How are you going to send me off to difficult places in search
of wonders after I’ve seen The Wave. It’s
like asking, where do you go from Heaven?
I wish I’d saved The Wave for that final day when I’m barely able to
make it there, but not back. Nevertheless,
life continues with too little knowledge and too many alternatives. So off I went as if The Wave were just another
day’s goal, another hike.
On May first of this year, I made application for a permit to
enter Coyote Buttes South, in Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and did so
online without the lottery uncertainty required for The Wave. I simply had to say, three months in advance,
that I wished to go there on a particular day.
Had I applied any later, all slots would have been filled.
So it was that I drove in morning darkness to the top of 8,000-foot Kaibab Plateau, passing this sunrise for some vermillion not in the cliffs.
I turned north onto rough-and-dirty House Rock Valley Road and drove thirteen miles over rocks and bumps to where two-wheel-drive vehicles can go no farther. Then I walked two miles to meet my little colored friend and to understand his tracks.
Another day in the Vermillion Cliffs, hiking to another remote wonder, though here the cliffs are a misnomer with only vermilion to indicate the formation.
I came to Paw Hole Trailhead where no trail begins, and where the sign says a permit is required. Mine was dangling from the back of my Pack. Footprints headed in several directions, so I ignored them and headed north because map and compass led me that way. And soon I came to a village of teepees, shown here.
Here is a teepee up close. Perhaps it was inspiration for Paiute architects many centuries ago.
Little people live in these cliffs, their doors perhaps a foot high, or so it seems. Everything seems out-of-proportion here in the Paw Hole
Sand dunes once shifted here and changed with winds many millions of years ago. See how the layers change directions, perhaps with changing winds or seasonal shifting of wind.
Here is a riddle for all you armature geologists. If these layers were formed in ancient sand dunes, where winds shifted and created the different directions of sand buildup, which eventually hardened into sandstone, then why is this layer looped back, so much that it appears upside down? Anyone who correctly explains this will receive an very ancient prize when I return.
Maybe there was something there that the sand fell around like the root of a tree or the skeleton of a snake (looks like a snake) and then the sand fell around the thing. But after a while the sand was pressurized and hardened and then the thing whatever it was decayed leaving a vacuum which was then filled with more sand and then was pressurized into stone in turn...well it is a creative thought.....
ReplyDeleteWelcome, Susan, and thanks for being the first to answer, and quite creatively. If there was something that the sand fell around, then what explains the parallel lines left of and above the “snake”?
Deleteor maybe the sand fell and then there was some tectonic plate movement and the sand hardened accourdingly....
ReplyDeleteor maybe it was the bas relief of an ancient stone carver...
ReplyDeleteHello and hugs dear Sharon and the elusive Susan... not usually found in local climes... but here amidst the dunes! We just got home from some of our own adventures in Colorado, as you know --so slow and catching up as usual, but have been loving your beautiful pictures of this really amazing world. It seems to me that anything can happen in any direction with the ancient history and winds over ages... I think there used to be lakes here... it looks like water on the shore, rising and going back in a swirl perhaps to me... blown by the wind now or then and then again... all of it reminds me of how planetary science looks at other planets and tries to discern what happened there long long ago on other planets, by the signs that are left. I notice that culebra (snake) is a common word to describe the rivers and formations that mimic them,in that area, and others... this seems like one... part of a long gone snaking river. That rose and curved into the present... Look forward to seeing both of you! We leave for Italy on Sept 1, so we will see if our paths cross, like streams flowing before then! We are back Sept 23.
ReplyDeleteCulebra—well, in some artistic way perhaps. You are never lacking in imagination even if an image comes from someone else. Lake deposits are possible except that geologists have looked at the grains of sand microscopically, and found them rough like they are in sand dunes we find today, not smooth like in lake and stream deposits we find here and now. Such riddles are “part of a long gone snaking river that rose and curved into the present. And we have the audacity to say we can imagine what happened 100 million years ago.
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