Staircase-Escalante National Monument. GSENM is
mostly accessible by 4-wheel vehicle. It gets it's
name from the 4 distinct geological layers in the form
of a, that's right, grand staircase, each tread being
about 25 miles wide.. Big time dinosaur remains and
lots of universities sending teams to dig. In the
more remote areas they helicopter in and out.
I'm starting to OD on beauty. Zion is another
spectacular place. Two immense canyons. You drive
down into the first, go through a tunnel into the
second. The tunnel was another CCC project, built for
the cars of the time. Some rigs are too big to go
through, and some, pay a special fee to they can go
through as a single lane while the traffic from the
other direction is stopped. The Virgin River Canyon,
where I am camped, is a very busy place. So much so
that you can't drive to the end of the canyon but have
to take a shuttle bus, and so much business that
there's a bus every 15 minutes for the 8 mile route.
The canyon is very narrow and the walls go up 500-800
feet on both sides. I biked to the end today and the
views were dangerous. In case anyone was wondering
what happened to the tops of the Appalachians, they
are outside my trailer. The eastern mountains eroded
and the dirt ended up in Canada. Then big sandstorms
blew the dirt down here (though, when this happened,
land masses were in some different places), turned
into sandstone and got eroded away again.
The campground is very much like ones I remember from
growing up. Lots of families with kids running
around, lots of tents. There's a woman with rather
large parts a couple sites down who keeps yelling
"Matthew". I don't know if Matt is a kid, a dog or a
spouse, but whoever, he keeps pissing her off.
Finished "The Worst Hard Time" about families that
lived through the Dust Bowl. I'd always thought that
the dust bowl was simply caused by drought. But it
was drought, after all the grassland had been plowed
under to grow wheat, which was encouraged by the
government. A great read. Just started "Special
Topics in Calamity Physics", by Marisha Pessl.
Fiction, stream of conciousness, made up literary
allusions, about a young woman with an eccentric
father. Very good so far.
This is my first night on daylight savings time. I'm
ready to go to sleep at my usual time of 9:30 or so
but when I wake up at 6:30 AM, this morning just in
time to see the sunrise, it will still be dark and
cold, even more so because it will take a couple hours
for the sun to peek over the canyon walls.
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1 comment:
Hey, I read "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" last fall - really enjoyed it - it gets weirder and weirder...I'll be interested in your reactions.
Still COLD and icy here - near zero this morning. The sugarers are happy, the rest of us more than a little stir crazy. The sun is a factor, though - looked out the P/CC dining room window today, and there were toddlers being pushed on the swings - all bundled up, but it seemed a sign of spring!
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