Tales of Time & Travel v1.1: Goosenecks of the San Juan

Volume 1.1: Goosenecks of the San Juan

Last in.  Last Out.  That was the case as Grant and I were shooed out of the Four Corners Monument a few minutes after 7 in the evening.  With the gate closing behind us, we charted the last few miles of a long day of driving for a desert camp at a primitive Utah State Park, The Great Goosenecks of the San Juan.

The daylight lingered and the molten sun hung before my eyes as I drove west.  This last leg of the day's trip carried us through a remarkable land.  The abrupt cliffs of sandstone balanced upon slopes of shale, which were in turn set upon older rocks testifying to a time when this now sun-baked terrain was once covered by a clear ocean teaming with lifeforms that would appear quite alien to us today.  While some folks scurry across this landscape seeing nothing but desolation and forsaken abandonment, as a geologist, these slopes, ledges and cliffs tell me stories and speak of wonders from the past.  With such expansive vistas beyond my windshield, my eyes read the stories of extinct environments told by the rock formations.  The rocks have become my friends and it is good to see them and listen to them.

Many of the slopes are colored a hearty, thick, brick red; a result of the oxidation of the abundant element of iron contained in these sediments.  These strata were formed by rivers and streams flowing across a broad and muddy plain.  When these rocks were still mud, Earth's dominant land fauna were amphibians, giant salamanders. This was a time even before the age of dinosaurs.  The boundary between the Permian and the Jurassic is marked by a mass extinction of most of the existing species at the end of the Permian (some place the extinction around 90% of all lifeforms). Thus the ebb and (sometimes eposodic) flow of life, environments of both continents and sea, dramatically ended the earth's Paleozoic Era, "the time of Old Life".  But, since change is a constant, new time brings new life and evolution fills in the gaps.  We come up the slope onto the Triassic and Jurassic formations layered upon the Permian, with more shales holding the bones of early dinosaurs and outcrops of petrified sand dunes of almost pure quartz, displaying festooned bedding in the rock looking like woodgrain and speaking to when this land was covered by towering, drifting sand dunes whipped and driven by the wind.

Now with the sun balanced on the horizon, we two drive through our last canyon and the stone walls catch the low sunbeams and have become as embers of a dying fire, the cliff walls glow a brilliant, warm red.  The entire landscape is radiant in hues of a monochromatic red spectrum, with perhaps a tinge toward the violet within the deepening shadows.  This land of red must be nature's way of saying stop.  And so stop we did.



Grant stretches his limbs on the edge of the Canyon
after a long day's drive to the
Great Goosenecks of the San Juan



The first time I came to this place, it was late at night and as I parked my vehicle and began to set up for a night's sleep, I placed by stuff on the ground as the wind began to pick up.  It was not until first light that I noticed that I had slept quite near the edge of a large cliff and I felt relieved that neither a gust of strong wind  or a fit of sleep-walking hand moved me over the side to my demise.  This time, it was twilight when we set up our camp.  But never-the-less, lesson learned, we set our sleeping bags and air mattresses a good 50 yards back from the edge of the precipice.

We kept it all very simple that evening.  No tent, just a large canvas ground cloth, with our bags laid on top of our air mattresses.  Dinner was also very simple, it was a few small tangerines, banana nut bread (I baked the night before we left) with water and chocolate chip cookies for dessert (cookie provided by Aunt Susan while we stayed in Wichita Falls).

Side Note: We traveled long and far with that heaping bag of chocolate chip cookies, and in the jostling and shuffling and unpacking and packing, some of those cookies were broken to crumbs and dust as the trip wore on.  Do you believe in ghosts?  I swear that up to the very last day of our travels I could smell those phantom cookies at times inside the car.  I guess I like to thing of those dashed cookie crumbs not as phantoms or ghosts - but as comforting little cookie angels watching out for us on our journey.  Thank you Aunt Susan.

Once the dusk deepened into a dark and moonless night, Grant and I slipped into our bags in the still warm desert air and pointed out the Big Dipper, the Milky Way, Venus and Mars, "The Red Planet".  But as the rocks around us tell those who listen, Earth was once "The Red Planet", as climate, environments and even planets change.  We slept well.

Desert Camp at Daybreak

Mid-June days are long, and begin early.  I was up with first light, but lingered for a while within my polyester cocoon.  I knew Grant wanted to sleep longer (and was doing so).  I crawled out into the open and wandered about on the cliff's edge.  The brim of this canyon was the Honaker Trail Formation (Pennsylvanian age), a limestone and the very formation that was the subject of my Master's thesis at the University of Texas.  Though my field area was in Colorado, high up at Molas Pass between Durango and Ouray. 

The San Juan River cut these "gooseneck bends" as a classic example of an entrenched meander.  The San Juan River was originally flowing over a much different terrain, but as the Colorado Plateau began to rise beneath the river, the river kept its course and gradually cut down into the rock that was being uplifted beneath it.  The uplift of the Colorado Plateau is responsible for the Grand Canyon and many of the other spectacular geologic features and formations found in the American Southwest.  At the lip of the canyon, there is a book to register your name and home and add a comment .  It is interesting to note that most of the visitors to this far flung corner of the United States are from Europe. 

I greeted the sun and then picked up a piece of the Honaker Trail limestone and gave it a little good morning peck as well.  Hello old friend.
It is a another fine and good day for adventure!
Let rise and enjoy the journey! 

The morning light begins to seep down into
the canyon of the San Juan River
flowing 1,000 below the rim of the canyon.
Still slowly eroding as it cuts its channel
deeper into the Paleozoic sediments beneath.

  

Grant checks cell coverage for social media and sports updates in the remote American Southwest desert.