Geology

Carrizo Plain National Monument

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This month I’m posting my spring visits to national monuments and recreation areas in California, slowly working my way north.

Soda Lake above dries out each summer, leaving alkaline deposits that look like baking soda. The plain is best known for occasional super blooms in April attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. But the roads are poor, so some folks get stuck in the soft mud in this remote area of coastal California ($1,200 bucks to retrieve your vehicle). The Bureau of Land Management runs a seasonal visitor center from December through May, with exhibits and very helpful staff who can tell you if the petroglyph area is open or not. If you plan to see the wildflowers, definitely call ahead to get the latest info on both the blooms and the roads.

I came early this year after a nice dry stretch while the lake was full and the land was still green and drove all over the place without seeing another person. I saw several golden eagles and watched a small flock of curlew land beside me to peck around with their long thin curved beaks. Geology students often come out to drive along the Dragon’s Back and take photos where Wallace Creek is sharply diverted by the San Andreas Fault, which runs between the seasonal lake and the Temblor Range in the photo above left.

National Parks to Visit in April

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[Quick note: beginning next week, Thursday and Saturday posts are switching to Friday].

After January, February and March, here are my April recommendations: Bryce, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and the Petrified Forest. These high plateau parks are great to visit in April.

Bryce Canyon is spectacular in April with a chance of snow on the hoodoos. The best of Bryce is a horse or better a mule ride down into the canyon, and the park concessionaire starts riding tours on April 1. The canyon rim is around 8,500 feet, so late snow and leftover morning ice are quite possible. Except for a couple roads up to mountain peak lookout trails, the park opens for spring between the end of the first week and mid-April. If you are a serious hiker and want all the trails open, then I’d recommend the first half of October before the snow falls. Otherwise, I’d check the weather, wear a thermal layer and go in the second half of April, when wildlife and flowers are just emerging after a cold winter. May or September are also nice, as they are at most parks.

Canyonlands has good weather in April and has many different places to explore by bike, drive or hike. The roads and trails are often rough especially after rain, but there are wildflowers. Campgrounds require early reservations and background camping requires permits, gear and experience.

Capitol Reef has some excellent hiking in April ~65° F. There may be some rain, but that brings wildflowers. Some like visiting the orchards in fruit picking season, but I’d rather be biking here when the orchards are in bloom.

April has pleasant weather for taking photos of the Petrified Forest with wildflowers. Summer is too hot and winter is too cold. You need decent weather to hike around, and the contrast between the fossilized trees and living flowers is nice.

Gros Morne

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Gros Morne, a world heritage site in Newfoundland, has three must sees: Gros Morne Mountain, the Tablelands, and Western Brook Pond. The first can be seen easily from many viewpoints, and the approach trail is reasonably flat. The whole park is famous for its geology, with rocky coves, pond marked plateaus, deep fjords, dark, magnesium rich cliffs and the lonely mountain of Gros Morne itself, with pinkish quartzite on top. The views from the top are supposedly stunning, but it’s an all day steep hike.

The second must see above is unique and has an easy guided hike. The Tablelands is one of maybe three places in the world where you can walk on the earth’s mantle. Left over from a temporary overlap and receding of the North American and Asian tectonic plates, this mountain of mantle cooled, dried and had its crust removed by glaciers and erosion. The Table Mountains are studied by geologists—including those who developed the theory of plate tectonics—, and it is easy to see soapstone, serpentine, and other interesting rocks here. But most of the rock above is peridotite, an iron rich igneous rock from the mantle.

I took the ‘easy’ Tablelands hike with a guide who explained about the tough creatures who live up here, including the local humans. The forecast was clear all morning, so naturally it hailed and rained for much of the hike. Still, the clouds occasionally parted and revealed some of the muted yet dramatic scenery.

And the third must see also has an easy hike, but then you need to take a boat to see the rest. Western Brook Pond is actually a deep lake in the middle of a landlocked fjord, with high thin waterfalls cascading down massive cliffs. Glaciers carved many fjords, arms and valleys in the park, and this spot offers a great view of the ancient Appalachian landscape. On a good day, it is spectacular, but the weather doesn’t always cooperate.

I would recommend scheduling more time than usual for Newfoundland, as the pace is slow, weather is changeable, and delays are common. I will have to return to see a couple places that I missed due to a ferry cancelation. On the other hand, I’ve been forced to slow down my typical hectic schedule, which is good.

Natural Bridge

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George Washington surveyed it in 1750, and Thomas Jefferson bought the largest limestone arch in North America above in 1774. At 200’ tall, it’s higher than Niagara Falls. See if you can find the people in the photo. It’s an NPS affiliate, managed by Virginia State Parks. There’s a pretty 1.7 mile trail up under and past the arch along Cedar Creek, with many steps, interesting rock formations, heron below, woodpeckers, chickadees and other birds.

