Delirious Ramblings

Where Green Stones Flow Like Water

The River of Green Stones, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

I'm knee deep in last year's snow, working my way slowly along the face of the mountain when I finally see light ahead through the thick spruce and bristlecone pine forest. I head for it, hoping to see the sun. When I break free of the crusty snow and gloom I find myself on the banks of a river of green lichen and gray lava.

I wade out into it, mindful of the rollers and tippy flat plates, and look upstream. The great river of rock extends upwards for a million years. Downstream is the same. It is a raging torrent frozen in time, the rumblings and stirrings of earth paused in mid flow. Around me I can feel the trembling potential energy in the ancient rocks, all that repressed gravity waiting these many millennia.

 

The River of Green Stones, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

They say the San Francisco Peaks are extinct, that they've been asleep for a quarter million years or so and unlikely to ever reawaken. Extinct. Dormant. I guess that's technically true as far as geologists and science is concerned, but standing there in the middle of the frozen jumble of stone with the ancient lava rapids roaring in my ears, somehow it doesn't feel true.

I poke at one of the lichen covered boulders with the carbide point of one of my snowshoe poles. It moves imperceptibly, tips ever so slightly. I hear it grate softly against its mates. I can't help but think about Aron Ralston and his 127 hours.

A little unnerved I stand and work my way across the expanse of rocks quickly and carefully. I let out a little sigh of relief when I reach the other side, having safely forded the river.

No, it doesn't feel true at all. Dormant my ass, this damned mountain is alive.

Hot Loop trail, Javelina sighting and dinosaur trace fossils in Sedona

I attempted to finish the last section of the Hot Loop / Jacks Canyon trail system today but was thwarted by mud. The trail was mostly fine all the way from the trailhead at the Jacks Canyon Road corrals to just after Hot Loop Tank, but up on Horse Mesa where things weren't draining as well it turned into a nightmare of thick, gooey clay - you know, the kind that sticks to the soles of your boots and to itself so that after ten steps you're walking on six-inch platforms of heavy mud. It was no fun and I sure didn't want to damage the trail so I turned back, vowing to return at some later date when things have dried out.

On the way back to the trailhead I sighted six or eight javelina crossing the trail. They didn't offer to give me any trouble so I just stood silently and let them pass. I guess they had more important things to do than mess with me, namely rustling up a juicy breakfast of prickly pear cactus! Unfortunately the terrain and brush prevented me from getting a clear photo to share. This sad long-distance cropped picture is about the best I got. I've been seeing their tracks everywhere so it was pretty neat to finally catch a glimpse of these critters.

Before heading back to Flagstaff I decided to check out an old story I'd heard about dinosaur tracks off of Red Rock Loop road. I spent most of the afternoon poking around the hills off to the west looking at every flat expanse of limestone I could find. Finally, after exploring seemingly every hill and outcrop back there I think I found something. Maybe.

I dunno, if it is a trace fossil it's pretty faint and of poor quality. I put a faint red circle around what might be a track with four toes and a red arrow pointing to a tail or belly mark. Maybe back in the Triassic something like a crocodile crawled across a mud flat and left these traces behind?

Shells that once rocked in the tides

A couple of weekends ago I was crossing the boulder-filled bottom of Jacks Canyon when I looked down and noticed the above fossil sea shell embedded in one of the rocks. The stone it was entombed in had obviously come down from higher up the canyon in some flash flood as most of the other rocks nearby were of the red Schnebly Hill sandstone variety. From the color of the fossil-bearing stone I believe it to be Kaibab Limestone, which probably dates the shell back some 240 million years to the Triassic Period.

When the mollusk that used this shell was alive the earth was a very different place than it is today. The continents were packed into one large super-continent named Pangea that straddled the equator. The climate was hot and dry and early dinosaurs were just starting to get traction on land and in the sea following the "Great Dying" of the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event. And the marine organism fossilized into this piece of Kaibab Limestone tells us that Arizona was situated near the coast under a shallow sea, probably much like the modern day Caribbean.

