The 10 most incredible places I have stood

In celebration of Earth Day, Geotripper started a series of blogs where he identifies the most [geologically] incredible places he visited. In his opening blog, he encouraged his readers to play along so I started making my list. I found the endeavor harder than it seems because for I lived in Utah, and each and every place in southern Utah that I visited could have been part of this list. In refining my list, I tried to include places that were more than just incredible for their geology, but also hold special meaning to me.

Here is my list (unfortunately I don't have pictures of some because many of the places were experienced in pre-digital camera and pre-geology days so my limited images are often not in  focus or focused on the geology):

10. Black Box Canyon, San Rafael Swell, Utah - There are a number of slot canyons I could have chosen, but in the end it came down to this one because it had all of the slot canyon features (and was one of the most rugged hikes I had ever been on). Although not as narrow or deep as a some of the other canyons of the San Rafael Swell, the rugged nature of this canyon makes this the only slot canyon I have visited in Southern Utah that we saw no other groups (It was also one of the most exhausting day hikes I have ever been on, 12 hours with several sections we had to swim, and early on there is 15-20' drop that makes you commit to the whole canyon.) In addition to the slot features, I was impressed by the snags and logs wedged 20-30' above the canyon bottom from flash floods.

9. Eagle's Rock, Lake of the Woods, Ontario -Eagle's Rock is not much more than a high cliff on one of the islands in Lake of the Woods. But geologically it is part of the Canadian Shield. Recent ice ages have removed all the overlying sediments exposing Archean Aged grandiorite. These rocks represent some of the oldest rocks on the surface.

8. Silver King Mine, Park City, UT. I tried to think of one of the places I had been under ground, the two that were most memorable were an old copper mine near Watersmeet, MI, and the Silver King Mine in Park City UT. Although the copper mine was still actively being mined for pure copper, for this list I choose the Silver King Mine which is until recently was open as a tourist attraction. Parts of the mine are still being dewatered today as part of the water system for the Park City but unfortunately the tours of the mine are no longer available to the public. The highlight of the tour was when the tunnel we were in (on  a railroad cart) goes past a long straight drainage tunnel. This tunnel was completed in the 1920's by miners boring through the hard (mostly granitic) rocks from both directions, but it is so straight that as you go past it you can sere the opening into daylight over 1000 feet away.

7. Lassen Peak, California - I have climbed on two of the Cascade Volcanoes and both  were incredible experiences. I would have chosen Mt. Shasta, but the altitude got me before making the final summit. So Mt. Lassen it is.

6. Yosemite Valley, California - Truly a majestic place and the last two time I have been to Yosemite it has been in the winter or early spring. The snow in the valley keeps the number of people down, but it also muffles the sound running through the valley. In the winter the water falls are sometimes barely a trickle, but the ice cones at the bottom and the frost from the sprays is a beautiful scene.

5. Many Glacier Valley, Glacier National Park, Montana - I spent a summer working as a concessionaire for one of the hotels in Glacier national Park so there are several memorable moments and places within the park, but to me the most incredible place is the Many Glacier Valley. Many Glacier Valley is really the junction of three glacially carved alpine valleys, and up one of them Grinnell Glacier still is (barely) holding on. The valley is full of alpine glacier features such as Aretes (The Garden Wall), Truncated spurs (Grinell Peak), Paternoster Lakes,  hanging valleys, cirques and tarns. The place I chose was the top of Swiftcurrent pass, standing on the narrow arete of the Garden Wall, looking down the Swiftcurrent Valley.

Near Artist's Vista, Makoshika State Park

4. Makoshika State Park, Montana - For four years we lived in Montana, we had Makoshika State Park in the back yard of the Community College I was teaching at. Makoshika is a badlands park with extraordinary sedimentary features with the added feature that the K/T boundary runs right through the park so has you drop down into the many coulees and washes you enter into the Late Cretaceous age and dinosaur fossils are abundant. (Most of the fossils are bone fragments and chips but I did run across some ceratopsin frills and a jaw bone). But for some politicking in the 1930's Makoshika might have become a national park. That it didn't is a mixed blessing because it is much less busy than the nearby (and entirely Cretaceous aged) Teddy Roosevelt National Park, but at the same time many of the paleontological resources are being lost because it does not get the attention (money and personnel) as it would if it were a national site.

Lake Baikal

3. Shore of Lake Baikal, Siberia - As an undergraduate, I was fortunate to spend a summer doing a language program at University of Siberia. At the end of the program the group took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Lake Baikal. Unlike the American Great Lakes, there was almost no development along the shores with near pristine landscapes to the north, barely visible across the lakes were snowcapped mountains just visible through the clouds.

