However, if I were to do this with anyone then Katie is a good candidate, as she is much quieter and more laid-back than I am (!) and I think the biggest argument we ever had lasted 20 seconds and was about how to cook the pasta. And she is a responsible, model citizen. In fact, the only suspect habit she has is one I noticed a long time ago. She is capable of great tidiness, and in fact used to wash my dishes every night she came over, but she does not pick up beer bottle caps. Ever. Every beer that was opened--and over two years, there were many--had its place of opening marked by the deposition of a cap, there, on the countertop or coffee table or end table or sink. These bottle caps would stay where they were until I put them in the trash. So I often wondered what would happen if I weren't around to clean them up.

Now I have my answer.

Apparently, once they reach a critical mass, the bottle caps spontaneously arrange themselves into pyramids. I know because this is what I saw when I entered Katie's trailer. It is not clear how the caps perform this maneuver. What is clear is that they never, ever make it into the trash.

The bottle-cap-meister, on the gondola over Telluride. We went up to this resort town on Sunday and it was absolutely beautiful. There is a free gondola! I wanted it to be the kind of gondola that is poled by stripe-shirted men down long canals, but it turned out to be just your regular free mountain resort sky gondola.

I included this odd picture of Telluride from the gondola because it is blurred in a way that makes it look as if it's a toy town. Click for detail.

A less deceptive picture of Telluride.

After the gondola ride, which I loved (so much that I made us do it again before we left), we went shopping downtown. One particular store had a bounty of interesting hats and accessories, including one of the most bizarre mash-ups of high fashion and 80s cheese that I have ever seen, which Katie will demonstrate for you below:

It is a real fur snap bracelet. Enough said.

And because Katie would want me to include it:

As far as voltage warnings go, this one is pretty scary. At least, the voltage demon is scary. The big-headed man is just silly. And that's it for Telluride.

I drove out... okay, to be completely honest, I didn't just leave Montrose, I went out Monday morning and looked for ammonites for three hours in the @^$#&* Mancos Shale (that is its official geologic designation) because Katie had one and I wanted to find one, but I didn't find any... I drove out to Grand Junction and east on I-70, which was beautiful just like everyone told me it would be, then up into the mountains west of Rocky Mountain National Park, which was where I finally saw a big cat.

I don't have a picture of it, because it ran off as soon as my car rounded the curve on the little dirt road I was on... I just saw what looked like a giant tawny housecat sitting on its haunches in the road and then it was gone. I don't even know if it was a mountain lion or a bobcat. I thought it looked too small to be a mountain lion, but what do I know?

Instead, here is a picture of some trees near where I saw the cat.

And then that night it was in the 20s, and I only know because I took my thermometer out after breakfast and it read 29. I hadn't woken up that night. Wow. Then I went to Rocky Mountain National Park and had some nice hikes.

The moon sets over the Never Summer mountains. I have become very aware of the moon, sleeping outdoors all month. At Badlands, my first night backpacking, it set at bedtime. I watched it set. The next night it set too late for me to stay up and watch. Now it's setting at noon or something. This seems crazy to me. It's only been a couple of weeks! Slow down!

Dream Lake, which was lovely green and had pretty cutthroat trout swimming in it.

A chipmunk that wanted a handout. He was crawling on my boots at one point.

And now... what you've waited a very long time for...

When I saw this sign I knew that I wanted very much to see some special elk. So I drove back to this area at 5 PM and parked where a bunch of other people were parked, and sure enough, an elk came out. He walked up to a fenced-in area (where the overgrazed willows were being allowed to regrow) and walked back and forth, back and forth, peering beyond the fence and seemingly unable to see that he could get around just a few feet to his right.

We all watched him for half an hour or so as he trotted about, failing completely to apprehend that the fence ended just beyond where he was standing. This was, perhaps, a special elk. A little bit slower than the other elks.

Above, the elk stops to read the sign, but still fails to comprehend that the fence ends just to his right.

In fact, it was wonderful to see the elk come out (more did come out later to join our special friend) and hear the males bugling, which sounds like whale calls, and is eerie and wild. I didn't get a picture of any of the harems because they were too far away, just a couple of the bulls that were a bit closer to me, but it was really a fantastic experience and made a lovely end to my first month of traveling.

Wow, this might be my longest post ever. I would like to do one more quick post before I leave Golden, but we shall see... Katie joins me tomorrow and there is much work to do to get ready for October.