A Day in the Life of a Desert Rat

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”-- Benjamin Franklin  

I would like to think that I obtain the former, but I know it’s just vanity. 

In the dark before morning, I rise and turn on the motel coffeemaker, dress in kaki and brown, put on high-top Wolverine boots with thick knobby souls.  In twenty minutes I start the jeep and head for absence of people.  I haven’t talked to anyone today.  You are the first.  I have instead responded to nature, with only the drives to and fro as interludes back to traditional culture.  Out there I wandered in Aztec Sandstone again, which you heard about in my post called Keystone Thrust on 10/4.

Just a small piece of the Aztec Sandstone
 shows red under the old limestone

Again, the Cambrian limestone has been pushed up at an acute angle, where it slid over and above the younger sandstone, and has done so for some fifty miles.  These are the last pictures you will see of old limestone resting on sandstone.  The rest of the day we are deep in Mesozoic sand, wind-blown, and hardened into rock.  It is interesting that the sandstone of Zion Park and many other sites east of here is called Navajo.  It’s the same age and kind as the Aztec Sandstone and hails from the same dunes that covered the western United States.  They are the same, just studied by different geologists. 

A herd of rocks cascading down a gully, sand particles grinding off to become dunes perhaps, or river sand.  To become sandstone again?  How many times has this happened?  I feel like a grain of sand on the surface of the red earth.  

The Aztec Sandstone with its many colors was all red once, colored with iron rich minerals.  The rainbow of colors came to us later, with migrating groundwater carrying various minerals with many pigments.  

Were it not for the slow, gnawing forces of erosion, these artistic curves would not be among us, tantalizing us to wonder how simple rain and wind carves figures of strange beauty.

Whatever you imagine in these curves, it all came to us by random acts of the laws of nature.  Or did it?

Enter with me now a slot canyon, where gushes of water, like flushes of a giant toilet, at intervals of about a hundred years, carved it a little more each time.

Writing with photographs is a step removed from the actual experience.  There is no way I can take you totally with me.  But I try to bring you as close as possible.  

Other than to amuse ourselves, why should we pretend to know where we are going or to understand what we see?  Rocks eroded into wonderful shapes.