The picture below was sent to me by Tom Anderson, one of the participants in our 2017 Talking Rocks Tour. He noted that he had been so preoccupied with looking for dinosaur tracks that he failed to see the obvious feature on the sky line. It was only after he arrived home and was reviewing his photos that he realized he had a picture of Noah’s Ark.  Hope you can join us for the next tour, this fall or next spring. Who knows what we might find.  🙂

It’s important to realize that geology is not purely theoretical. Because of the centrality of historical interpretation to the practice of geology, we might be tempted to think that geology is as susceptible to bias as political history. However, geology has multiple checks on the power of bias. One of those checks is mining. Mining puts geological theory to the rude and ruthless test of money. Is this mine worth the investment? When the hole is dug and the ore is assayed, the theory turns into hard, cold fact–you make money or don’t. Either way, the mine might become a photo shoot.

  This structure is the head of a tram that carried ore from mines on Treasure Hill above Pioche, Nevada, to a mill down in the valley. In 1928 it cost 6 cents a ton to deliver a ton of ore to the mill via this aerial tram.

 

One of the nice things about geology is you can see it. Your first or second interpretation may need to be modified after further investigation, but concrete, tangible reality exists, and we can return to it repeatedly for more information. In geology, opinions frequently can be corrected by facts, facts that can be verified or falsified by direct observation. This high regard for concrete, tangible reality–stuff you can see and touch–is central in our Talking Rocks Tours.

The picture is of Basin and Range country in central Nevada.

I camped for a couple of nights at the top of Hog Canyon Road outside Kanab, Utah, to do some geological prospecting.

Specifically, I was looking for protosuchus burrows. (This animal was an ancient version of crocodile.) I found some anomalous structures in the sandstone that might be burrows, but nothing with the kind of definition I was hoping for.

However, I noticed the sand around my camp was covered with tracks made by bugs and lizards.

Then up on the outcrop where I was prospecting, I found this rock with tracks reminiscent of the tracks in the sand.

Not exactly dinosaur tracks, but still pretty cool.

These tracks in the Navajo Sandstone tell us that when these sand dunes were created, there were living animals present running around on them. The animals in this ancient neighborhood ranged in size from worms to the size of horses judging from the tracks they left. (I mention horses only for size comparison. There are no modern mammal tracks in the Navajo.)

Talking Rocks Tour 2017: Buckskin Gulch on day five. A fantastic hike. One group did the full twenty-mile loop. Others did about five miles. Notice the person (the very tiny person) in the photo. The geology lessons we saw in this slot canyon were dramatic.

The walls of the canyon towered over us. There were flood deposits that spoke of cycles of deposition and erosion inside the canyon–obviously more recent than the formation of the canyon itself. Note this package of debris wedged into the canyon above Bryan’s head. Think of the force of the water required to pack all that woody debris so tightly that long after the water was gone, the debris dam remains.

I was endlessly fascinated by the mud on the canyon floor. Ripple patterns indicating different rates of water movement, different viscosities of the water (due to mud suspension), channel shape, and who knows what else. In addition to ripple patterns we saw mud cracks, mud curls, mud imprinted with dog paws and human feet, mud sprinkled with red sand from a passing wind storm above the canyon.

We had mud inside our shoes, mud on our clothes, mud everywhere. It was lovely.