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Where Not To Live

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Bill Leave a comment

Living in Colorado, I may be arrogant about all the inferior places in the country, but the ones on this list are unsafe. They are also popular. It seems people like to live on the edge.

San Andreas Fault

At the top of my list is anywhere near the San Andreas Fault. When two tectonic plates are bumping along one another, things get shaky. Just look at those aerial photos of the gouges the sliding plates created. Lots of energy goes into motion of that magnitude, and there is plenty left over to bring buildings down. The Los Angeles and San Francisco areas have a lot to offer. Climate, scenery, the Pacific, and all those geologic features created by the colliding plates.

The place of greatest folly is the Portola Valley.

Fault in Portola Valley After 1906 Earthquake

Just west of Stanford University, the valley is not a stream valley, it’s a fault valley. The valley is full of big houses located not near the fault, but on it. Well, not right on the fault, you must build fifty feet away from the fault. Portola Valley is one of the richest zip codes in the country which is a good thing; the people will have the money to rebuild somewhere else. There is a strict building code, but the fault is just too damn close.

A relative used to live in Menlo Park, one of the charming and wealthy communities in Silicon Valley. Her house was midway between the San Andreas and Hayward faults in a flood plain. What are those people thinking? Pretty country, though. She had redwood trees in her front yard. One of my favorite ironies is that the west coast office of The United States Geological Survey is in Menlo Park. What were they thinking?

Shaking in Parkfield, Oakland, San Francisco, Northfield, Palmdale, and soon. The entire Los Angeles area is at risk. There hasn’t been a big quake in some years.that means increasing amounts of energy is being stored along the fault. It’s not if, but when.

Mt. Rainier

Those tectonic plates are at it it the Pacific Northwest as well. There are earthquakes there, but the real danger is those pesky volcanos. All those striking photographs of Seattle nestled beneath Mt Rainier? It is an active volcano, folks. It has been a while, but every day is one day closer to the next one. Mt. Hood is due as well. Are you old enough to remember Mt. St. Helens? 1980. Not many lives were lost, it is in a remote area, but the blast flattened the forest for miles.

The real danger from those big volcanos is pyroclastic flows and lahars. The eruption releases massive amounts of ash and larger chunks (clasts). In addition, parts of the mountain blow apart, and the whole mess heads downhill. It is hot, coming out of the volcano, and wet from the ice and snow on the mountain. There are huge landslides contributing to the mass, which can travel as fast as 300 mph. Everything in the flow’s path is buried or carried with the flow. What is scary is that Seattle, Tacoma, Eugene, and other towns are in the path of the flows.

Track of the Lahar after Mt. St. Helens eruption.

In an earthquake, buildings collapse and maybe burn. A pyroclastic flow kills everything in its path. If the heat doesn’t do it, the ash in the air is so dense it fills the nostrils of any animal. It also buries land with upwards of several feet of ash. Lahars travel down valleys and is a mass of ash, rock, water, and any other thing in its path. It flows down the valley and when it stops, it is the consistency of concrete. No living thing survives. Stay away. The Puyallup Valley is most vulnerable from a Rainier eruption.

Don’t live right on the coast either. Earthquakes can generate tsunamis that will sweep away anything in their paths, sometimes far inland. In addition, sea level rise will drown lots of development.

Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains. Fault at base of mountains

Moving east, the Salt Lake mountain front is overdue for a big earthquake. The city developed at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, with a huge fault at their base that moves fairly regularly. Watch out, people, Zion is going to shake.

Another place to avoid is Florida. A beautiful place with amazing wildlife, the peninsula is just a slow moving disaster punctuated by somewhat lesser disasters. The biggest problem, it is all limestone. Not just limestone but limestone honeycombed with water filled voids. The voids are growing as the abundant rainfall soaks in and dissolves even more limestone. Sinkholes are the result. There are more all the time. In addition, Florida is low and flat. Low enough for much of it to go under as seal level rises. It’s happening. Every flood tide, water flows out of manholes in subdivisions north of Miami. The rise will continue, and Mr. Trump isn’t helping.

Charlotte Harbor

Oh, and there are the hurricanes. They sure do make a lot of messes. Climate change is predicted to increase the number and intensity of the storms. My late in-laws lived for a time in one of those retirement trailer parks on Charlotte Harbor, on the Gulf coast. The trailer park is gone, thanks to Hurricane Charley in 2004. My in-laws had moved to Mt. Dora before the hurricane. Mt. Dora is in the middle of the state on high ground (around 300 feet). They have had 77 hurricanes since 1930. One of the storms knocked out power for two weeks.

The only time I have had real reason for fear while in an airplane was when we flew into Orlando during a thunderstorm. We were on approach when I saw the storm hit us. The visibility went to zero and turbulence rocked the plane. The pilot shoved the throttles forward and went around. By the time we circled around, the storm had moved on.

The entire East Coast is also hurricane country. The ocean also seems to want to move inland. Don’t be in the way. The ocean is rising. The coast is moving west.

New Orleans After Katrina

The Gulf Coast is also a danger zone. Subject to hurricanes, low lying areas can also be flooded by rising rivers. The Mississippi Delta is also no place to live. It is sinking. The Mississippi River mud is going over the continental shelf, thanks to the Corps of Engineers channeling the river straight to the gulf rather than allowing it to build the delta. The river is going to win. It will not allow itself to be contained for long. Louisiana, beware.

