AYA Sacramento Convention trip, July 2005

Home
Amana Sioux City Rawlins Rockies Moab Canyonlands Arches Salt Lake Sutter Creek Big Trees Sacramento Convention Lava Beds Crater Lake Beaver Island

to the story's beginning back to Sioux City

West of Alliance, the terrain began to rise in earnest, and we encountered some light turbulence - the only part of the trip that even resembled a rough ride (it was early afternoon by now). We landed at Rawlins shortly after 3 PM. At 6813 feet above sea level, this was our highest-elevation landing (and takeoff).

Rawlins is the home of the old Wyoming State Penitentiary. The original pen was in use from 1901 to 1981, when a new prison was opened, also in Rawlins. The old prison is a National Registered Landmark, and may be seen by guided tour.

Of course we took the tour. There's a small museum that may be seen without the tour, but it's only a small fraction of the place.
The tour begins with an explanation of the Julian Gallows, which Wyoming used to execute nine prisoners before replacing it with a gas chamber in 1936. Invented by a Cheyenne architect, this machine is a Rube Goldberg-like contraption. One end of a rope is tied to a support that works like a trick knee. The other end is attached through a pulley to a balance weight just outside the scene here. The weight is balanced by a can of water. When the prisoner steps on the trap door, another cord pulls a plug out of the can. Water runs out until the balance weight has lowered far enough to pull the support beam so it collapses suddenly, opening the trap door and dropping the condemned man.
The mechanism wasn't meant to be humane, so much as to spare Wyoming citizens from having to pay a hangman — the prisoner was his own executioner. Of the nine men executed on this gallows from 1912–1933, none fell far and hard enough to break his neck; they all died by suffocation.

This "prisoner" is waiting for a visitor.

Here's Cell Block A and one of its cells - looking in, and looking out.

This is what solitary confinement would look like from the inside if the prisoner had a flash camera. There's no other light in the cell.

Death row cells are behind two sets of bars. Each cell has a photo of an inmate who had spent his last days in that cell.

This is the trap door for the Julian Gallows. The photos are all the prisoners executed here and in the gas chamber. Before stepping onto the trap door, the prisoner was told to look out the window for one last view of the world outside.

Wyoming started using cyanide gas to execute condemned prisoners in 1936. For quality control, they tested the apparatus on a pig before each execution.

A couple of views in the exercise yard. The tree is a Russian Olive, which I know as a bush. I've never seen one more than eight feet tall before this.

The prisoners were allowed to paint - on media, on the walls, just about anywhere. The last painting was meant as an admonishment to "stay on the right side of the tracks."

Sidewalk art in Rawlins.

We got an early start for the flight from Rawlins to Moab. We flew over several oil wells, and then the terrain began to rise again, offering very few options for a forced landing. We followed the Green River through the Dinosaur National Monument, which straddles the Colorado-Utah state line. The last photo shows a road in this park. It leads to the turn-around at Echo Park Overlook, Harpers Corner. It looks like it would be a pretty tough drive to get up there. It's 7625 feet above sea level.

Chained to Mother Earth at Moab, Utah. The Canyonlands airport has a very attractive terminal building.

If we had flown just fifteen minutes beyond Moab, we might have landed at this airstrip instead of driving to it. It's the Needles Outpost runway, next to Canyonlands National Park. The Outpost is a popular spot for fly-in lunches, and sometimes for campers. It's 4500 feet long, which is adequate but not overly long, almost 5000 feet above sea level on a hot day. We needed the car, anyway.

In Moab, we stayed at an eclectic B&B with a fresh-water spring on the property, a rarity in such a dry place.

It also has a small collection of Volkswagen buses, one of which actually runs.

And you might be able to go for a log ride. if you only knew how.

Although we were here to see two parks, even the drive into Moab offered scenic delights. It runs through the Moab Fault, seen here from a viewpoint in Arches National Park.

Caution: this photo is very wide (there's a smaller version here).

A dramatic break in the earth's surface occurred here about six million years ago. Under intense pressure, unable to stretch, the crust cracked and shifted. The highway parallels this fracture line.
After the rock layers shifted, the east wall of the canyon (from where the photo was taken) ended up more than 2600 feet lower than the west side.

The west side of the Moab Fault is an anticline (layers scrunched up) exposing several layers that were deposited when thie area was at the bottom of a prehistoric ocean. Notice how the Chinle Formation slopes away from the Wingate Sandstone above it. The Wingate is harder, acting like a protective hat. A few miles south of here, we'll see a dramatic example of this selective erosion just before we get to the Needles District.

– diagram adapted from Lohman, S.W., and Stacy, John R.,
The Geologic Story of Arches National Park, U.S. Dept. of Interior, 1975.

Wilson Arch is on Route 191, just a few miles south of Moab. It's Entrada sandstone, a layer that has already eroded from the high side of the Moab Fault on the other side of the highway.

