Finding My Bliss in the Carboniferous
We saw this little guy crawling across the sand, seemingly struggling in the high desert heat, a heat I have come to call lizard heat, for lizards are the only creatures hardy enough to survive, even thrive, in the burning furnace days of this place. Well, there are the pesty gnats too, and us brilliantly foolish (or is that foolishly brilliant) humans who visit here every year to see what we might see and learn a new thing or two about this raw world, a world almost completely untouched by the hand of man.No wonder it's untouched. The gnats are nearly unbearable, endlessly buzzing about my head, cave diving in my ears, taking tiny but painful bites of my dirty (tasty?) skin. Maybe I am not unlike our fire-roasted marshmallows to them, toasty-brown on the outside, gooey sweet on the inside. Ok I can go with that to a certain extent, offering up my body for an hour or two each day, just to do my part to feed the bloodsuckers of the world (yes, there are mosquitoes here too). But the whole day? Appears this world could use a little rearranging and rebalancing.My mates and I tease each other with the struggling bug, not touching it, just joking it will suddenly attack if you get to close (as in my taking this picture). I pretend to fling it at one of my comrades and accidently get a little sand on the creature, which I carefully brush away. Someone reverts to prepubescent mentality and suggests we squash it. Of course, we are only teasing, as if reminding ourselves how senseless, brutal and utterly disrespectful such an act would be. And yet, in the vast activities of human life, this goes on all the time.I've been coming to this high desert every spring for 20 years now. And every year I am reminded how this canyon country captured me in the first place, how its stark beauty and profound expanses of time and space fired my imagination and appreciation for the landscape fantastic. And despite initial impressions, there's always something new to see here. From the tiniest "ahhh" to the most profound "WHOA!", there's always something new to discover here.
The great Colorado Plateau is literally geologic paradise. Hundreds of millions of years of Earth history are exposed here, layed bare by Nature's sculptors, the elements. The Colorado River and its tributaries cut through this massive "state-size" uplift of crust, taking a deep slice through time. Wind, rain and ice further widen the gap.Into lands beyond, we enter other canyons, canyons with canyons into this vast maze of time and space, until finally we drop below the threshold of the great Permian Extinction...into the Paleozoic, this era of very old life.
To get to our eventual destination we first travel through Jurasic and Triassic Period rocks, mostly sandstones, mudstones and shales deposited between 145 and 245 million years ago. These time periods comprise the first two-thirds of the Mesozoic Era, the age of the dinosaurs.
