My favorite camping areas near Bluff, Utah, are on either side of Comb Ridge. I found this geologic feature beautiful from all angles, as when the setting sun fired up its west flank one afternoon.
To me there's nothing like moseying up a red dirt road in the countryside. This one ambles north through Comb Wash, the ridge on its right.
On the day I was driving east on Hwy 95, back from a visit to Jacob's Chair and White Canyon, I realized how huge this ridge is.
I was nearing Blanding, which is twenty-six miles north of Bluff. And, as if for emphasis, a dramatic highway cut slices through the wall.
It is both beautiful and formidable. For the time being I thought of it as some sort of geologic upthrust, and left it at that.
Comb Ridge runs north-south through Bears Ears National Monument, so I began thinking of it as the bear's spine, what with its cockscomb in places also looking like well-articulated vertebrae (1st & 2nd photos above). Here's the Bear's Ears, in the northward area of the park:
I also love camping on the east side, up Butler Wash, because clambering around on the slick rock side of the ridge is such fun. The terrain is entirely different from the red escarpment on the west side.
The central red mound (below) is one of the westside 'combs' showing through to the east. It provided a fine goal for hiking one day, but I was tired and it was farther than it looked!
Eventually I had to head home, south along Hwy 160 toward Flagstaff. To my astonishment, Comb Ridge traveled right along beside me for miles and miles, nearly to Kayenta, AZ.
It finally petered out near the field of volcanic plugs that includes the famous Agathla Peak, aka El Capitan (below). By then I was determined to figure out how a ridge so long could have formed.
The explanation didn't make sense at first: It's a monocline...but one vastly different from nearby, Raplee Ridge (above Mexican Hat, UT). When I first saw Raplee, I was confounded: How could flat sedimentary layers suddenly veer downward?!
It happens when a fault deep in the earth causes terrain above to fold, like a tablecloth laying over the edge of a table. But this didn't fit with what I saw around Comb Ridge -- it was so long (about 80 miles!) and juts up on both sides. This diagram took a very long time to figure out:
The left side (A) shows the cross-section shape of the earth as a monocline (the fold from high to low) as it originally stood. The same view on the right side (B) shows the current shape after millennia of river waters eroded out all the earth to the left/west, leaving the escarpment and ridge.
But why 80 miles long?! Because it is the eastern boundary of the extensive Monument Upwarp, a 90-by-35 mile rippled area of mesas, escarpments and valleys, which could be pictured as accordioned taffeta. And, as with the Colorado Plateau, of which it's a part, and the nearby Rockies, these all were geomorphed during the Laramide Orogeny, around 70-40 million years ago, give or take a few million years.
So, with this understanding, I'll be able to sit by my campfire imagining where I am in both time and space. One thing leads to another: the hipbone's connected to the thighbone, the Ridge is connected to the Upwarp, the Upwarp's connected to the Colorodo Plateau, the Plateau's connected to the Rockies, and they're all connected by the Laramide Orogeny. I love this. So does Marcia Bjornerud in her book, Timefulness:
"Timefulness includes a feeling for distances and proximities in the geography of deep time. Focusing simply on the age of the earth is like describing a symphony in terms of its total measure count. Without time, a symphony is a heap of sounds; the durations of notes and recurrence of themes give it shape. Similarly, the grandeur of Earth's story lies in the gradually unfolding, interwoven rhythms of its many movements, with short motifs scampering over tones that resonate across the entire span of the planet's history." (p. 17)
She suggests that timefulness encourages us to recognize the deep-time flow, of which we are a part, a flow that continues into the deep future. She posits hopefully that such awareness could help forestall the environmental depredations occurring, were we to fathom, deeply, our place on and responsibility for our Earth.
I'll close, finally, with her enlargement of the concept of sati (derived from E. Shulman's 2014 Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception.).
"The Buddhist concept of sati is typically translated as 'mindfulness,' or of being attentive only to the Now. But it actually means something closer to 'memory of the Present' -- that is, awareness of this moment from a vantage point outside it....From our vantage point in the present, we can replay the past at any speed and envision possible futures. This geologic habit of mind -- the practice of timefulness -- is a fusion of wyrd and sankofa (sensing the presence of the past), sati (holding a memory of the present), and Seventh Generation thinking (a kind of nostalgia for the future). It is something like the way parents see their growing children, poignantly remembering them at earlier stages while holding aspirational visions for who they will become." (pp. 162 & 178)
And...one thing leads to another...my daughter and granddaughter.
