We are on fire

All of a sudden, the mountains and the medians are yellow again, just like all of a sudden earlier this year then were green. I guess spring is over. No doubt Colorado's been in the news a lot because of all the wildfires (I don't read or watch the news, so I will have to assume), but all of them are far enough from me that I can't even smell them. I did see some smoke from the one outside Boulder last night.

Last week I joined Kris & friends for a backpacking trip in Rocky Mountain National Park, which turned out to be good timing as it hit over 100 degrees in Denver while we were away. Kris had planned the whole thing, and as we rode up to the park I was unaware that we were supposed to be rock climbing the first day.

We climbed into the mountains on the edge of the park to reach these crags, on which several folks were already climbing.

Find the climber's hand above.

I didn't have any climbing gear, so I went to take a nap and read in my hammock. When I came back a few hours later my friends were still climbing, and they convinced me to borrow a harness and try to scale the wall in my gigantic backpacking boots.

I got pretty far up, but not all the way.

After the rock climbing, we drove into the park, where we were car camping for the first night, and where we found they'd instituted a fire ban a couple hours before we arrived. How were we going to cook our hot dogs now? We set up one of our backpacking stoves, and as it was so windy--it'd been blowing like heck all day, maybe 50-mph gusts--made a makeshift windscreen for it out of aluminum foil that wrapped all the way around both stove and canister. Everyone set up tents. I didn't feel like getting up so I sat at the table pretending to watch the hot dogs, occasionally trying to flip one over with a miniature spatula.

At some point I noticed the flame had gone out.

"Did you turn this off?" I asked Kris. (I really wasn't paying very much attention.)

Kris hadn't turned it off. We tried for a while to get it to start up again, with no luck. We unscrewed the burner mechanism from the fuel cartridge and shook it vigorously, with no luck. We attached my burner to the cartridge. Still no luck. Fuel was still sloshing inside it, so it clearly wasn't empty. It seemed that nothing was coming out.

"We can use my stove," I said.

"No," said Cori, "Look at your cute little canister. We should save that for backpacking. It's lighter than the others."

So we set up Kris's stove on a new canister, and set up the windscreen around it.

A minute later, it was ON FIRE.

It is difficult to know what to do when one's explosive canister of compressed butane is on fire. Kris risked her fingers and managed to turn the stove off. We debated what to do. We decided to try again.

Within seconds, the stove was ON FIRE AGAIN. There was some freaking out. One of us got the stove turned off again, and once it was cool-ish someone unscrewed it from the canister.

The canister was hissing. Gas was coming out of it. This wasn't supposed to happen. You were supposed to have to screw on a Snow Peak Giga Power burner element, its plunger delicately depressing the valve on the canister and its O-ring sealing securely, and turn the stove on, before any gas would come out. But there was the canister hissing like a snake. The whole campsite suddenly smelled like butane.

Someone picked up the canister and threw it about 15 feet away, where it stopped hissing unless one of us walked over and kicked it.

We sat and talked. Every once in a while, we got another whiff of butane. Not all of the hot dogs were cooked yet. A couple people were frightened to start another stove when we could smell butane in the air. I did not think we could possibly light the ambient butane on fire and eventually set up my own, with its cute little canister. I did not use the makeshift foil windscreen. I had an Official Snow Peak Giga Power Titanium Windscreen that enclosed only the burner, and I have a feeling that was why my stove lasted the rest of the night and through breakfast the next morning without puttering out, catching on fire, or any other thing.

The next morning, we had another problem. When we went to get our backpacking permit, the ranger told us there had been a bear sighting at our second campsite, and that bears had been pulling down bear bags--the only thing that would do was putting all food and toiletries into bear canisters at night. We had bear canisters, but we weren't sure we had enough room for everything. So we took the only logical course, which was to strew our stuff all over the parking lot as we practiced stuffing the canisters.

It didn't fit. We ended up driving out of the park and into town, where we rented a third canister. (The makers of the Bear Vault Solo advertise that it will hold 1 person's stuff for 4 days, or 2 people's stuff for 2 days, but it's a challenge to get even half of that inside of it. Just sayin'.)