Go up the river to New Madrid, Missouri south of Memphis. Earthquake country. The last time it shook, bells rang in Boston. That was in 1812, when the population in the quake region was small. It is small no more. St. Louis is vulnerable.

Tornado

Now that we are in the Midwest, let’s discuss tornadoes. The entire region is at risk, with devastating storms anywhere. Tornado Alley, from Texas through Oklahoma and to Kansas, Missouri, South Dakota, and Iowa has the most danger, but anywhere east of the Rockies has some risk.

The general idea here is that nowhere is completely safe, nature being what it is, but there are some areas that I would not live in. I think I will stay in Colorado away from those canyons that like to flood. Oh, wait, if Yellowstone lets loose, we’re toast.

Posted in Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Mt. St. Helens, Stories, Subsidence, Tornadoes, Volcanos

rat in cage two bottles

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Bill One comment

The World Famous Green River Formation, for oil shale, not beauty

About fifty million years ago the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River did not exist. The area was surrounded by the Wind River Mountains, the Uintah Mountains, the San Juans, the Uncompahgre Plateau, and the newly formed Rocky Mountains. This huge area had no outlet to the sea. The climate was similar to our current Gulf Coast, warm and moist. During the six million years we are exploring, things changed. Lakes formed and receded, land rose and subsided, and through all this the surrounding highlands were sending their sediment into the lakes.

The Green River Formation is the result of all the sedimentation. It is up to ten kilometers in depth, thinner at the margins. At first the lakes were fresh water, but later became saline, leaving large deposits of carbonate rocks. The trona deposits at Green River, Wyoming are some of the richest in the world. The margins are sandstone and conglomerate interlaced with the fine silt that filled most of the basin. The formation is rich in the fossils of the abundant life in the lakes. They are world famous for their variety and abundance.

There was an anoxic layer at the bottom that preserved the organisms settling there. The lakes were abundant in blue-green algae. The remains of the algae are the source of the oil shale deposits the region is known for. The oil shale is there in millions of barrels, but it is expensive to extract the petroleum from the rock. It may never be commercially viable, but the formation has been extensively studied as a result.

Green River Formation Map

Standing in my home town of Fruita looking north, the white cliffs behind the Book Cliffs are the Green River Formation. The Roan Plateau is huge, but does not attract visitors like the red rock country to the south. A huge exposure is the highlands west of I-70 from Rifle to DeBeque Canyon.

My interest is from visiting ranchers and hunting in the Douglas Pass area in my youth. Most of our visits were to ranches in the Green River Formation. The elevations varied greatly. The ranches were along West Salt Creek, but there were back country roads that went from sagebrush desert to piñon-juniper to oak brush shaly hillsides with sandstone rims to high country timber with world class mud. In fact, the mud is world class everywhere in the region.

Back before four wheel drive became common, there was a pile of rocks at the bottom of every big hill. Load them in the back of your pickup, go where you planned, and unload them on the way home. There is a network of canyons with side canyons branching off. All of it is fine deer habitat. My favorite places were at the head of a canyon with the wind in my face and a view of the LaSal Mountains and the Uncompahgre Plateau in the distance. Flat, wooded country gives me the creeps.

Access to a lot of the country is difficult. Most of the land is BLM land, but the early ranchers homesteaded the choice land that had water. The private land meant locked gates. We knew some of the ranchers, family friends. Hunting season was a big deal. There were maybe a dozen or more people, hunting during the day and drinking and playing poker at night. The big ranch house had a big kitchen with a wood burning stove along with the stove in the big main room. There was a light plant in the shed next to the house. It looked like no generator you see these days. There were also lots of Coleman lanterns when the light plant failed. Good times and lots of venison. The unheated bunkhouse was upstairs.

Douglas pass was up the main road, gravel in those days. It isn’t that high by Colorado standards, but made up for it with the switchbacks up the head of the canyon to the summit up through that shale. When the shale is wet, it moves. The road trapped the runoff, wetting the soft shale, and most every spring one or more places slid. The mountainside now is braided with old road cuts. It wasn’t much of a main road in the 1950’s, but now there is so much oil and gas development that the road is a paved state highway that the highway department spends money on.

The road crosses the desert above the Highline irrigation canal before it goes into the canyon. It is on the Mancos shale, responsible for all that flat desert in Colorado and Utah that turns to grease when it is wet. There was one hill the road went over then descended into the wash on the north side. That meant the road was on a north facing slope for a distance. That hill was named Coyote, because it could bite and gnaw on you if it was wet. A bit farther north was a ten or twelve foot high rock on the side of the road, all by itself.

The county employee maintaining the road in those days had his grader blade scrape on that rock every time he bladed the road. It would leave a bump, so he would have to drag dirt over to level things out. One day he got fed up and dug that rock up and moved it off the road. It was probably a two day project, but he never had to fight that damn rock again.

After I could drive, I ran around that desert quite a bit. I learned how to drive a two wheel drive pickup in that greasy stuff from my father. He was the telephone man in Fruita, responsible for maintaining the toll line as far as Cisco, Utah. That meant navigating two ruts through the cheat grass and sagebrush. He could put a two wheel drive pickup into places that were a challenge for a Jeep. Rocks in the back, chains if needed, put it in second gear and putt along. He seldom used the granny gear or used the gas pedal. Those old Chevy sixes would just lug their way along.

