The Grandest Canyon

Today is the day--the day that we had been building up to. All 14 Stretchies plus Ed, Justin, and Matt decided to hike to the Colorado and back on the Bright Angel Trail: 18 miles long, 1 mile down in elevation. Clearly, we were warned against doing so. Some of our crew decided to one-up the canyon and run down (I did not haha).

Well, we started at 7:15am and I made it down by 10:30. It was so beautiful and the mighty Colorado was roaring (high flow experiment ~35,000cfs). I made it back up by 3pm. It was such an accomplishment and am so thankful to have had the opportunity and to have been in shape to do it.

 

11/13/14

I decided not to put a new post for the last day, since I feel like the Grand Canyon should be the culmination of the Stretch. But today, we got to go down into a lava tube and walk about 1 mile to the end. Pretty cool stuff!

Red Mountain

Sadly, the Stretch is winding down. We left Flagstaff for the Grand Canyon this morning, with a little exercise stop halfway. We went to Red Mountain, a cinder volcano with an area out the side that blew out (or so we think). Ed basically let us loose to go exploring, which was pretty sweet.

Alas, we made it to the Grand Canyon. I had never seen it before, and a mixture of excitement, wonder, and anxiety filled me. The excitement was a result of seeing the canyon live up to its expectation portrayed through media and stories. The wonder came in comparison to all the other canyons we saw and seeing how this one was SO much larger. What forces and time were at work to create such a canyon. And the anxiety, well, it was in response to my realization that I'm walking to the bottom and back tomorrow: the longest hike I have done in my life.

Let's do it!

SP Crater

Today, Ed took us up SP Crater, an old cinder cone in the San Francisco Volcanic Field outside of Flagstaff. As we are doing a remote sensing exercise for the area, we messed around with reflectance of materials in the area, including some unusual materials (eyes, scabs, skin, etc). Then we went out and "ground-truthed" areas that we needed to identify in our computer program.

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Meteors!

Today we drove outside of Flagstaff to see Meteor Crater. This was the first recognizable crater on North America and has sparked studies of other craters around the world. Matt taught us a bit and led us through an exercise to determine the size of the meteor.

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Dropstones!

Ah, so we explored Proterozoic sedimentary rocks today, catching a glimpse into the past before advanced life colonized the earth. These rocks show us how the pre-Cambrian earth was extreme in environments and climate. Vast colonies of stromatolites are preserved in some of the units as well as evidence for tropical glaciation. Can someone say Snowball Earth?

The sandwiching of glacial sediments between thick carbonate units indicates that there was extensive glaciation at low latitudes. We finally got to see dropstones: clasts that drop through the water column from an ice block and then make a depression in the fine clays. It has been the joke answer for the extent of the Stretch, so it was satisfying to finally see them for real.

Last Mapping Project

LAST MAPPING PROJECT!

These past two days were pretty cool mapping days. By cool, I mean the rocks were awesome, and the structure, well, was a head-scratcher. We caught a glimpse into rocks that were 1,750,000 to 540,000 years old. They date back to pre-Cambrian times and showed it. We all enjoyed seeing dropstones from "Snowball Earth" times, since it had been the joke explanation for every "How did this rock form?" question.

We finished our maps in the evening with the help of Ed, Justin Stroup, Justin Strauss, and Matt.

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Be One with the Rock

Today some of us joined Ed, Leslie, and Justin Stroup for a hike up a slot canyon outside of China Ranch. We got to see a solid fault plane and the slickensides on the surface. In a moment of fun, we all "became" slickensides. Yay structure! Leslie then left us with Ed and Justin Stroup, an incoming professor, to finish out the Stretch.

The rest of the afternoon was spent exploring canyons and seeing some really cool rocks!

Date-ing

We drove to China Ranch from Death Valley today. China Ranch is a date farm in Tecopa, CA, and is the coolest little escape from the barren wastelands of the desert. Upon arrival we were treated to date-shakes, which were SO GOOD. And make no mistake, there was no shortage of date jokes and puns.

For the next couple days we will stay in a bed and breakfast within the ranch. We will sleep in giant tepees that had beds inside them. It is an interesting juxtaposition of the tepees next to the date palms and then desert canyons on the horizon. There is no internet or cell service, so we are completely off the map!

Drop it Low

We know that there is a race between erosion and tectonics in the valley, so we wanted to quantify each to see who is winning. We took gravity measurements to profile the valley floor to see how thick the sediments are. Then we modeled a fault scarp to find the rate of down-dropping. Through calculations and some Leslie programming magic, we figured out that the valley floor on the eastern side of Death Valley was dropping faster than the mountains could be eroded.

Pretty good for a few day's work.

Racetrack Playa

On our off day today, a handful of us went on an epic excursion to the Racetrack Playa. 3 hours on a washboard gravel road and two blown shocks later, we arrived at this beautiful playa that had mystified scientists for some time. There are rocks that seem to have plowed themselves along the lake bed and leave long "racetracks". You can check out the recent hypothesis that explains the phenomenon here.

After about 5 hours driving back (due to busted shocks), we made it to an old crater that blew its top due to lots of water mixing with its magma. Death Valley is extreme in its climate and events, all which are so well preserved.

 

 

200ft Below Sea Level

Today was our first full day below sea level. It was hot and dry in Death Valley, especially down in the valley. We learned that the basin is sinking due to extension from the Basin and Range and shear near Walker Lane. Leslie took us all the way up to Devil's View (~5000ft) in the Black Mountains to look down at the valley and then down to the Badwater Basin (-282ft) to see the evaporites in the basin. We also went up Mosaic Canyon to check out the metamorphism associated with all these tectonics. 

And hey, deserts should have sand dunes, right?

Right.