Further down the trail I found another rock, also probably Kaibab Limestone, with many organic-looking shapes embedded in it. I don't recognize any of the shapes so they may not in fact be fossils, but they're still pretty neat.

It's kind of strange to be hiking through a dry, sandy canyon bottom choked with catclaw, juniper and cyprus trees and suddenly see evidence of marine life.

The title of this post comes from a line in Ellen Bass's Ode to the Fish, published in the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Orion magazine.

Couple pics of potential Mount Elden fossils

Last weekend I was hiking the Heart Trail up on Elden and got some pictures of what appears to be fossilized sea creatures:

The recent monsoon rains have washed a lot of soil off the trail, baring some new rocks. I hadn't noticed these before, but that doesn't mean anything: I could've just been paying closer attention to what I was walking on this time due to all the new rocks making the trail even harder to negotiate.

To my untrained eye they look like some sort of segmented worms or maybe coral impressions. I'm more confident that the first picture is of an actual fossil than I am of the second. I've read that Elden's fossils date back to the Devonian period, 409-363 million years ago. During that time fish became abundant in the seas, the first amphibians evolved, and the first forests appeared on land. This area was under a shallow sea then and scientists have found fossils of early fish, shells, bony plate impressions, corals, and other ocean creatures up on Elden.

I'm pretty psyched that I actually might've found some fossils up there. Yeah, I know - My inner 8-year-old is showing through...

Going way back in time on Mount Elden

Mount Elden is a really cool mountain for several reasons, not the least of which is its geology. Because of the huge 1977 fire that decimated the tree cover on the eastern slopes you can see a lot more of the mountain's rocks than you normally would sans fire.

Unlike the San Francisco Peaks, which are actually a single gigantic stratovolcano comprised of layer upon layer of lava flows erupted over about a million years, Mount Elden is a dacite lava dome and formed relatively quickly over a few months time. Elden was born when thick, sticky magma forced its way up from deep underground -- imagine bread dough squeezing up from a crack in the ground-- and piled up on top of itself. That's what made those fascinating lobed blobby areas visible from the Flagstaff mall. And that's also why there is no crater or vent visible - the vents are buried deep under the mountain itself.

Anyhow, to the untrained eye (me!), Elden looks like it's just a big pile of boring old volcanic rock, the same as you'd find anywhere else around Flagstaff.

But because of the way Elden was formed you can actually find some really interesting rock formations up there, stuff you wouldn't expect to see in the middle of a volcanic field. When the sticky dacite magma was pushing its way up it brought all kinds of rocks from earlier (i.e. deeper) periods along with it. For example, here's some nifty red sandstone outcrops visible along the lower portion of the Heart Trail:

If you were wondering where you've seen this before, well this is the same kind of sandstone you find around Sedona, a full 2,000 feet lower. This sandstone is part of what geologists call the Martin Formation and formed on the bottom of the shallow sea that covered this part of the country during the Devonian Period, some 400 million years ago.

Note how the rock layers are tilted away from horizontal - a clue that significant uplifting has occurred here.

During the Devonian Period life in the oceans was mostly made up of primitive fish, invertebrates,  corals, and brachiopods (i.e. shelled creatures). Fish were just beginning to experiment with walking around on land and breathing air, insects were already well established, and the first seed-bearing plants were becoming widespread.

Supposedly there are places on Elden where you can find the fossilized bony plates of certain early fish, shell imprints, and corals. Because of the extreme age of the rocks the fossils are not very well preserved and you'd need a well-trained eye to spot them. I haven't found anything myself, but I suspect that's because others have already picked the areas near the trails I frequent clean. That and I wouldn't know a posterior ventrolateral arthrodire plate if it jumped up and bit me in the gluteus maximus.

Higher up on the Heart Trail the path cuts through another interesting layer of seemingly out-of-place rock, this time a whitish limestone:

These rocks are still part of the Martin Formation. If you head down to Jerome supposedly you can find more examples of this rock.