It is both beautiful and formidable. For the time being I thought of it as some sort of geologic upthrust, and left it at that.
Comb Ridge runs north-south through Bears Ears National Monument, so I began thinking of it as the bear's spine, what with its cockscomb in places also looking like well-articulated vertebrae (1st & 2nd photos above). Here's the Bear's Ears, in the northward area of the park:
I also love camping on the east side, up Butler Wash, because clambering around on the slick rock side of the ridge is such fun. The terrain is entirely different from the red escarpment on the west side.
The central red mound (below) is one of the westside 'combs' showing through to the east. It provided a fine goal for hiking one day, but I was tired and it was farther than it looked!
Eventually I had to head home, south along Hwy 160 toward Flagstaff. To my astonishment, Comb Ridge traveled right along beside me for miles and miles, nearly to Kayenta, AZ.
It finally petered out near the field of volcanic plugs that includes the famous Agathla Peak, aka El Capitan (below). By then I was determined to figure out how a ridge so long could have formed.
The explanation didn't make sense at first: It's a monocline...but one vastly different from nearby, Raplee Ridge (above Mexican Hat, UT). When I first saw Raplee, I was confounded: How could flat sedimentary layers suddenly veer downward?!
It happens when a fault deep in the earth causes terrain above to fold, like a tablecloth laying over the edge of a table. But this didn't fit with what I saw around Comb Ridge -- it was so long (about 80 miles!) and juts up on both sides. This diagram took a very long time to figure out:
The left side (A) shows the cross-section shape of the earth as a monocline (the fold from high to low) as it originally stood. The same view on the right side (B) shows the current shape after millennia of river waters eroded out all the earth to the left/west, leaving the escarpment and ridge.
But why 80 miles long?! Because it is the eastern boundary of the extensive Monument Upwarp, a 90-by-35 mile rippled area of mesas, escarpments and valleys, which could be pictured as accordioned taffeta. And, as with the Colorado Plateau, of which it's a part, and the nearby Rockies, these all were geomorphed during the Laramide Orogeny, around 70-40 million years ago, give or take a few million years.
So, with this understanding, I'll be able to sit by my campfire imagining where I am in both time and space. One thing leads to another: the hipbone's connected to the thighbone, the Ridge is connected to the Upwarp, the Upwarp's connected to the Colorodo Plateau, the Plateau's connected to the Rockies, and they're all connected by the Laramide Orogeny. I love this. So does Marcia Bjornerud in her book, Timefulness:
"Timefulness includes a feeling for distances and proximities in the geography of deep time. Focusing simply on the age of the earth is like describing a symphony in terms of its total measure count. Without time, a symphony is a heap of sounds; the durations of notes and recurrence of themes give it shape. Similarly, the grandeur of Earth's story lies in the gradually unfolding, interwoven rhythms of its many movements, with short motifs scampering over tones that resonate across the entire span of the planet's history." (p. 17)
She suggests that timefulness encourages us to recognize the deep-time flow, of which we are a part, a flow that continues into the deep future. She posits hopefully that such awareness could help forestall the environmental depredations occurring, were we to fathom, deeply, our place on and responsibility for our Earth.
I'll close, finally, with her enlargement of the concept of sati (derived from E. Shulman's 2014 Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception.).
"The Buddhist concept of sati is typically translated as 'mindfulness,' or of being attentive only to the Now. But it actually means something closer to 'memory of the Present' -- that is, awareness of this moment from a vantage point outside it....From our vantage point in the present, we can replay the past at any speed and envision possible futures. This geologic habit of mind -- the practice of timefulness -- is a fusion of wyrd and sankofa (sensing the presence of the past), sati (holding a memory of the present), and Seventh Generation thinking (a kind of nostalgia for the future). It is something like the way parents see their growing children, poignantly remembering them at earlier stages while holding aspirational visions for who they will become." (pp. 162 & 178)
And...one thing leads to another...my daughter and granddaughter.
I try to imagine the unimaginable forces and time that shaped the geology of this planet. All I can do is think, "Wo-o-o-o-o-o-w-w-w-w!"
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