After that we drove for approximately 2 hours through construction zones in the park to get to the trailhead. A large chunk of this time was due to a construction worker who apparently didn't know he was supposed to let those with backpacking permits through, and kept yelling at us and waving us back to the line of cars creeping back toward where we came from. So we got back in line, waited for the pilot car to lead us to the edge of the construction, then turned around and got in another line, and waited for the pilot car to lead us back to the construction worker, who insisted we turn right and wait in another line of cars until the pilot car came back, when we were led forward far enough to explain ourselves more thoroughly to him.

He wouldn't let us through.

We detoured up the hill to a visitor's center and found a ranger, who walked all the way down the hill to talk to the construction worker, who eventually let us through. So here we are at the trailhead.

Lunch. We all had tuna. What can I say? Foil tuna packets are lightweight and nutritious!

Most of the snow on the trail had melted, but there were still some sections to cross.

We came to a planned "day hike," a little trip up to an alpine lake that didn't have much of a trail (certainly not an official one), but did have more snowfields. I was not the first to try to slide down one...

...but I will claim to be the most stylish, going down on my belly like a penguin. (I managed to turn around before I hit the rocks at the bottom with my face.)

A few of us climbed all the way up to a pair of alpine lakes at about 11,000 feet. Here, marmots wandered back and forth, without much apparent fear of us. (Photo below courtesy of Nancy.)

The lakes were so clear and beautiful, we had to go swimming. For about 3 seconds, until the 32 degree water drove us out. But it was refreshing, and after getting out we put our boots back on and took some photos. As I wandered around the edge of the lake I spotted a marmot investigating my clothing, and I chased it away.

I had wandered round to this side of the lake, opposite my clothes, to get a shot looking back, when I heard a commotion. The marmot had taken my shirt in its mouth and was scampering away with it. My friends, still in nothing but their boots, were chasing the marmot down the mountain, yelling.

Life had not prepared me for this situation. In lieu of an appropriate response I began trying to document the incident photographically (I didn't get any good shots). My friends got my shirt back when the marmot eventually dropped it. I felt eerily like I'd been transplanted into a Chevy Chase movie.

We hiked onward toward our campsite.

All through the trip we were comparing gear. Three of my friends had those plastic "origami" folding plates that are all the rage right now. We discussed the pros and cons. I don't know what to think about a brand of plasticware that is best cleaned by tongue.

The next morning, I was down at the river filtering water. I was down there quite a while. (We had two water filters, but the one that pumped faster than agonizingly slow kept getting a tiny rock stuck in it.) When I came back to camp I was told that a chipmunk had gotten into my pack, eaten part of my trail mix, and refused to get out even when the pack was picked up and shaken vigorously. I was not allowed to eat any more trail mix. The entire bag was placed into our trash, and I mooched food off everyone else for the rest of the trip.

We took another little side-hike up to Odessa Lake, where Kris attempted to fish with a bit of line and a lure...

And beyond, into the trailless woods where we came across a large bull elk grazing and mostly ignoring us.

When I turned back, I could see a billow of smoke from the High Park fire outside Fort Collins, CO.

When we returned after an hour or so of exploring, Kris and Mary were still sitting on their boulder on the lakeshore without having so much as seen a fish. But as we headed back to the trail, where the lake emptied into a stream we saw many trout. This incited a kind of creative frenzy in Kris, who tied her lure onto a hiking pole and proceeded to fish for a bit with the same total lack of success as before.

Mary and Kris use the hiking poles for "trail pictionary."

Some overexposed columbines by a waterfall.

On our last evening we camped at the meadow where a bear had been seen the previous week. At the time I was told that the copious scratches on the aspen trees all around us were made by bear, but further research shows them to be from elk eating the bark. However, bears do claw aspen to mark their territory.

A bird!

Yoga on our final morning. For some reason the entire meadow was overrun by ants, but where else are you going to do yoga when you're camping? So we did yoga, stopping constantly to brush ants off our bodies. But I really was trying to pay attention to the lesson, which is probably why at one point I felt ants biting me simultaneously on my lip and just below my eye. I'm afraid I killed one of them in trying to get them to stop. If you kill animals while doing yoga, does the good & bad karma cancel out?

That afternoon we took a scenic drive before leaving the park. My final picture, below: I do not look starved, ant-bitten, or marmot-harassed. You might think I enjoyed myself.

3. Job

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.

This post contains SPECIAL ELK

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.