We planned to visit two national parks while we were in Moab. First stop was the Needles in Canyonlands National Park. Newspaper Rock is on the access road into the Needles. The sign nearby tells us that it...

...is a petroglyph panel etched in sandstone that records approximately 2000 years of early man's activities. Prehistoric peoples, probably from the Archaic, Basketmaker, Fremont and Pueblo cultures, etched on the rock from BC time to AD 1300. In historic times, Utah and Navajo tribesmen, as well as Anglos, left their contributions.
There are no known methods of dating rock art. In interpreting the figures on the rock, scholars are undecided as to their meaning or have yet to decipher them. In Navajo, the rock is called Tse' Hane' (rock that tells a story).
Unfortunately, we do not know if the figures represent story telling, doodling, hunting magic, clan symbols, ancient graffiti or something else. Without a true understanding of the petroglyphs, much is left for individual admiration and interpretation.

Leaving Newspaper Rock, we headed for the Needles. This scene includes Wooden Shoe Arch (third formation from the left), which we'll see closer in a few moments.
The Needles are a series of spires formed out of a red and white sandstone layer called Cedar Mesa Sandstone, which makes up most of the rock features in the Needles District of the Canyonlands Park. This 245 to 286 million year old layer was once a dune field on the eastern edge of a shallow sea that covered what is California, Nevada and western Utah today. Sand was blown in from this direction and formed the white bands in the Cedar Mesa Sandstone. The red bands came from sediment carried down by streams from a mountainous area near where Grand Junction Colorado, is today. These layers of sand were laid down on top of each other and created the distinctive rocks seen in the Needles District.
Starting about fifteen million years ago, the Colorado Plateau was pushed up thousands of feet. Rivers, such as the Colorado and the Green, cut down and carved deep canyons. Water, the primary force of erosion, eats away or weathers rock by attacking the cement holding the sand grains together. During storms, rushing water knocks loose sand and rocks as it flows down washes, causing additional erosion. The water naturally acts faster on areas of weakness within the rock, such as fractures and cracks. The Needles occur in an area with many fractures called joints.
The joints were formed in two different ways. The first was the Monument uplift, which begins around the Needles District and trends slightly southwest all the way to Monument Valley. This uplift caused brittle, surface rock like the Cedar Mesa Sandstone to crack as it was bent upward, forming a set of joints in a northeast-southwest direction.
A thick salt layer underneath the Needles district, known as the Paradox Formation, is the second cause of joint formation. The salt is flowing slowly toward the Colorado River and dragging the overlying layers with it. As the upper layers became stretched, they also fractured into joints. This action created a set of joints running northeast-southwest. In the Needles area, these two joint sets meet and form square blocks of rock between the joints. As water widened the joints, the squares were sculpted into pillars and spires that are today the Needles of Canyonlands.

These structures are outside the park boundary, but they are no less striking than the formations inside. The diagram shows when several layers of rock were deposited in this area. Over the past few million years, about half of them have eroded away from this area. On the access road, we're somewhere in the middle of the Chinle formation, which arrived here about 200 million years ago. The two Six Shooter Peaks are named for their Wingate sandstone spires, which reminded explorers of revolvers pointed up. This layer is harder than the underlying Chinle Formation that composes the conical bases of the peaks. The harder layer sheielded the peaks a bit from erosion, leaving the distinctive shapes we see here. Essentially the same process formed Chimney Rock in Nebraska (near Carhenge), but that better-known structure is only about thirty mllion years old.

– diagram adapted from Sandra Hinchman's Hiking the Southwest's Canyon Country,
3d ed., Mountaineers Books, Seattle, 2004, pg. 18

Wooden Shoe Arch. We learned about how arches are formed and destroyed a day after seeing this park, at Arches National Park.
About 300 million years ago, this area was covered by an inland sea. As the water evaporated, it left behind a great salt basin into which many layers of sediment were deposited. Here, red sediments from the mountains to the East interfingered with white coastal deposits. These sediments were later transformed into the red and white sandstone of the Cedar Mesa formation that is the floor of the Needles District.
The buried salt, which flows under pressure and is dissolved by ground water, shifted under the sandstone, causing it to fracture. Weathering along the fractures carved Wooden Shoe Arch, and the other arches, spires, knobs, and fins that we see today.

Turn around after looking at the Wooden Shoe Arch, and you see Squaw Butte. Like all of Canyonlands National Park, and unlike the Six Shooter Peaks, it's above the Monument Uplift. Imagine a fist pushing up most of southern Utah from below, and you get the idea. The structures in Canyonlands are Cedar Mesa Sandstone, about 150 million years older than the Six Shooters. When this area was an ocean floor, Canyonlands was about 2500 feet below the level of the Six Shooters.

