Monday, February 13, 2012

"Crossed the deserts bare, man, I've breathed the mountain air, man" - Utah traverse!

Hi all,

Our revised itinerary took us from northernmost Utah almost due south to Arizona. The state of Utah is beautiful and so diverse in terms of the geology/geography. The Johnny Cash line in the title is a little misleading, as we encountered the mountains FIRST as we were driving south and ended in the desert.

Our first stop of interest the morning of our Utah traverse was the Great Salt Lake. Below is a satellite image of the lake, it's huge! The size makes it almost impossible to get a good view of it from the ground. The lake is the largest U.S. lake west of the Mississippi River. It is a remnant of Pleistocene-age Lake Bonneville, which was about ten times larger than the current size of the Great Salt Lake. At ~75 miles long and 25 miles wide, it's the 4th largest lake without an outlet in the world! It is only about 35 feet deep though, making it comparable in depth to the Chesapeake Bay. It is about 3-5 times saltier than the ocean and has no fish. Source: USGS Water Science Center.



One of the places recommended for viewing the lake was Ensign Park, a park in Salt Lake City, that is perched on top of a hill, ideally to get better viewing. What the website didn't say was that this park is a site of historical/religious significance for Mormons, so we were in the religious minority at the top. Oh, and did I mention this was the day of the rapture? So everyone else there had hymnals and were singing and praying and having picnics. We were just trying to get a view of the lake! This is me at the top of Ensign Peak with the lake in the background. Note how the water embays the ridges - the large Pleistocene lakes that formed in this area formed by rainfall filling up the low-lying areas (basins) between the high ridges (ranges) of the Basin and Range province that extends through most of the southwest and into Mexico. More on Basin and Range paleolakes in the posts about my trip to the Quinn River!



Salt Lake City seems like a nice place - it looked clean and not too built up. I've been told it's one of the prettiest airports in the U.S. to fly into, which I would believe considering the lake and snow-capped peaks all around! The picture below is from Ensign Peak, looking down on the Utah state capitol building.



After leaving Salt Lake City, we traveled a short distance south to visit the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine, the largest open-pit mine in the world! This is a picture taken from the interstate - the brown mounds are the sides of the mine - look how tall it is compared to the mountains!



This is a view down into the mine from the visitors' parking lot:



The visitors' center was really informative - there was a lot of historical stuff about the mine, a good display on how copper goes from copper ore to thick sheets of pure copper (the stuff that gets sold!), copper-bearing mineral samples, and displays of everyday, household objects that contain copper. There were also some pretty pieces of art made from copper and other metals. Megan and I both took a picture of this piece, so it must have been pretty good!



From the mine, we drove south toward Moab, and Arches National Park. As we drove, we saw some exposures of the Book Cliffs. These rocks are so named because they look like the side view of a book that has been opened and laid down on its cover. The layers of sedimentary rock include sandstones, shales, and coal beds, and represent the sediments of the Great Cretaceous Seaway that filled the interior of North America. The Cliffs are where Exxon geologists developed the practice of sequence stratigraphy in the 1980's. This is a picture we took from the road:



It's easy to see why people name rocks things like "ship rock" out west. I had never seen landscapes like this in person until this trip. The land is so flat, and some of the rocks are so isolated and stick up so abruptly from the surroundings, that they really do look like ships on a dry sea.



We arrived at Arches National Park around dinner time, only to find that all the campgrounds were full. We spent the majority of the evening and night driving around looking for a place to camp. Every single campground was filled up. We ended up unofficially sharing a family's campsite around midnight. We only infringed for about 5 hours before taking option c - sneaking out in the middle of the night! Just like at the Happiness Hotel (reference: Great Muppet Caper)!!!! That was probably our roughest night - most people didn't even pitch tents, they just slept in their sleeping bags on a tarp on the ground.

My real work is calling...unfortunately. Next post: Arches and Canyonlands!

Happy trails!
Sarah

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Southbound

Hi all,

So we left off in northeast Wyoming at Devil's Tower, having made the decision to go south. We got a late start the next morning, as we were no longer on a set itinerary. The majority of the day we spent driving through Wyoming. We basically cut straight across from the northeast corner to the southwest corner. Below is the revised map of our trip:



Wyoming is an interesting state. It is divided up into isolated mountain ranges with large basins between them. What was surprising to me though was although it's not a desert, how brown and dry it looked in most places. There are a lot of natural resources though - there are lots of mining operations in Wyoming and you can see a lot of open pit mines and rigs from the interstate. Wyoming produces the majority of the coal in the US, which surprised me. We pulled over on the side of the road to check out this coal mine:



When coal seams catch on fire naturally - usually by lightening strike - the seam is burned to a red color and forms a resistant unit. This is referred to as "clinker." Because it is more resistant to weathering than the surrounding sedimentary rock, it forms the caps of mounds of rock. Wild coal fires in the Powder River basin of Wyoming were reported by Lewis and Clark during their expedition west.

It took most of the day to drive across the state. We ended the day at Fossil Butte National Monument, which was one of our stops in our original itinerary for the drive home. Fossil Butte is in the southwest corner of Wyoming, close to the borders of Utah and Idaho. We got to the visitors' center just a few minutes after it closed. The park ranger was heading to his car as we pulled up and upon seeing our vans, asked if we were from UT. When we said yes, we were from UT's geology department, he told us that he had been a master's student in our department years ago and reopened the visitors' center for us! Fossil Butte is known for the amazing fish fossils that come from there, but as I saw in the visitors' center, ALL the fossils - plants, fish, other animals - are equally amazing and beautiful!!! This site was a lake that had hosted many species of land and aquatic organisms. For some reason, which I believe is still unknown, the fish all died very suddenly, resulting in huge numbers of fossils in each layer of rock. Lakes are good places to preserve fossils are they are low energy environments and the rocks that form in them are fine-grained, so it is easy to see the fossils. Visitors to Fossil Butte can pay $40 to go out to the rock units and take home as many fossils as they want. Unfortunately, because we got there so late, we were not able to do so, but we did do a short hike up to the quarry where the scientists collect fossils. Here are some of my favorite fossils from the visitors' center:




This is me in front of the quarry rock layers. Note how thin and perfectly flat the layers are! This is characteristic of lake deposits. Also note how many layers I'm wearing! Dinner time in the Rockies is pretty cold!



We camped that night at Bear Lake, Utah. This was the view from our campground the following morning: so pretty! And look at the snow!



We hit the road in the morning after some tasty pancakes made by Cassaundra and Caycee:



A few miles down a pretty, windy, mountain road from our campground, we stopped to get a look at Bear Lake. Megan, me, and Felicia in the parking lot in front of the lake:



Northern Utah in a word was BREATHTAKING. The Rockies are "rockier" here than in the parts of Wyoming we saw and are all topped with snow. We drove by the Utah State campus and I almost got out of the car and transferred on the spot!! It's in such a beautiful location. I think most of our students were the most excited for southern Utah, which was also very cool, but northern Utah was amazing.

Got to go prep for my second lab section of the day! Next up: Utah traverse!

Happy trails,
Sarah