Sunday Post: Balancing Act

Our dry continent has a scenic advantage over wetter parts of the world.  We have amazing rocks here.  Since my recent days have become something of a topsy turvy adventure, I figured I might post this wonderful shot from Arches National Park.

Arches is often described as a place that you not only must see before you die, but must see soon before it falls apart.  While the process of erosion is not nearly that dramatic on the dry Colorado Plateau, things do still crumble now and then.  Arches, like much of the plateau, is a great way to introduce kids to the magic of the natural world, and the wonders here are enough to usually make even the skeptical adult take a second look.

As you can see, it is also full of life.  The smells after a fresh rain are beyond compare.  

Sunday Afternoon Post: Sagebrush Flat on the Colorado Plateau at Dusk.

Utah 24 southbound looking west.  The range in the background is part of  Goblin Valley State Park.  The night skies here are among the most spectacular in the world.

Where the Pines Meet the Desert, the Herd Rushes Through

The east gate of Zion National Park is perhaps one of the less dramatic entrances one can enter through to get access to the canyon.  Much of the landscape is low in relief in comparison to much of the inter-mountain west, and the vegetation consists largely of scrubby pines and things that can tolerate sandy, arid conditions.  Most people entering the park from the east pass by this seemingly unremarkable, almost typical scene of the Colorado Plateau while looking forward to the canyon, tunnel, and other sights beyond.  The truth is, transitional areas are often overlooked in favor of the areas they border.  After all, who wants to see a stunted tree on the edge of a desert, or slushy snow at the snowline on a mountain?  If you ask me, that is taking a "glass half-empty approach" to watching the world unfold around us.  Instead, try seeing a tree growing as tall as it can despite all the odds against it, or watch as the slushy snow feeds little streams that turn out to be the source of a mighty river.

So what do you think of this scene?

At first glance, there is nothing really remarkable about it.  The Ponderosa Pines in the background are hardly impressive, the sagebrush in the mid-ground is altogether too common, and the yucca up front is in flower, but otherwise is as common as the sagebrush.  Then again, things look a bit lush for having all that well-drained sand around, and while pines and desert scrub can appear together, they often do not.  Indeed, there are two different worlds converged into one here, the equivalent of being several hundred miles north and south of a respective mid-point at the same time.  Not ten miles southwest of here is the Mojave Desert, devoid of any sort of tree that claims more than twenty feet of sky, while a mere five miles to the northeast is a forest of pines,spruces, aspen, and flowing streams.  In the meeting places of these two worlds, such as in the space seen above, species co-exist in a marvelous natural garden that makes room for just about any plant one can find in North America, short what can be found in the most tropical and most northerly climes.

Most people wait for the fall to watch nature go through changes, but in places like southwestern Utah, they can do this around the year.  The environs of Zion National Park contain the frontiers of the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin, the Colorado Plateau, the Wasatch Mountains, and the geological diversity of rocks and minerals spanning millions of years of sequential development, all of Utah in miniature.  

Petrified Forest National Park

In 1906 the Antiquities act was passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by who we can only  imagine was a rather giddy American president Theodore Roosevelt.  Section 2 of the act permitted the president to set aside parcels of land deemed worthy of preservation, which caused quite a stir at the time (and still receives a bit of bad mouthing today, but thankfully bi-partisan efforts to back up executive decisions regarding the act usually quiet things down).  The forth monument proclamation set aside a stretch of desert on the Colorado Plateau that had piles of petrified wood everywhere.  Petrified wood was no secret treasure; nearly every state and most nations of the world have some variety of wood that has petrified by various means.  Here, however, the wood was plentiful, whole logs remained intact, and looked far more beautiful than many other varieties that had been known at the time.

The problem, of course, was that people could not resist taking souvenirs.  Commercial ventures and organized greed followed innocent rock hunting, and much of it had been hauled away a mere 40 years after Lt. Amiel Whipple surveyed the land and reported about the wood.  Roosevelt was certainly ready to preserve what was left of the wood, and certainly knew about the scenic beauty of the surrounding land.  Congressman John F. Lacey (credit is due to The Wilderness Warrior by Douglas Brinkley) was apparently instrumental in getting Roosevelt to actually sign off on the deal, even while he was also working on preserving Crater Lake and Jewel Cave.  Lacey considered the Petrified Forest to be one of the most amazing treasures of the entire continent.  The Arizona territorial legislature apparently agreed with him, as they had been pushing for protection of the land since 1895.  The monument was created in December of 1906, and later re-designated a full national park in 1958.  Theft of the wood continues to this day, but it was greatly slowed down.  

