Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Stuff tends to stick around, out here.

For literal eons, sometimes.

The scenery has a fair bit to tell you about not only how things are, but also how things were, should you stop and take the time to listen to what it's saying.

This whole valley is more or less nothing more than a near-endless series of merged alluvial fans.

Water has attacked, and continues to attack (although not since I've been here, but it will again, eventually) the mountains everywhere around.

The mountains more or less shiver to fragments and then relocate themselves miles away, downslope. The present-day valley floor will eventually find itself buried beneath hundreds of meters of transported objects, an awful lot of which would not at first appear to be the sorts of things that mere water would be able to pick up and carry off.

But it does, and the evidence is clear.

Stand on the lobate toe of an ancient mudflow, acres in extent, and realization will set in. Of course, "mudflow" is a bit of a misnomer, and might better be called a "boulderflow" but who am I to question the nomenclature? Whatever you may wish to call it, it must have been quite impressive when it went down, rumbling deeply with the gnashing of a billion boulders, utterly destroying and then burying, every single thing that was so unfortunate as to be inescapably in its path.

And the rocks themselves speak to a flowing past, as well.

Basalt shows clearly where bubbles of gas remained inside of it when the liquid rock finally froze to solid.

Other basalt speaks of being liquid for long enough, and cooling down slowly enough, to permit the various constituent chemicals that made up the original rock to fractionally crystallize, leaving large inclusions of olivine within the matrix of parent rock.

Other rocks speak of having been riven to bits, ground down remorselessly, and then compressed back together, every whichaway, with no rhyme, no reason, no pattern, only to be, once again, shattered, moved, smoothed, and left somewhere for a chance human's wonderment at what it might have all been like.

Some rocks look young, as geologic things go, with sharp edges and angular shapes, while others show clear signs of having traveled a very long way, grinding and scraping the whole while, until the hard angles and edges become softer, rounder, more gentle.

Sometimes the very same thing will happen to people, too.

There's stuff going on all over the place out here, but it's crafty. It's stealthy. It moves and changes, but it won't let you catch it in the act.

I like that.