2. Ice Cave in the Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska - While in college, I participated in the Juneau Icefield Research Program. Before heading up onto the icefields, we took a day trip to the toe of the Mendenhall Glacier. Where a stream was exiting the glacier, a large ice cave had been carved, and inside the light was filtered into an eerie glacial blue. 

1. Goblin Valley State Park, UT - The first time I went to Goblin Valley, Halloween was on a weekend and near a new moon, so my friends and I saw the name and figured it would be the perfect place to go celebrate. I was immediately taken in by the strange hoodoos and desolate feel and it has been my favorite place ever since. The story I often tell is that even though I lived in Utah for over 7 years, I never made it to see the Grand Canyon. On 5 separate occasions, I set out planning on going to the Grand Canyon, but I would make it to Goblin Valley the first night, and then never get much further.  A couple of years ago we had the opportunity to go back, and though it is a fair bit more developed it is still my favorite place.

Palouse Falls

The first year we lived here in Oregon, just after one of my geology classes had covered the Columbia River Basalts, a couple of my students took a weekend trip to Palouse Falls. They came back from their trip excited because they had been able to take what we had talked about in class and apply it to what they saw at the falls.

Because the Falls are nominally on the way to Spokane, WA or Moscow, ID, I would try and make a side trip to the falls on one of our trips for one of Sam's athletic competitions. Every time we would make the trip, I would plan on stopping on the way home, but something always came up (a snowstorm, a sick traveling companion, cold weather, a wrong turn, a snowstorm, lack of daylight due to a championship softball game, another snow storm) and I hadn't yet made it to the falls. I was finally able to make it this years when I had a couple of extra hours on a trip to Spokane.

The Palouse River cuts a narrow canyon through several prominent layers of Columbia River Basalts, and at the lower falls, there is an alcove where the river drops 56.6m (186ft) into a large plunge pool. From the falls, the river continues about 6 miles to where it empties into the Snake River above Lower Monumental Dam.

Lower Palouse Falls

It was a nice spring day, so marmots were out sunning themselves on the cliff side. It was a great lesson in camouflage that when we got about 5 meters away it took a while to pick the two marmots out from the dark basalt rocks along the edge.

Two marmots enjoy the spring sun.

From the main parking area, a short trail heads north to an overlook of the Upper Falls. From the overlook, a trail leads down into a wide side canyon and to the upper falls. Because we were limited on time, we only hiked down to the level of the UP Railroad grade for a view down the canyon.



View of Upper Palouse Falls from the Railroad grade.

At the base of the cascades of the North Falls, the river makes an almost 90 degree bend. This bend is because during the Ice Age Floods, the path of the Palouse River was diverted into a series of NW-SE trending faults.

The ancestral Palouse River used to follow the Washtucna Coulee to Kahlotus and Connell some 50 miles before ultimately discharging into the Columbia River near Hanford). But the volume of water resulting from the Ice Age Flood pushed the river out of its ancestral channel. The steeper gradient of the fault dominated channel allowed river to carve a deep enough canyon to capture the flow path after the floods receded. The abrupt transition from the ancestral channel into the nearly straight fault driven system can be seen in this Google Earth screen shot.

Google Earth image showing the fault channel of the modern Palouse River

Cascade Volcanoes in Spring

We haven't had a lot of time to do geology lately, Sam has been busy playing softball, and in general we have had a typical rainy spring. 

However last weekend we had a gorgeous two days, and as luck would have it, Sam's team played a tournament in central OR. On the trip down Friday night, we had clear shots of Mt. Hood in Silhouette above the Gorge,

Looking west at Mt. Hood down the Columbia George at about sunset

Sunday, I got up early to enjoy a little walk along the Deschutes River Canyon, and I was treated to show as the sun rose, casting its light on Mt. Jefferson.

Mt. Jefferson from near Cline Falls State Park

It was a gorgeous weekend, and Sam's team won the tournament.

Terroir

I met Scott Burns at the Pacific Northwest Section NAGT conference last June.

Scott Burns at 2011 PNW NAGT Field Conference in Malheur Count, Oregon

Over some bottles of wine at the conference, it was suggested that I try and have some geology lectures at my community college. Since our berg is located at the edge of two separate viticulture regions,  I invited Scott to come out and talk about Terroir, the relationship between geology/geography and wine. It turns out that this year Scott is on sabbatical having been selected as the AEG Richard Jahns lecturer, he is travelling around the world giving talks on Terroir, Missoula Floods, Landslides, and or the Cascadia Subduction zone.