I am as guilty as any back country explorer for spending most of my time in the Rocky Mountains or the Utah red rock country, but the Mancos Shale and the Green River formation are calling me. I just need to see if my tire chains are in good shape. I think I will go over Douglas Pass, loop around and look the Piceance Basin over. From Rifle I will go down to Plateau Creek (my father and grandfather said platoo crick) and up to Collbran to look at the big slide.

Posted in Colorado Mountains, Colorado Plateau, Colorado River, Federal Land, Geology, Green River, Green River Formation, Landslides, Oil Shale, Pipelines, Stories, Uncompahgre Uplift, Utah, Western Colorado

Weather

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Climate Change

2013 Flood

There is currently a lot of controversy about climate change and whether humankind has a role in the warming trend. While I think it is true that pouring huge amounts of sequestered carbon is the culprit, I don’t think it matters much for us here in Colorado and much of the west.

We live in a land of extremes except for the rainy Pacific Northwest, but, they have their earthquakes and volcanos. Here in Colorado, we dwell in a land of extremes. The west is dry, it snows in the mountains, the Front Range is kind of a mix, and it is pretty dry in the east. That varies from year to year. It varies a lot.

In the late nineteenth century it was a wet cycle in the eastern prairie, and the railroads made millions enticing settlers to buy their land and get rich farming. The population in eastern Colorado peaked then and has been declining ever since. The mountain ski areas have lots of snow some years and almost no snow other years. The western desert country looks dry and desolate most of the time, but I have seen it bloom in a stunning variety of color.

Then there are the floods, blizzards, and tornados, often followed by drought. The one thing we can count on is change. There are long term trends. Most archeologists think one reason the ancestral Pueblo Indians left southwestern Colorado was a prolonged drought cycle. Anyone who tries to raise dry land beans in that country can tell you not much has changed.

2013 Flood

Here along the base of the mountains we have the extremes as well. There was the drought of 2002, and the floods of 2013. The mountains create an unusual weather pattern that stalls along the mountain front, bringing more moisture than the land can handle. That is when lots of the mountains wash out into the flat country. It has been going on for more than sixty million years. The gravel in the Platte River in Nebraska is Rocky Mountain gravel. Some of the Louisiana mud is Long’s peak mud.

Some climate models say climate change is going to dry Colorado out, other models say it will be wetter. My money is on more extreme weather. Longer, more violent wet periods and long droughts. Look for more frequent floods, not the thirty or forty year cycle we have had since the first European-American settlers and miners arrived. Think about the tornados and hailstorms recently.

I like the extremes. We have our regular four seasons here but the winters are milder than in Iowa. It can get hot but there are few days over one hundred degrees, but not like southeastern Utah. I think that may change, hotter in the summer. I don’t think the winters will be colder. I can remember forty below in Boulder when I was flunking out of CU. Twenty below seems to be more the cold winter norm now. What I do not like is the hailstorms. I don’t think the insurance companies like them much either. Homeowners insurance costs keep rising. That hail is hard on the garden as well. We had only one tomato plant survive last year.

One of the big impacts of climate change will be on water supplies. The amount of precipitation may not change, but if it is warmer, the snowpacks will not last as long in the spring. That means more spring floods and a shorter runoff period, which will impact water storage. That could be bad news for the populated Front Range. People keep coming, but there will not be more water, and a lot of the big spring runoff will go out of the state. That will be good for the Sandhill Cranes in Nebraska, but bad for Parker and Highlands ranch.

I spent a long time in the water business, and it always disturbed me watching all that high quality drinking water being used to attempt to replicate Surrey or Connecticut foliage in the Great American Desert. All that bluegrass will have to go. The urban forest will have more drought-hardy trees. Denver Water’s customers have done a good job of conserving since the big drought of 2002, but the bluegrass model of landscaping continues. In Denver, daily water consumption is about 110 million gallons per day in winter. I the hot part of summer, it’s over 400 million gallons per day, most of it run out onto the ground.

At our house, we have significantly reduced the size of our lawn, but we still have a lot of crabgrass. It should be buffalo grass and blue grama, both native drought-resistant grasses. They don’t stay green all summer, so we are stalling and paying the water bill. Marijuana legalization is bringing lots of people to Colorado, and the economy is booming. Those people use water, and lots of water is used growing the stuff. One of the unintended consequences of legalizing pot is increased water consumption.

Myself, I am not too concerned about climate change for myself. After all I am 73 years old and don’t live on the coast. Long term change is a reality, but as John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long range we are all dead”.

Posted in Colorado, Earthquakes, Environment, Floods, Hailstorm, Money, Rain, Spring Flowers, Stories, Volcanos, Water Treatment, Weather, Winter

Time

Posted on March 27, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Time

Time is relative. It is all a matter of perspective. It is said that realized beings like Jesus or the Buddha lived entirely in the moment, which connects them with the timelessness of being. For mortals such as I, it is sometimes difficult to have a perspective greater than the next few hours. Carol and I do a weekly plan, setting our schedule for that span of time. For people in the corporate world, time usually means the bottom line for the quarter. Children see summer vacation as lasting a long time; for us old people, it’s over in a flash.

