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It brings a smile to my face when I run into former students who tell me they still remember the slide shows and stories from my Earth Science classes more than 30 years ago.
A host of those photos and stories came from the Western Parkland Field Study I've been writing about in recent weeks. Before closing the book on this trip, I thought it would be fun to share several final anecdotes and lessons from the trip.
Why It's Called Roughing It -- I went five weeks without sleeping on a mattress and when I finally hit one in West Virginia, I enjoyed one of the best night's sleep of my life. In between, I slept in the front seat of a Toyota truck during a thunderstorm, ten feet from a moaning porcupine in Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and among the lizards at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Twice, at Rocky Mountain National Park and Mesa Verde among the ancient cliff dwellings, the stars were so bright, I had a hard time getting to sleep.
Craters, Cones and Intrusions -- The volcanoes (Arizona's Sunset Crater) and intrusive igneous features made from cooled squirts of magma (Colorado's Walsenberg Dike) were special for those of us from places without such igneous features. The intrusions visible in the steep-sided Black Canyon of the Gunnison River and the massive hole formed, not by a volcano but by a meteorite, at Meteor Crater were similarly incredible.
The Miracle of Differential Erosion -- While it sounds like some financial term describing bad investments, the differential erosion of rocks explains many unusual geographic features and shapes. Besides the bench and slope topography of the canyon lands, differences in the erosion rate of rocks also explained the arches, buttes, mesas, and waterfalls we saw.
Rain in Unexpected Places - In the forty years since my trip, the southwest has been dominated by drought. But 1983 was a record-breaking rainy year. So much rain fell, following a snowy winter, that the spillways of several of the large dams were seriously damaged. A boat trip on Lake Powell took us back to canyons that had never before been inundated with water. We jumped off cliffs that are now so far from the water that you'd die if you tried to jump from them in 2023.
Sand Dunes of All Kinds - The West has a great deal of wind-blown soil and sediment. Great Sand Dunes National Park was especially fascinating, but the "frozen" cross-bedded sandstone found in several of the western parks were amazingly unique, too. Coral Pink Sand Dune State Park was not as pleasant, however, since the state of Utah allows ATVs and dune buggies in an otherwise peaceful, majestic landscape.
If Man Were Meant to Fly - Subscribing to the argument that if man were meant to fly he'd have wings, I had never flown to that point in my life. But when a Grand Canyon fly-over was offered, I knew I had to take the leap of faith. Just two weeks before one of the two-engine propeller tour planes went down, I received a rude and bumpy baptism to flying. I was so excited about the view and resulting photos, I assumed the turbulence was just an inevitable part of the experience.
Blair County resident John Frederick (www.johnjfrederick.com) writes about nature and the environment.