Science & WAAGNFNP Posted by christian h., 20 May 2007 06:58 am
Travelogue, Part II
By jimmyraybob
My humblest apologies for not getting this posted sooner. We here at the Ministry of Geology and Glitter (MOGG) have had a rather busy last few weeks (not that everyone else hasn’t). On top of that there were three deaths rather close to home, and the Virginia Tech shootings, and the death a Cardinal’s pitcher, and the on-going death and destruction in Iraq. Every time our travelogue subcommittee got together for a production meeting there seemed to be a smothering glum and a sense that what we were doing seemed too irrelevant in the face of issues of such magnitude – and nothing happened. However, after reviewing the report of the last closed door emergency strategy meeting of the MOGG General Commission for Figuring Things Out we seem to be feeling mo better. The report, entitled Sure Things Seem Sucky but How Do You Make Things Un-Sucky by Sitting on Your Lazy Can? Now Get Back to It and Show the Members of the Glorious WAAGNFNP Some More Pictures of the Great Fact Finding Mission to the Southwest Before We Come Down the Hall and Kick Some Major MOGG Butt!, was very well received by the travelogue subcommittee. So, without further ado……
Dateline STL (April 28 May 11, 2007): Continuing the report from the field, the MOGG entourage was able to find a very satisfactory camp on the east side of the Santa Catalina Mountainswithin the Coronado National Forest. It was a tad after dark when we rolled in so we just threw out the sleeping bag – on top of our extra thick wimpo model Thermarest pad.
The road that we were on is the Mount Lemmon Road out of Oracle, Arizona, and a nice trek that winds from desert grassland through dry woodlands and chaparral to boreal forest at over 9,000 feet above sea level. Later in the summer, when the road is open to the top, you might see wild horses & rattlesnakes along the way to a beer or a slice of homemade pie at the village of Summerhaven.
The next morning was a bit special for having painted clouds to the east across the San Pedro River valley: 
See if you can find the moon in this one:
The Santa Catalinas are just one of many elongated mountain ranges rising out of the desert down here in the Basin and Range physiographic complex. Right now you are probably thinking, jimmiraybob, do tell more about these distinct geological features. Well, since you asked. The Basin and Range is an area of the North American craton that has undergone “stretching” via extensional tectonics which has resulted in a thinning of the crust and north-south trending normal faulting. The extension is part of a process of continental rifting that began approximately 25 million years ago, or in Great Flood time a couple thousand years ago. Some of the crustal blocks between faults have rotated with the upward rotated edges forming the mountain ridges that we enjoy today. Deep basins filled with thick sequences of gravel, sand and silt have formed in the areas between the mountains and through erosion. Many of these rotated & uplifted blocks are known as metamorphic core complexes because of the metamorphosed continental basement rocks, rocks that have been transformed through the heat and pressure of deep burial, that form the core of the mountain. If you visit Tuscon and look up to the Santa Catalinas you are looking upon a metamorphic core complex. Or, if you’re in Phoenix and bicycling or hiking South Mountain, you’re on a metamorphic core complex.
Since it was still relatively early in the year and the road was still closed by snow, we returned to Oracle and headed to Casa Rivera’s Taco Express (a MOGG-rated four star café) for coffee and a breakfast burrito (a MOGG favorite). Next on the agenda was spending a little time walking in the Sonoran desert among the Gila Monsters and Saguaro:
I would try and express the beauty and serenity of walking in the desert in the early morning or evening twilight but instead I highly recommend that you visit A Creek Running North and peruse the desert posts. Or, just go (MOGG Disclaimer: If you step on a rattlesnake or are attacked by flying Cholla balls it is not our fault). More gratuitous desert pictures:
Sunset over the Plamosa Mountains:
Overall, the MOGG maintains that life can be good and that the state of the desert southwest is still pretty darned good (or pretty or good). Next week we’ll report on the MOGG visit through a bit of the Mohave Desert to the Hualapai Nation’s Sky Walk over the Grand Canyon.
Your Humble Servant – jimmiraybob
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Responses to “Travelogue, Part II”
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on 21 May 2007 at 5:12 am 1. christian h. said …
jimmyraybob, thank you so much for this beautiful post. It is very welcome at any time! I have never been to the (or any) desert myself, so I need some vicarious desert-watching.
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on 21 May 2007 at 6:15 am 2. peter ramus said …
Somebody with access to the page source needs to crawl in there and remove the waagnfnp admin cruft from all of jimmyraybob’s links. As it is, the links are just bouncing back to the blog’s home page. I want to know more about “craton,” and I want to know Nooooow!
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on 21 May 2007 at 6:29 am 3. christian h. said …
Arrgh. Thanks, peter, I hope they’re all fixed now. My bad. This is why I hate anything that’s not just a plain text editor…
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on 21 May 2007 at 6:36 am 4. peter ramus said …
Thanks, christian h.
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on 21 May 2007 at 8:34 am 5. JP Stormcrow said …
This is why I hate anything that’s not just a plain text editor…
Impersonating Robert DeNiro as Jack Byrnes:
I’m not just a plain text editor, christian, do you hate me? -
on 21 May 2007 at 9:07 am 6. jimmiraybob said …
Hey, it’s good to be back. It’s also good to be back in the SW with a halfway working intertudes connection. Thanks Christian for the work to get this up and thanks to our glorious MOJ for words of encouragement…I’m not saying that there could have been a trial involved, I’m just saying….
As far as craton, think of a craton as a piece of thouroughly sun-dried toast part of which is buried for millions of years experiencing heat and pressure that transform it’s structure and composition (the metamorphism part). Then if it’s uplifted (and being relatively brittle as toast may be), perhaps through the collision of two cratons, and then it’s extended, you end up breaking the craton into…get ready…no really, get ready… metamorphic core croutons.