Here are my visits to all parks in Virginia.

Ice Age National Scenic Trail

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The trail is not straight. It meanders through Wisconsin’s wooded hills, green valleys and along its rivers and lakes. The trail begins along the Niagara Escarpment that separates Green Bay from Lake Michigan, then south below Madison, before crossing the Wisconsin River at Lake Wisconsin. Then it passes up across the bluff on the right with its characteristic rough rock glacial remnants on the steep slope to the north beach of Devil’s Lake above before continuing north to the Wisconsin Dells with iconic eroded rocks. Eventually it crosses the state to end at the St Croix River.

President Biden elevated the trail to a full national park unit, but many of the most scenic sections are in state parks or affiliated scientific reserves. Wisconsin Dells itself is quite commercialized, with water parks and pricey tours, even though the layered rock can be seen in several different places along the Wisconsin River. State parks like above or Mirror Lake have fine scenery, camping and miles of maintained trails. I tend to rush around and then spend too much time at supper clubs, but it’s worth slowing down a bit here to enjoy the natural beauty. For more, read my earlier post about the Ice Age Trails.

Here are my visits to all parks in Wisconsin.

Capitol Reef National Park

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The dome in the middle reminded folks of the US Capitol, but the geologic speciality of the park is the reef, or Waterpocket Fold, one of the longest continually exposed monoclines (like a wrinkle) in the world, almost 100 miles north to south. Cathedral Valley in the north and Muley Twist Canyon in the south are difficult to access without a high clearance 4×4, but the geologic layers can all be seen in the middle cross section near the Fruita orchard. The Hickman Bridge trail above is a good place to see the dome, but the scenic drive along the fold is exceptional. The unpaved side trip into Capitol Gorge is particularly striking, and there’s a hike from the parking lot up to see the eroded round water-pockets for which the fold is named.

This is my favorite park to learn about the geology of the west, from the high country mountains like Great Basin and Rocky at 12,000 feet, to the high plateaus like Cedar Breaks at 10,000 feet and Bryce at 8,000 feet, to standing up country with Natural Bridges at 6,000 feet, Arches at 5,000 feet, Zion at 4,000 feet and the many layered Grand Canyon spanning from 8,000 to 2,000 feet, and all the way down to the low desert of Death Valley more than 250 feet below sea level. At Capitol Reef, the ranger’s geology talk explained how the changing climate and continental shifts over hundreds of millions of years left repeated layers of deposits, lifted them up unevenly and eroded them into the wonderful scenery we see today. The same patterns repeat, not just one ancient inland sea or forest or swamp or grassland or desert, but many repeated environments were slathered over one another and pressed into rock.

Why are there weird discolored greenish mounds along the Green River? Those were from one of the swampy periods (Morrison) when oxygen was low, materials were soft and clay-like and they contain late Jurassic dinosaur fossils. Why are there similar colored layers at much different altitudes? They were from different swampy periods and contain different fossils. What causes the alternating pink and beige layers of hoodoos and other rock formations? The layers are made of the same kind of rock, but in some years the iron oxidized and in others it couldn’t due to water changes. Where did all the sand come from to make all the sandstone layers? Much of the sand eroded from the old Appalachian Mountains, flowed down ancient rivers and blew across to the west.

Even if you’re completely uninterested in Geology, you might be interested in the outlaws who hid in the remote areas nearby, like the Wild Bunch, which included Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. Or maybe tour the old orchard and learn about pioneers. Or take a moment to think of those Uranium miners, many Native Americans, who still suffer radiation poisoning, or think about the wildlife who can’t read the warning signs. This is an uncrowded and under appreciated national park. Highly recommended.

Here’s the link to my visits to all parks in Utah.

Arches National Park

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Landscape Arch above spans over 100 yards. Photographs fail to render the three dimensional features. Only by hiking up the trail, turning that last corner and wandering around to view from different angles do the arches reveal their true nature. My head was spinning trying to take in the detailed patterns on rock faces, judge the sizes of dramatically shaped features, imagine the geologic timescale and focus on the variety of terrain in every direction at different distances.

The reason there are more arches here than anywhere else in the world is salt. As elsewhere, the land formed in layered deposits, rose up and eroded. The unique part was that there were more layers of salt from shallow inland seas which slowly migrated underground and piled up against a hard fault line, forming an unstable underground salt dome that liquified and caused many long straight vertical cracks in the rock layer above. The exposed fins of sandstone eroded from both sides forming many arches and small windows. (Bridges are entirely different than arches).