In the very center of the first picture, there is a small cave in deep shadow, visible from the roadside. This is an Ancestral Puebloan granary tucked into a ledge above a dry wash, built 800 to 1000 years ago. Canyonlands National Park has dozens of similar structures, but few dwellings. This suggests that early inhabitants of the area farmed intensively, but lived here only seasonally.

Scenes from the auto road through the Needles District.

Pothole Trail offers dozens of examples. Potholes are naturally occurring basins or pools in sandstone that collect rainwater and wind-blown sediment. These potholes harbor organisms that are able to survive long periods of dehydration, and also serve as a breeding ground for many desert amphibians and insects. Potholes range from a few millimeters to a few meters in depth, and even the smallest potholes may harbor microscopic invertebrates. From an NPS web site,

To survive in a pothole, organisms must endure extreme fluctuations in several environmental factors. Surface temperatures vary from 140 degrees Fahrenheit in summer to below freezing in winter. As water evaporates, organisms must disperse to larger pools or tolerate dehydration and the drastic physical and chemical changes that accompany it.

The most extreme conditions exist when a pothole is dry. In addition to the wide temperature fluctuations, ultraviolet light from the sun can damage body tissues. Many aquatic organisms are adapted to acquiring oxygen through water and suffer when exposed to air. Pothole organisms have three main ways of dealing with drought.

"Drought escapers" are winged insects, amphibians and invertebrates that breed in potholes but cannot tolerate dehydration (e.g. mosquitoes, adult tadpole and fairy shrimp, spadefoot toads). In some cases, adults live in permanent water sources or on land and travel to temporary pools to mate and lay eggs. If the pool dries out before the young mature, they die. In the case of tadpole, fairy and clam shrimp, adults must lay their drought-tolerant eggs before the pool dries up.

"Drought resistors" (e.g. snails, mites) have a dormant stage resistant to drying out. These animals have a waterproof layer like a shell or exoskeleton that prevents body tissues from losing too much water while a pool is dry. By burrowing, these animals are able to seal themselves in the layers of fine mud that often coat the bottom of potholes and form an impermeable crust.

"Drought tolerators" (e.g. rotifers, tadpole and fairy shrimp eggs) are able to tolerate a loss of up to 92 percent of their total body water. This remarkable process, known as "cryptobiosis," is made even more remarkable by the fact that many cryptobiotic species can be rehydrated and become fully functional in as little as half an hour. Cryptobiosis is accomplished by a command center that remains hydrated while substituting sugar molecules for water throughout the rest of the body. This transfer maintains the structure and elasticity of an organism's cells during long periods of drought, and enables the organism to withstand the climatic extremes of the desert. In fact, brine shrimp have been hatched from cryptobiotic cysts that endured a flight on the outside of a spacecraft. Many tolerators have only one stage in their life cycle (e.g. egg, larva) that can survive desiccation, and will die if a pool dries up during another phase.

Pothole organisms not only have to endure dry spells, but also must evaluate conditions and decide when to break dormancy. Desert precipitation falls at irregular intervals, and once water enters a pothole there is no guarantee that there is enough for an organism to complete its life cycle. Most organisms living in potholes have very short life cycles, as brief as ten days, reducing the time water is required and allowing them to live in the shallow pools. Even vertebrates such as toads, which are found in other environments, display shorter development times when found in potholes.

However, the presence of water may not be the only cue used by eggs and dormant life forms to activate. Oxygen content, temperature, and other physical and chemical factors of the water may be evaluated. Some organisms produce different types of eggs that hatch on different cues; others lay eggs in different areas so that they experience slightly different environmental conditions. The net result is that not all eggs hatch at once and the species has a better chance of survival. After a pothole fills with water, the small ecosystem experiences many other changes. Water temperatures can be very high, while oxygen levels can be very low. As the pool shrinks from evaporation, its salinity increases and the pH changes. Many organisms are capable of surviving wide fluctuations in these factors, but for some these changes are an indication that the time for dormancy is near.

Here's an example of life in a pothole. It also shows cryptobiotic soil, a major geological feature of Arches National Park.

Some other scenes from the trail at Pothole Point.

Here's a teaser view of Islands in the Sky, in the background. What's that?

Junction Butte
Island in the Sky Mesa

Canyonlands National Park surrounds the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers. These rivers naturally divide the park into three sections. You can't get from one section to the other easily by car (no bridges), but you can see. This is a view of Islands in the Sky, generally considered to be the most accessible part of the park. These are buttes that haven't turned into needles yet. That will take a few thousand years or more.

It isn't possible to show the Needles in a normal photograph. This distant view of Chesler Park is very wide (there's a smaller version here).

on to Arches

Amana Sioux City Rawlins Rockies Moab Canyonlands Arches Salt Lake Sutter Creek Big Trees Sacramento Convention Lava Beds Crater Lake Beaver Island
Home