Washington Viticulture Areas

I do not know much about wine, and I am far from a wine connoisseur (the subtle flavors and bouquets elude me), but the talk answered a couple of questions I had (and some I didn't even know I had). One thing which has vexed me is that when we moved to our current house, I planted a grape vine. In three years, I haven't gotten even a blossom, much less a grape so I have been watering and fertilizing it to try and get it healthy enough to produce grapes. It turns I have it all wrong. not only do vines typically take three years to mature, in order to get them to bear fruit, you have to stress them by withholding nutrients and/or water.

The other misconception I had had was that the reason Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon were prime wine growing regions was because of the volcanic soils. While it is true that many of the Oregon wines are from volcanic soils, that is mostly in the cooler/rainier western part of the state where the lace of soil nutrients can be the stress that promotes fruit growth. Here in the eastern part, it is more likely to be water (or the lack thereof) that stresses the vine into producing grapes, thus most of the vineyards in this area are in richer silty soils deposited by the Missoula Floods.

Most of the main channel flooding occurred north and west of here, but the natural constriction of the Columbia River Gorge caused water to backflow up the John Day and Umatilla drainages (Lake Condon). A similar lake (Lake Lewis) was formed by flood waters backing up the Walla Walla drainage due to the restriction at Wallula Gap.

Missoula Flood transient Lakes created by topographic constrictions

The emplacement of these flood deposit silts answered my final question, which was that despite similar climates, grapes were being grown in the Walla Walla Valley and in the Hermiston Area, but not further up the Umatilla River in the Pendleton or Mission areas. The simple answer is that the soils aren't there because the deposits were constrained to the narrow river valleys. I suspect that if I spend some time along the Umatilla River Valley, I should be able to correlate where the Umatilla river valley constricts near Echo to the deposition of Missoula Flood soils.

In all it was a good talk, it gave me more things to think about regarding the geology of the area, and learning more about terroir is a good reason to stop in some of the local wineries.

San Juan Islands

In a previous series of posts I mentioned that for the Rodeo Holidays we went to Mt. Baker after being at the San Juan Islands. We did not spend long on the San Juan, but we did get a flavor for the area. The day started with a stop at Deception Pass State Park. The park encompasses both sides of the channel that forms between Fidalgo Island and Widbey Island and the Iconic bridge that joins the two island.

Deception Pass connects the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Skagit Bay, and during the change in tides, the difference in response rate between the Bay and the Strait cause a visible current through the pass, sometimes resulting in standing waves and whirlpools. We came through just as the tide was turning so we were able to see the current, but not the large standing waves.

From Anacortes (just north of Deception Pass), we took the ferry to the San Juan Islands. The San Juan Islands consist of an archipelago that represents a submerged mountain range that connects Vancouver Island with the mainland. The Islands are largely composed of Paleozoic aged sedimentary rocks which have been folded into a broad east/southeast plunging syncline. The sedimentary rocks have been intruded and metamorphosed by Mesozoic aged igneous activity. During the Pleistocene, the mountains were heavily glaciated so many of the straits and channels have fjord like characteristics.

Within the Paleozoic aged sedimentary rocks are lenses of Devonian aged limestone. These limestone deposits are accessible on San Juan Island near Roche Harbor and at Lime Kiln Point on San Juan Island. In fact Roche Harbor was a company town dedicated to the production of Lime, and much of the historic town infrastructure has been retained by the resort that now owns the town.

Lime was produced from the Limestone at Roche Harbor and (what is now) Lime Kiln State Park beginning in 18608. Some of the old lime furnaces are still standing, including this one at Lime Kiln State Park (built in 1918).

1918 Vintage Lime Furnace

According to the informational sign located at the site, typically two loads of lime were produced each day by dropping softball sized chunks of limestone in a hole at the top at the top of the furnace.

Limestone chunks into a hole at top

3 1/2 loads cords of wood per load were into the sides to keep the furnace temperature near 1100 degrees C.

Wood added on the side

The heat removed the CO2 leaving behind powdered lime (CaO) that fell through a screen in the furnace. The lime was scraped from the furnace into barrels (100 per load) and shipped by sea to Roche Harbor where it was then sent to Seattle and beyond.

Finished Lime out here

Lime production continued from the San Juan's until 1923. Although the limestone was high quality for producing lime, the fact that lime explodes on contact with water meant shipping lime from the San Juans was hazardous, eventually lower quality limestone deposits inland that could be shipped by rail became more economical and the lime business in the San Juans ended.

Fort Rock

On the way home from Crater Lake, we drove through Southern Oregon. My primary purpose was to stop at Fort Rock State Natural Area.