I seem to have several time perspectives. In my spiritual life, I attempt to be in the moment and in the eternal. In meditation, however, I find myself planning the next day or reviewing childhood events, not in some exalted state. My everyday life tends to be day by day, checking the weekly plan if I remember to. Often I can’t remember which evening I am supposed to cook.

I have developed something of a longer perspective on life as I age. I am shocked to realize that a lot of people were born in this century, which for me is a relatively short time. Y2K wasn’t that long ago. I can remember Senator Joe McCarthy and the Army-McCarthy hearings when the country was experiencing a right wing resurgence a lot like now. That time ended, as will this one, probably in November. I was in the Army when Kennedy was shot. Obama is in year eight of his presidency; we have watched his daughters grow up. As teenagers, I wonder if they think their dad is hopelessly clueless, even if he is The Man.

Newspaper Rock, Utah

My history professors talked about developing a historical perspective, to take a long view about human events. To some degree I succeeded. I can connect the pagan deities of Mesopotamia with elements of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Four thousand year old Greek myths influence our current thinking. Because of the American Civil War, I dislike grits, sweet ice tea, deep fried fish, y’all, and that strange flag. Most southerners are wonderful people, but I am not one of them. But, I feel a connection with the people who illustrated their world on the sandstone canyon walls of Western Colorado and Utah.

So, where are we? From “Do I have to go to the bathroom?”, to what’s to cook tonight, to the doctor’s appointment Thursday. From there, it’s my lifetime and all that has gone on, even to those kids born in 2009, when my pickup was built (with a faulty airbag).from there it is the span of human history as recorded by symbols such as writing, the digital cloud, or rock paintings. Then I go to archeology and the origins of humankind.

Next is yours and my favorite subject, geology and the universe. Time changes, from hours to days to weeks, years, lifetimes, and all of human history, all mere blinks in the span of geologic time. Four billion years ago our planet was a ball of very hot rock. 2.7 billion years ago what is now Denver was part of an island arc similar to Indonesia headed for a collision with Wyoming. Lots of things crash in Wyoming.

65 million years ago this place was a sea bottom, with shale accumulating that runs from South Dakota to central Utah. Denver has gone from a hunk of hot rock to an island, a sea floor, a place being buried in the stuff washing out of the Rockies as the glaciers melted, to a place with a lot of people and their accumulated toxic waste and a lot of used plastic.

The planet and the universe will go on, with humankind gone, mostly as a result of their own folly. What does it all mean? Maybe what is important is the time I took this morning to watch a big hawk fly over the DU campus looking for a little critter to eat.

Posted in Colorado Mountains, Extinction, Geology, Stories, Time, Wyoming

Boise Road Trip Part Two

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Bill 2 comments

In the first installment I got us as far as the Wasatch Front, and warned of the future apocalypse-earthquake waiting to happen there. I was on the way to Boise, and needed gas. I took an exit and pumped gas, moved the Tacoma to a parking spot, and went inside.

Pried Open Sliding Window

When I came out I saw my keys on the seat. Oops. No spare key. I have done this before, and it usually means breaking a window. The Tacoma has a sliding rear window, useful for ventilation in good weather. I borrowed a screwdriver from the guys parked next to me. I figured that was the cheapest window to replace if I had to break it.

The window has a plastic latch and I pried between the panes there. The glass bent and the latch popped open. I have tried those magnetic key holders and they always disappear. I’ll figure out a stash spot sometime.

On the road again, I drove through some arid hilly country-cow country, in the wind. I have always thought that Wyoming is the wind capital, but the wind has to come from somewhere, I guess it is northern Utah and Idaho.

Driving on north, near the Snake River it is irrigated farmland, reminding me of home. I was getting tired and stayed in Twin Falls. It’s not that far to Boise, but when I am tired I lose concentration, not good at 70 mph.

Oregon Trail Ruts

The Oregon-California Trail parallels the Snake in that region, so I went rut hunting. The Snake runs through a gorge in the Snake River Plain, so the trail left the river if there were alternate water sources. Those hills Idaho people call mountains also run parallel to the Snake a few miles north, and the trail ran there away from the river. Water was available from springs and creeks at the base of the hills. The water is gone now, victim of all the groundwater pumping by farmers.

The ruts are there, as well as the ruins of an attempt at a resort in the early part of the 20th century. I like following the trail, thinking about what it was like for the emigrants, traveling 8 to 10 miles per day, hoping for a better life at trail’s end. Many found the better life, many did not, and many died on the way.

On to Boise, seeing people I care about, and searching for Basque food. Headed home it was back to the Wasatch, then U.S. 40 east. I had never been west of Vernal, so it was new country for me. The highway rises through the Wasatch to Heber City, a nice town that reminded me of our Eagle River valley, with all the businesses supporting the ski resorts. The Wasatch Mountains are rhe easternmost range of the Basin and Range Province. The Basin and Range is being stretched as the Pacific Plate scrapes northward along the North American plate.

Uintah Mountains From US40

Leaving the Wasatch Mountains, we are back on the Colorado Plateau, with its northern boundary, the Uintah Mountains. The Uintahs are unique among North American mountain ranges, as they run east-west. They were uplifted at the same time as the Rockies, but I can’t find a good explanation of why they run east-west. There they are, and I drove east with mountains on the left and desert on the right. Come to think of it, the Book Cliffs and the Tavaputs Plateau also run east-west, but they aren’t called mountains because they are only 8000 feet high. The Uintahs have two thirteeners.