So what is so special about this place that it deserves national park status?  Well, the wood itself is certainly gorgeous, but it also sits in the Painted desert, which I have to say, certainly lives up to the name, especially at sunset.  One of the reasons that color photography was first developed was to show people how beautiful this land truly is.  The truth is that pictures, as is the case for so many wonders of the natural world, can barely do the place justice.  Seeing this land with one's own eyes is definitely recommended, although the sensory experience does not stop there.  Much of the North American deserts have such unique smells, sounds, and even just a plain feel of the air to them, and this particular portion is no exception.  The air quality, in fact, is considered by the National Park Service to be among the highest of anywhere in U.S. territory.  Anyway, what does the Painted desert look like?

It looks like it was painted.  Much of the area is part of the huge Chinle Formation, which extends throughout much of the southwest and can be found prominently featured in Zion, Capitol Reef, and many other fine places.  

What else is here?

The Puerco pueblo, along with some associated petroglyphs, and even older markings dating back as many as 2,000 years ago.  

While the land seems a bit inhospitable, the climate was apparently pretty decent in the past if such a settlement was founded here.  The Puerco river, while mostly a dry wash, does have some amount of water in it underground, as evidenced by the Cottonwoods.  

Far more recently, people have been using the area as a passing point.  The attraction of the wood, and the convenient location off of Route 66, now Interstate 40, has meant that a lot of tourists have come by this way.  Route 66 enthusiasts consider this park and surrounding area to be one of the main highlights of the classic trip down the length of the mother road, and the old road bed can be seen here, alongside the Painted Desert Inn, which has been lovingly restored.  

Aside from all this, of course, there is the wood itself.  While not exactly a "forest" in the conventional sense of the term, points of interest such as the Rainbow Forest certainly have nice collections of the stuff, including large logs.   

Apparently, before dissolved silica managed to turn wood into, well, almost quartz, some of these trees used to be redwoods.  Such a wet climate must have seemed like a different world compared to the high desert of the Colorado plateau which exists at the present.  Again, however, the desert has its charms, and this particular one, being over 5,000 feet up (the level land and presence of a rain shadow prevents much growth in the way of junipers of pinyon pines), does not have the scorching 100's of the lower deserts to the south and west.  While the main attraction is definitely the wood, ruins, and painted landscape, this is probably one of the better places to explore the "fifth American desert" of the Colorado plateau.  Here one can find lots of sagebrush, various smaller cacti and yuccas, as well as cottonwoods (and the disgusting, invasive, evil Tamarisks) along the Puerco river.  There is even a chance to see the odd White-tailed antelope squirrel and  a lizard or two.  

 This had to be my favorite cactus I have seen in a while.  It had a lot of character for being such a small thing.

Now, as far as the wood goes, while it is illegal to collect any within the park, and huge amounts of it have been scoured from surrounding areas, there are numerous shops that can legally sell you souvenirs of wood harvested from outside the protected area.  I would recommend Jim Gray's Petrified Wood co., which has an incredibly large shop that also sells other Arizona mineral specimens, and has fashioned logs for sale.  Believe it or not, the chair was pretty comfortable.  The eastern stretch of I-40 in Arizona has a bunch of other shops as well, but some might be a bit less reputable in collecting sources.  Even at Jim's, I was not immediately comfortable with the ethics of the situation, though when I spoke to the staff, I changed my mind.  They truly do care about the land, and were surprisingly far more polite and knowledgeable about it than the (non-ranger) staff at the actual park.

All in all, a pleasant place to visit.  Due to the open nature of the terrain, and the distance from any point sources of light pollution, this would be a great place to do some wilderness excursions and back-country camping.  There are supposedly more logs out there, waiting to be discovered.