Fort Rock is a volcanic tuff ring that stands about 200 feet above the surrounding paleolake bed. It is a near circular ring of lapilli tuff that is the result of a Surtseyan eruption 50-100 ka. Most of the larger clasts in the tuff are welded glasses and pumice

But in some places small basalt bombs are included too

Subsequent weathering by wave action created an opening on the south side of the ring, so you can hike inside the ~1 mile wide crater. Where the waves interacted with the structure, along the outside and along the cut, there is a visible bench. At other tuff rings in the area, these benches show evidence of human habitation 9-10 ka

Bench on edge of Opening

After Fort Rock, we cruised through the desert high plains of the Christmas Valley and into Burns, where we turned north to home. We were all ready to be home, so we didn't stop to geologize along the way, just a reason to go back and explore again.

Utah Museum of Natural History

We went to Salt Lake City to visit Sam's grandparents over the Christmas holidays. They informed us that the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah history had moved into a brand new space. We make it a habit to visit natural history museums, and from my time at the UofU, the Utah museum has always been one of my favorite.

The major corporate donor for the new building was Rio Tinto, so the building had a beautiful copper sheeting and a great location up on the "benches" right next to Red Butte Gardens.

It was clear that much of the emphasis in the new facility was highlighting the extensive collection of dinosaurs. The building was designed for museum gowers to enter directly into the hall of dinosaurs, and snake their way through (most of) the rest of the exhibits. (We ended up missing the space science and formation of the planet exhibits because they were on another floor and unconnected. Only when I looked at the map as we were leaving did I realize we had missed it.)

Allosaurus

I really appreciate it when you can get a scale for how big some of these creatures were. This picture of the sauropod was taken from the balcony overlooking the dinosaur area. It was my best attempt at getting the whole of the skeleton in the field of view of the camera.



This picture was a little closer up, and uses Sam as scale for the hind foot of the Sauropod. The perspective is a little off because of the distances, but the total ground to hip distance is a little over 3 meters.

Utah his famous for it Jurassic aged dinosaurs, but I didn't know there were Cretaceous aged fossils too. The museum also had a small room (and map) with some of the Cretaceous dinosaurs found in the state.

There was also a cast of the skull of a T. Rex (I think Big Al). I remember this cast from the museum when it was at the previous location, and it is certainly an impressive piece. My only real critisicm is that it is in a display case of Cretaceous aged fossils found in Utah, and it is suggestive that it is a Utah fossil (to be fair, the tag identifying it says T. Rex skull from Montana, but I still found it misleading).

One of my favorite displays, and one that certainly highlights the advantage of a new bigger space, was a wall with a cladogram showing different ceratopsin skulls.

The remodel also updated many of the informational signs. They were much more colorful and had good interpretive content.

From the hall of dinosaurs, the meandering path went to an area on the ecosystems (past and present) of the Lake Bonneville and the Great Salt Lake. It was a nice display. but it seemed a little out of context. Also, I spent a good amount of time looking for a display, or information about the draining of Lake Bonneville through Red Rock Pass, but I never found it. Maybe because it happened in Idaho...

From the Salt Lake area, it was back into general geology and a discussion of the ecoregions of the Basin and Range Provincne. A nice diagram of the Rock Cycle

A somewhat crude, but interactive display where you got to pull apart a piece of plywood to see the formation of Basins and Ranges

 A seismograph from two (there was room for three) locations tracked by the University of Utah Seismograph station


Yellowstone Seismograph on Left, Little Cottonwood Canyon on Riight

The main hallway ended in the biology area, which certainly much updated and much improved from the 1960s vintage stuffed animal displays that the old museum had. But when I got here, I thought where were the minerals! The old museum had one of the best displays of minerals I had ever seen. You could have taught a whole segment on minerals to a intro geology class at the previous display. It was a spaceous display showing minerals by property (hardness, cleavage, mineral habit, luminesence, etc), by family (silicate, oxide, sulfide) etc, as well as displays minerals common to Utah. I LOVED the old display and figured with the new building it have updated displays.

I was disappointed to say the least. The new Mineral display was one tiny hallway, located out of the way, with only about 1/4 of the minerals on display and not with the same level of detail.
.

Some of the old displays had been moved, like the minerals that exhibit, flourescence

But most of the new displays just showed minerals, with their associated names.

In all, the new museum had a much nicer biology display, and the focus on dinosaurs was evident. But I was sadly dissapointed that the flow of the museum didn't always transition well from one area to the next. The museum nicely went through the first four floors, but then the space science and mineral displays were off the path and woud be easy to miss. But most of all I mourn the loss of what had been one of the most complete mineral displays (second in my mind only to the Smithsonian).