Highway 40 runs between the Uintahs and the Tavaputs. The Uintahs are important to the Salt Lake area, providing water for the growing population.They are also pristine, mostly roadless. The glaciers are gone, but they left dramatic peaks and broad mountain valleys. The core is the High Uintahs Wilderness,the rest Forest Service land providing summer range for sheep and cattle.

Next, Vernal. It reminds me of Cortez, Colorado and not in a good way. It is, however, a good jumping off spot for a lot of interesting country.

Green River Campground, Dinosaur National Monument

The eastern end of the Uintahs have Dinosaur National Monument, with its fossils and the amazing canyon of the Green River. I was camping down on the river one time a few years ago. My neighbors in the campground had some dogs they were letting run loose. I warned them about the skunk I had seen. Early next morning they learned about skunks and dogs and I got to hear some morning howls. I am glad I wasn’t in their car on the way out.

Maybell, Colorado is next, a ranching town isolated enough that the natives retain the western drawl, a dying accent. On to Craig with its coal controversy, then Steamboat on the Yampa. Pretty country. Then, drive over Rabbit Ears and Berthoud Passes, down to I-70 and a traffic jam. That meant I was close to home.

Posted in Green River, Oregon Trail, Road Trips, Stories, Utah

The Colorado Plateau Part Two

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Bill Leave a comment

Colorado Plateau Country

There is a lot of beautiful country on the Colorado Plateau, but there is the other side. The term many use is the stinking desert. My home town has an annual rainfall of about eight inches. Before the Utes were run out and ditches were dug, the Grand Valley was a sparse desert. The irrigation projects made much of the valley green, but north of the Highline Canal is the desert. It is a fairly barren desert, not like the Sonoran Desert with its green saguaro cactus.

Mancos Shale Soil

The soil, if you can call it that, is fairly infertile, high in salts, and high in toxic selenium. It’s called the Mancos Shale. The Mancos Shale, called the Pierre Shale east of the Rockies, runs from South Dakota to central Utah. It is an ancient sea floor, Cretaceous in age, of the inland sea covering much of North America. Shale is mud rock, laid down as the sea advanced and retreated over millions of years.

The lower part of the Bookcliffs and the valley floors are Mancos Shale. In its natural state it is a scrub grassland, supporting small populations of deer, antelope, prairie dogs, sage grouse, cottontails, and some Bison. When the Northern European Americans arrived, they saw grazing land. The sheep and cattle came. The ranchers did well for a few years, but their expectations were unrealistic for such a dry area. Soon, most of the good grass was gone, replaced by cheat grass and sagebrush.

The area between Delta and Grand Junction is a prime example. My father, born in 1903, lived in Grand Junction after 1918. He told me that at that time, there were extensive stands of tall bunch grasses. They are gone. That desert is one of the most barren stretches I am aware of. It is hilly, so irrigation water went to flatter areas. It is close to towns, so lots of ranchers grazed their stock on the land.

Much of the Mancos shale country is BLM land today. In the old days, the Land Office and the Grazing Service leased land to ranchers. There were allocations on the number of head allowed on each segment, but there was little enforcement. The grass mostly disappeared. Thus, the stinking desert.

I-70 from Palisade to the west of Green River, Utah is on the Mancos. Highway Six from where I-70 veers south almost all the way to Price is on the Mancos. Travelers on those highways have the bare Bookcliffs and the bare desert floor to look at for over 200 miles. Their impression was what tended to keep the canyon country to the south relatively isolated. Locals had all that magnificent country mostly to themselves.

Art in Salt Creek Canyon

The a uranium and oil and gas booms of the 1950s built a large network of roads and opened the canyon country up for tourism. Those flat deserts remain empty, along with the mostly shale country of the Bookcliffs and the Tavaputs Plateau to the North.

When I went to Arches in the 1950s, we drove down two tracks winding through the sand. This year during the height of the season, cars were lined up literally for miles. Canyonlands National Park is also crowded, people lined up. I remember going there and often seeing no one.

From Green River to Hanksville is mostly flat, dry desert, with 70 miles from the highway turnoff to the Maze District Ranger Station in Canyonlands. The greater part of Navajo country in southern Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona is fairly flat desert. Monument Valley is flat desert that happens to have some rocks sticking up. Have you ever driven from Albuquerque to Flagstaff on I-40? Flat desert.

Henry Mountains

The Colorado Plateau does have some other features. Mountains, tall, green, and wet, supplying water to the desert. Three ranges of mountains, the La Sals near Moab, the Abajos, known to locals as the Blues, and the Henry Mountains, near to nowhere. The La Sals are the tallest, over 12,000 feet. The Abajos and the Henrys stretch to 11,000 feet. They stand in contrast to the red rock country surrounding them, and provide a welcome relief. People go there in summer to cool off and enjoy the wildlife.

Geologically, the mountains are Laccoliths, formed by a neck of molten magma rising to a weaker junction between two layers of sandstone. At that junction the magma moves laterally, forming a mushroom shaped dome of igneous rock in the domain of sandstone. The overlying strata usually erode away, leaving the igneous core. The Henrys are the type location for Laccoliths, being the subjects of the earliest study, and displaying the domed shape.