In theory, the most famous arches are easily explored. Only a few miles from Moab, the main park road climbs up through the dramatic red canyon and branches off towards Delicate Arch above a salty valley, past Balanced Rock towards the Windows and up above to the Devil’s Garden. Each area has parking, and many of the trails are easy. In March, there were only a few visitors in the morning, and every arch waited patiently for me to admire. But by April the park requires timed reservations due to crowds, and in summer the heat can become dangerous. So in practice, you should time your visit thoughtfully, especially if you want to capture sunrise or sunset views without crowds. This is one of my favorite parks for geologic features.

Here’s the link to my visits to all parks in Utah.

Cedar Breaks National Monument

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I hiked out here 2 miles round trip to Spectra Point to get a view with Bristlecone Pines, so that you can tell this is not another photo of Bryce. There are a number of Bristlecone Pines here and a few more near Chessmen Ridge Overlook, although they are likely younger than some at Great Basin. By the way, if you’re looking for cedar trees, there never were any. Early visitors from back east mistakenly thought that the juniper trees were cedars, and the misnomer stuck. Cedar Breaks is over 10,000’, so it’s a step or two above Bryce, but since it extends down through and exposes the same layer of rock, it looks similar near the top. The view down the gorge looks down over 5,000’ towards also misnamed Cedar City, so you get a good look at the various layers of the grand staircase. Be careful hiking here, as high altitude contributes to vertigo. Due to the heights and erosion, there aren’t any recommended trails down from the rim, but there are a few rim trails and seven overlooks, four of which are near parking. While the road and trails may still be open, there was frost on the trail when I visited, and the roads will close as soon as it snows. The temporary visitor center and store has now closed for the season, and the new visitor center at Point Supreme Overlook is still under construction. Hopefully it’s open next year.

Here’s the link to my visits to all parks in Utah.

Bryce Canyon National Park

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This view is of Bryce Amphitheater from Bryce Point in the morning. Below are the 5.5 mile Peekaboo Loop, 1.3 mile Navajo Loop, 1.8 mile Queens Garden and other trails through the hoodoos. Definitely do at least one hike, if you’re able at this altitude, or even better, book a trail ride from the lodge. I won’t ever forget the spectacular feeling of riding through a layered maze of brightly colored hoodoos with my family; it is one of the best park experiences I have ever enjoyed.

There are around 15 different trails and as many overlooks, including Mossy Cave, Natural Bridge, Rainbow Point and Fairyland Point. Carbon burners should stay home or at least park and take the free shuttle, which goes from the hotels and campground near the entrance to the lodge and the most popular viewpoints and trailheads, but, since the shuttle is not yet electric, I drove my EV around early.

Bryce Canyon is between 7,500’ and 8,500’, and it is one of the prettiest places to appreciate geology. Long story short, the inland sea dried up, the land rose and erosion created the hoodoos and the rest of the canyons in the area. Grand Canyon is the bottom of the grand staircase, Zion in the middle and Bryce near the top. The colors of the steps span from ancient dark rock, tans, chocolate, vermillion, marble, to pink and white. And, if that’s not enough, it’s easy to see mule deer and other wildlife, wildflowers and to appreciate the dark night sky.

This is a great park to visit in April. Here’s the link to my visits to all parks in Utah.

Natural Bridges National Monument

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The Bridges, so designated because water flowed through them and formed them, are much older (Permian) than Utah’s famous Arches (Jurassic). There are three main bridges to see here, each only a short hike from the scenic drive to view, and they span two canyons, Armstrong and White. The Owachomo Bridge above is over a dry creek bed and can easily be hiked under. The Kachina Bridge is at a more challenging viewing angle near the intersection of the canyons, but if you’re up for the Loop Trail hike, I bet it’s spectacular. Sipapu Bridge, second in size only to Rainbow Bridge, is named for the emergence gateway mythology common to Native American tribes. There’s an impressive view from the overlook, and if you hike and climb about halfway down and go out along a wide ledge, you can get a view from the other side, which is equally magnificent.

This is one of my favorite parks for geologic features. Unfortunately, none of the bridges were working as portals to distant past or other dimensions. The surrounding forest and beautiful canyon lands are part of the Bears Ears National Monument (managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management), and the mesa top buttes that look vaguely like ears from a distance can be seen from the parking lot as well as from miles away in several directions. I drove in from the east, stunned by the scenery, and then left south, where the road drops into Monument Valley. Wow.

“I’m pretty tired…. I think I’ll go home now.”

Forrest Gump

Here’s the link to my visits to all parks in Utah.