Man that’s a long way to go to deliver a coffee-deprivation induced groaner pun. But, that’s why I get the big bucks.
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on 21 May 2007 at 9:19 am 7. jimmiraybob said …
Unfortuneately, the Creek Running North link doesn’t gat all the way to the indexed dessert pages that I’d hoped it would. Here’s the link to the main page and the link to the dessert pages is at the bottom.
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on 21 May 2007 at 9:36 am 8. JP Stormcrow said …
jimmyraybob,
Looking forward to further crumbs of geologic knowledge from your journeys.(and are the “dessert pages” typos? or a half-baked attempt to broaden the range of acceptable punning.)
Anyway, sounds like you had a very gneiss time.
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on 21 May 2007 at 10:00 am 9. jimmiraybob said …
(and are the “dessert pages” typos? or a half-baked attempt to broaden the range of acceptable punning.)
Uh, um…I’ll go with pun. Would you believe wishful thinking. How ’bout the sweet morning desert air is a delightful dessert.
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on 21 May 2007 at 10:06 am 10. christian h. said …
I hope I fixed the faultline link, the first attempt was apparently an unstable url. I’m in my office and the office computer runs an old linux that makes editing posts hell, while my notebook is connected to the university (as opposed to math department) net, and the DNS server seems to be a bit tipsy - or maybe it’s a dchp problem, who knows. Well, I need to get some lunch. With dessert.
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on 21 May 2007 at 10:22 am 11. Oaktown Girl said …
There is no way a geologist can misspell “desert” as “dessert”. That’s impossible. It’d be like a farmer misspelling the word “cow” as “crow”, or something. Clearly the error lies with christian, who is supposed to check for those kinds of errors before posting. But as we all know from the most recent Open Thread, he had a little bit o’drinking on his agenda for the weekend, so his spell check was probably in a vodka-tinted haze.
I love geology. If I had any math skills at all, I would have loved to have been a geophysicist. Growing up with a lot of earthquakes here in the Bay Area, it’s always been a fascination of mine. And UC Berkelely has one of the world premier earthquake research centers. So of course whenever there a good sized quake here (or anywhere else), the TV talking heads and camera crews all go rushing over there to interview the seismologists. -
on 21 May 2007 at 11:27 am 12. christian h. said …
There actually was a “dessert” in the original post?? Not only in a comment? Damn Vodka.
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on 21 May 2007 at 11:52 am 13. JP Stormcrow said …
There actually was a “dessert” in the original post
Well, there was that slice of homemade pie at the village of Summerhaven.
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on 21 May 2007 at 12:53 pm 14. Seattle said …
Reminds me of a place I’ve never been, but always wanted to visit since I heard about it in a community college geography course taught by a former CIA agent over 20 years ago…unfortunately, the Steen Mountains aren’t on the way to anywhere, and I’ve yet to get there.
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on 21 May 2007 at 12:55 pm 15. Seattle said …
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on 21 May 2007 at 1:14 pm 16. christian h. said …
Seattle, I took the liberty of embedding your link to avoid breaking the page boundaries for “recent comments.”
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on 21 May 2007 at 1:16 pm 17. spyder said …
Passionate road music to program into your “players” while you tour through the Southwest, or anywhere else this summer. I shall be in them dagnabbed Catalinas in a few weeks, as well as my favorite Chiracahuas. Just enough to get the tastes and textures and then hightail back to the cool realms of the Sierras and the Cascades. Road trips are good for the human nomadic meme buried in our DNA for thousands of years.
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on 21 May 2007 at 1:16 pm 18. Seattle said …
Thanks, Christian. Hell if I know what I’m doing.
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on 21 May 2007 at 1:22 pm 19. Seattle said …
“Road trips are good for the human nomadic meme buried in our DNA for thousands of years.”
At a certain point in human evolution, the road trip becomes the “family trip” which is a bird of a whole different feather. My mind drifts back to driving through Spokane traffic with a 5 year old yelling that he had to pee…NOW….a 13 year old niece yelling that she couldn’t stand being in the van with that spoiled brat anymore, and no cliff close enough to drive off of… LOL
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on 21 May 2007 at 5:21 pm 20. Oaktown Girl said …
The blog went down for well over an hour just as I was about to post my “kudos” to Seattle for her “driving off a cliff line” about the family vacations. So cool. That has waaayy more authority than “I’ll turn this car around right now!”.
But then the blog went down, and I figured either the authorities shut us down for James and spyder’s chat on the Open Thread, or Seattle finally snapped and drove us all off a cliff.
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on 21 May 2007 at 5:30 pm 21. christian h. said …
Personally, I am convinced we are dealing with a sabotage attempt from the Proletarian Hammer Tendency. I have long suspected that they are a gang of ultra-left splitters - or possibly a pseudo-radical front organization for the reformist sellouts of the CPUSA.
christian h.
Tribunus Laticlavius
MOOAD, WAAGNFNP. -
on 22 May 2007 at 10:48 am 22. The Constructivist said …
Cool pictures, science, puns, mispellings (heh), and shout-outs to Scott McLemee–love the post and thread! Speaking of which, I got a sequel for the Party, just not the one christian’s waiting for….
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on 22 May 2007 at 1:15 pm 23. spyder said …
I don’t know nothing bout the copulate-ing miss scarlet?
A little dig-f/x version of that magical desert of desserts in the great southwest of this continent.
oh what the hell, here’s another one from the archives just for phun:
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on 22 May 2007 at 2:08 pm 24. Oaktown Girl said …
spyder - top photo looks like a slug mounting a catfish.
The second and third photos just plain cool! Third photo looks like a good place for a ceremony of some sort, or else someplace the “landing crew” from the original Star Trek might beam down to.