Salt Creek Canyon

The three ranges are important to ranching, providing water, hay farming, and a summer range, with the stock wintering on the desert. Salt Creek, draining north from the Blues, has a canyon with year-round water, arches, and Ancestral Puebloan ruins and rock art. The canyon also provides access to a park in the midst of the Needles District of Canyonlands. I like that park because it was never grazed. It provides a look at the land before cattle came, trampling or eating everything, mangling stream banks, and bringing alien species like cheat grass. No I won’t tell you where it is. Go look for yourself.

Posted in Arches, Bookcliffs, Canyonlands National Park, Colorado Plateau, Colorado River, Environment, Geology, Green River, History, Memoirs, My Story, Southwestern Archaeology, Southwestern History, Stories, Utah, Western Colorado

The Colorado Plateau Part One

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Bill Leave a comment

Colorado Plateau Scenery

I am a child of the Colorado Plateau. I was born and grew up in Fruita, Colorado, and still think of Fruita as home, although I have lived along the Front Range of Colorado most of my life. The Grand Valley of the Colorado River is near the Grand Hogback, the eastern extent of the plateau in that area. The Grand Valley is green due to irrigation, but the annual precipitation averages around eight inches a La year, fairly typical of the Plateau.

I am sure that the center of the universe (well, my universe) is somewhere within 100 miles from the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. It is fitting, therefore that the Plateau is somewhat unique geologically. All those striking layers of varicolored rock formed into spectacular scenery by the work of the Colorado River and its tributaries are relatively undisturbed compared to the Plateau’s neighbors, the Rocky Mountains, the Basin and Range, the Wasatch and Uintah mountains and the Mogollan Rim in Arizona. Pretty neat neighbors, eh?

Those places have been folded, faulted, stretched lifted, collapsed, and otherwise deformed. The Plateau, on the other hand has remained relatively stable through much of geologic time. It is this big slab, poked, lifted, twisted, drowned, buried, and eroded several times but still mostly intact. There were just enough deformation and intrusion to make things interesting.

The reasons for this stability are still somewhat controversial, bit have to do with the Pacific Plate coming our way and north at about the rate your fingernails grow, and the North American Plate headed west at about the same speed. At different times they have behaved in different ways that, coupled with the somewhat thicker crust under the Plateau, have resulted in this unique region. I don’t have the space or understanding to explain all those processes, but we can see the result.

An interesting fact is that the entire plateau seems to be rotating clockwise as the Pacific Plate grinds along northward. That movement is also what is pulling the Basin and Range province apart. Don’t look for any big changes next week. This process is really slow. While all this plate movement is going on, our friends the Green and Colorado rivers just keep digging. On rare occasions you can see the digging, when there are exceptionally big thunderstorms during the summer monsoon. A lot of stuff goes into the rivers then. Today, Lake Powell is catching it, and will become one huge mud flat until the dam eventually fails.

Looking at all these processes requires a different sense of time than how we live from day to day. In geologic terms, sixty million years (60ma) is relatively brief. We think of our world as stable (unless you live in the Bay Area) but in truth, everything is on the move, it is just a bit slow.

Upheaval Dome

The Colorado River will eventually bring the entire plateau down to sea level. Look at Grand Canyon or any of the tributary canyons to see how it works. My favorite is the San Juan. Some fine canyons and not as cluttered up with people. Another place to see the processes of change is Upheaval Dome in Canyonlands National park. A great big rock came along and smashed down, forming a huge crater and shaking everything up for a long way around. You can see rocks turned to waves from that hit all the way to Dewey Bridge.

That big crater tried to form a lake, but it is dry there. The water did make its way to the river, cutting as it went, and now the crater has an outlet. The crater will get bigger as the cliffs erode back until it is just a depression, then, gone.

There is a plug of gypsum in the crater. When all that rock was blown out by the impact, the pressure on the stuff under the crater was lowered. Some of that stuff down there is salt, known as the Paradox Formation, which can flow. The salt goes into the river, but gypsum isn’t quite as soluble and there it is. The salt is from an ancient sea that alternated between filling and drying up as sea level rose and fell. That left a lot of salt which was then buried under a lot of rock.

The Dolores River Leaving the Paradox Valley

That salt moving around and being dissolved is responsible for much of the scenery in the Moab and surrounding areas. As it dissolves, some of the overlying rock drops down, creating some fairly large valleys. Paradox Valley, Sinbad Valley, Lisbon Valley (uranium, oil, and gas), Spanish Valley (Moab), Castle Valley, Fisher Valley, are all big grabens. They are big blocks that dropped down as the salt leached away. Paradox Valley and Spanish Valley have rivers coming out of a canyon on one side, and going across the valley into a canyon on the other side. Moab has the Colorado, Paradox has the Dolores. That makes for some fine scenery.

Paradox Salt Disrupting Things

The fins and arches in Arches and Canyonlands come from the same process on a smaller scale. All that magnificent scenery is a result of that ancient sea floor full of salt being buried by a colorful succession of rocks that the rivers and the wind could work on.

An exception to the salt influencing the process resulting in fins and arches is Rattlesnake Canyon in Colorado near Fruita. The river is solely responsible for the work. The arches are just as cool, and not all full of people.