One final observation, on the day went Sam's Grandmother was in a wheelchair. I think every architect in the country should have to spend a week in a wheel chair before gettting a license. While the building was fully ADA compliant (and I would bet the old one wasn't), it was not very wheel chair friendly. Some of the ramps were out of the way, and many of the displays (specifically books of pressed plants for the Basin and Range ecozones) and placards were at a convient height for a standing adult (or over the head of someone in a wheel chair).

In all, it was still worth the visit, but it no longer is in my "top five"

More Summer Trips

Ok, so its been a while since I have been able to sit down finish posting about our trips last summer. After our trip to Sumpter/John Day, we spent a week at the coast. Most of our time at the coast was spent playing in tide pools and seeing non-geology things, but I did take one picture of some barchan dunes on the beach below the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse.

On the trip back to the east side of the state, we took the scenic detour through the desert high plains. This allowed us a stop at Crater Lake, which Sam had been wanting to go see ever since we moved to Oregon.

Stanton at the Rim near the North Entrance

We got to the park about 1 hour to late to take the boat ride (next time Sam) so we did the obligatory drive around the lake. Sam's favorite stops was at Pinnacles, where the steam from fumaroles welded together the overlying pumice and ash into an erosion resistant hoodoo.

On the way back from Pinnacles, we stopped at the new trail in the park, a 2.5 mile out and back to Plaikni Falls. It was a nice little trail through the woods, and the falls at the end were a nice surprise (ok I knew there was a waterfall, but it was more impressive that I had anticipated). Sam, however was tired, so by the time we got to the falls she had transformed into a bit of a sullen teenager.

Plaikni Falls

I think overall, Sam was a little disappointed in the lake. (I found out later that, being who she is, what she really had wanted to do was go swimming in the Lake. She didn't expect only one access to the lake that was 2-3 miles down a steep trail to a non-existent beach that would have been hypothermia inducing cold at that rate!)

Mt Baker cont

In previous posts, I wrote about our Rodeo Holliday trip that ended with a day at Heather Meadows on the side of Mt. Baker. The last notable thing about the trip was we had a great conversation about how science is supposed to work. At an earlier stop, I had pointed out the sun cups on top of the snow field, and mentioned that the how and why suncups form is a question that hasn't been completely answered. While exploring a snowbank Sam noted that there were suncup like features under the snowbank as well.

As we walked down the trail we made theories about how the suncup features would form on the bottom of a snowbank, and if the theories were testable. My theory was that it was based on the crystal structure of ice, but when pressed by Sam how I would test it, I did not have much of an answer. Her theory was the rocks under the snowbank (in the streams) initially forced the meltwater up over the rock creating the curved shape. Her test was to se if there was a correlation between cup location and size and an underlying rock.

At the next snowbank she ducked under to test her hypothesis

and sure enough there was a rough correlation between boulder location/size and suncup size. She repeated her observations at the next (last) snowfield we encountered and her subjective test held true. In the end she felt pretty proud she had come up with a theory that made more sense (to her) than her dad's and she was able to prove to him that she was right!

Mt Baker

In my previous post, I mentioned that on a Rodeo Holiday we went up to Heather Meadows on the Mt. Baker Highway. While we were there, we ran into a High School Geology class and the instructor pointed out to me that even though we couldn't see any mountains, there was some notable geology under foot.

Basically the canyon that forms drains Bagley Lake is a fault. On the west side of the lake is the Chilliwack River Terrane an accreted island arc, and on the east side are Mt. Baker Andesites. The Bagley Lakes trail parallels this drainage and crosses over a small dam, where you can see the difference in rocks from one side to the other.


Sam Looking at Mt. Baker Andesites



Sam Looking at Chilliwack Terrrane

  According to the USGS website on the Chilliwack Terrain, it is mostly phyllites and Greenstones that are thrust over the younger Nooksack Terrane.


From: Terranes of the North Cascades: Chilliwack River Terrane

We saw a couple of nice metamorphic rocks on our hike. Admittedly the weather wasn't conducive to finding the best examples (and I am not great at identifying metamorphic rocks), but there were three areas that had distinctly different outcrops



Greenstone with quarts veins

 

Metaconglomerate

 

Not sure with this one, originally thought it was a different metaconglomerate, but then thought about a fault Breccia, didn't know if that made sense. Help?

Though I certainly saw the difference between the rocks, I was in "Look at the Mountain and Glacial Features mode" so I'm not sure if I would have put together the drainage was a contact between terranes. So thank you to the unnamed HS teacher I met. It certainly made more sense to look at rocks than mountains on that foggy day.