Next time, some of the other interesting things about the Colorado Plateau, one of the most interesting places on the planet.

Posted in Arches, Colorado Plateau, Colorado River, Geology, Green River, Rattlesnake Canyon, Stories, Uncompahgre Uplift, Utah, Western Colorado

The Bookcliffs and the River

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Bill Leave a comment

Bookcliffs

The Book Cliffs are the neglected stepchildren of Western Colorado and Eastern Utah. That is somewhat ironic, because they stretch from Palisade and Mt. Garfield about 200 miles to Price, Utah. Rising about 1000 feet from the valley floor, they are the longest escarpment in the world. Above the Book Cliffs is a bench With the Roan Cliffs forming another escarpment Behind the cliffs is the Roan Plateau, rising to about 8000 feet in elevation. With the wide change in elevation and precipitation from eight inches annually to around thirty, there is wide diversity in plant and animal life. There are energy resources as well. Natural gas, tar sands, oil, coal, and that huge deposit of oil shale. The region is known as the Tavaputs Plateau.

The plateau is home to the Desolation Canyon Wilderness and due to the wide range in elevation and precipitation, a diverse range of plant and animal life. There are three reasons why the area is not very popular with visitors.

First, look south. Colorado National Monument, Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, Zion, and Grand Canyon National Parks. There are the three mountain ranges and all that wondrous red rock carved into some of the best scenery on earth.

Next, accessibility. Douglas Pass is the only paved road in the vast area. The many dirt roads are accessible only as long as they are dry. Traditionally, the only people there were stockmen and the Utes on their reservation. In recent times there has been much energy-related activity that comes and goes.

The third reason? Shale. It is not only shale, there are layers of sandstone, even limestone. It’s all gray or shades of tan. Driving on the drab Mancos shale landscape of I-70, looking north you see drab cliffs. More of the same gray rock, just standing up. Roads built on that shale changes into some of the most slippery substances known after a rain or snow.. People are just not inspired to go there.

Growing up in Fruita, Colorado, I spent quite a bit of time in areas on either side of the Douglas Pass road, which was gravel and dust at the time. We had rancher friends, and deer season was a big social scene. It is wild, mostly empty country, home to lots of cattle, some sheep, a few ranchers, and a lot of wildlife. It is also famous for some of the most treacherous mud in the world. There are some sandstone lenses (we called them rims), but it is mostly shale, a former lake bottom that now sits thousands of feet above the Grand Valley, where the people live.

Colorado National Monument. Bookcliffs on the horizon

I used to look at the Colorado National Monument with its red rocks to the south. To the north were the relatively drab Bookcliffs with the whitish Roan Plateau above them. Why the difference? The Monument is famous, with lots of information about the Uncompaghre Uplift lifting the Uncompahgre Plateau thousands of feet compared to the Grand Valley. As the plateau, erosion took the more recent rocks off, leaving the more resistant sandstone.

I thought some sort of uplift must have formed the Bookcliffs. Well, partly. When the entire Colorado Plateau was uplifted at the same time as the Rockies, The Colorado River just dug away, carrying the eroded rock to the sea. It is still digging, and is eroding those Bookcliffs to the north. Under the Bookcliffs are the rocks of the Monument. Someday the land will be fairly flat between Grand Junction and Craig. We won’t be around, however. These things take time.

So, the Colorado Plateau was uplifted and after that the Uncompahgre Plateau went up some more and wore down. The rocks exposed at the Monument are, a few miles north, well below the rocks of the Bookcliffs who are headed north as the river gnaws away. The Colorado River rules, it is just a bit slow.

Posted in Bookcliffs, Colorado Plateau, Environment, Geology, Stories, Uncompahgre Uplift, Western Colorado

Four Wheel Drive Equipment

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Bill 2 comments

Willys Jeep Wagon

I have been involved in four wheeling since childhood. Stuck up to the axles and high-centered in Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, and Wyoming. I like to get out where the country is wild and there aren’t too many people around. My favorite places are mountain passes in Colorado and the vast red rock country in Utah. I am not a hard core rock-crawler with a vehicle jacked up in the air with near tractor tires whining and rumbling down the street.

I have had International Scouts, Nissans, Dodges, and my current Toyota Tacoma. There is a long succession of Jeeps I have ridden in and driven. I have also been stranded in them. So, no Jeep for me, I just don’t trust them. There are lots of choices in four wheelers, but not as many choices for cheap four wheelers. I’m cheap.

1953 Chevy 2wd

I buy base model vehicles. I even bought one without air conditioning. 4x4s aren’t particularly cheap, but it is not necessary to spend $50,000 for a nice rig. My Dodge pickup had a small engine. Oh, wait, it wasn’t even four wheel drive, although I treated it like it was. I guess my willingness to use a two wheeler goes back to my youth, when we had a 1953 Chevrolet pickup. That was in the days when the only 4x4s were old military Jeeps and the venerable Dodge Power Wagon. Both were capable, but slow and fairly unreliable (35 mph in the Jeep, about 50 in a Power Wagon). Dad and I went hunting and fishing in that old Chevy. Dad was an amazing driver in the bad stuff. He used to maintain the telephone line from Fruita to Cisco, Utah across that adobe desert in a two wheel drive pickup. Up in the Bookcliff area, there used to be a pile of rocks at the bottom of a bad hill. If it was muddy or snowy the driver would stop, load the rocks in the back of the pickup, go about his business, and unload the rocks at the bottom of the hill on the way out.

Two times we went places in that old Chevy where no sane person would go without four wheel drive. Once, we were deer hunting up in the Douglas Pass country after a storm. The road was muddy with that slick stuff Western Colorado is famous for. We drove down into a saddle that was steep at either end. We couldn’t get up the hill. A newer pickup came by that had a limited slip differential, new at the time, and went right up the hill. We had to put the tire chains on.

Battlement Lakes Road

The other adventure was going fishing at the Battlement Lakes road on Grand Mesa. That road wasn’t steep, but was full of big rocks and mud holes. It was narrow, with little room to maneuver around obstacles. Dad put that old pickup in second gear, not even the granny gear, and mostly idled along thar road with that old Chevy six lugging along. The rocks in back rolled around and smashed my good spinning rod. We met some guys in there in a Jeep. They could not believe we got in there with a two wheel drive pickup. I don’t think the fishing was very good that day, but no matter.

Scout I

After he retired, Dad got into four wheeling. His first one was an old Jeep station wagon with a 283 Chevy V8. That thing was good in the bad stuff, but leaked oil and had some ignition problems. The next one was an International Scout I. Pretty primitive, but capable with one exception. There was a place on Elephant Hill in Canyonlands named Scout Slot. It was narrow, in solid rock with a ledge that was in just the right place to break the transfer case of a Scout.

After that was an older model Jeep Cherokee. It was pretty good, and it went around the White Rim Trail with some friends. Next was a Scout II. It was good, but one night coming off Elephant Hill it quit. Dad and I walked to the Canyonlands Resort and got the owner to tow us with his Ford pickup. We bounced a short distance and the Scout started. The carburetor float must have been stuck and bounced loose. I sold the Scout for the Dodge pickup.

2009 Tacoma

I did two wheel drive for a while then bought a Nissan Frontier. It was capable, lasted quite a while, then I crashed it on ice in Glenwood Canyon. Now it is the Toyota. It is good, but I gave it a dent on Pearl Pass. Now I have a Detroit Trutrac limited slip differential which should help. Summer is coming, and I’m ready to get out there.

Posted in Current Activities, Four Wheeling, Memoirs, My Story, Stories

Part Three, the Keystone XL Pipeline

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Bill 3 comments

Pipeline Construction

When I was growing up in Fruita, Colorado in the 1950’s, the El Paso Natural Gas Company built a 26″ natural gas pipeline from north to south through Western Colorado. In flat country, laying a pipe is fairly straightforward. To lay a pipeline, dig, lay pipe, weld, wrap, and backfill. In the Colorado Plateau, the pipeline not only goes from point to point, it goes up and down.

North of Fruita, The line had to go over Douglas Pass. As Colorado passes go, it is no big deal. Not that high, but near the top there is steep and unstable ground famous for landslides. The trenchers, welding machines, side-boom tractors handling pipe, and bulldozers; all had to be winched up and down the mountainside. That is a slow, expensive process. To us in Fruita, it meant that our little town had lots of pipeliners for several weeks.

I mostly saw the pipeliners in Hill’s Cafe, where we often had dinner. The stereotype is that pipeliners are a wild bunch, but we didn’t see it in the cafe. They were quiet, well-behaved, some prayed before eating, and I liked them. After all, if you are from Bald Knob, Arkansas, how wild can you be?

That pipeline brings gas from Wyoming, Western Colorado, and Eastern Utah to markets in Texas and the southwest, including California. To my knowledge, it has few problems and quietly does its job. I think that pipeline has shaped my thinking about pipelines in general.

Today there is much oil and gas development in North Dakota and Alberta. A pipeline network exists to deliver crude oil from there to the refinery complex on the Gulf Coast. It can’t deliver all that is being produced. Proposed is a new line, the Keystone XL Pipeline that would run west of the existing line, picking up crude from the Williston Basin in North Dakota as well as the synthetic crude from the Alberta tar sands.

There is a lot of opposition for several reasons. One reason is fear of leaks. Big spills, contamination, fire, ground water contamination, and all the risks that go with moving lots of nasty stuff that burns. That Alberta synthetic crude is even nastier than regular crude. Its carbon footprint is much higher than oil from traditional sources. It is thick and has to be heated to separate it from the sand. Most of the crude oil refined here in Denver is tar sand oil.

Oil Car Train

The fact is that as long as demand for petroleum products stays high, that Alberta crude will go south, but in rail cars if the pipeline isn’t built. Here in Denver, there are many tank car trains headed south, competing with coal trains for right of way. In the upper Midwest there is so much oil traffic that farmers are having difficulty shipping their grain. Pipelines are safer than rail cars for shipping petroleum.

Some of the opposition is for environmental reasons. Tar sand crude is bad. Pipelines are bad. Fossil fuel is bad. All true. The solution is not stopping pipelines, but reducing demand. How to reduce demand? Make fossil fuels more expensive with higher taxes. Use the tax money to develop alternative energy and transportation. Build rails not freeways. Tell that to Republican legislators.

In the meantime, I think the pipeline is the best alternative until our energy policies change.

Posted in Colorado History, Energy Policy, Environment, Fear, My Story, Oil and Gas Policy, Pipelines, unjustified Fears

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