Mud or Sand?

I am in the midst of getting my Geology of the Green River class finalized. You always have to wait until the last minute to see what the water conditions are like. The past few years have seen lower than average water conditions. The good news is that the sand bars are numerous and camping is pretty easy...the bad news is that you paddle all day every day. This year could be different with the record snow pack last winter. Rivers have been running high but it looks like the discharge has been dropping off rapidly in the past week as the snow pack from last winter has about finished melting. This graph shows a 1000 cfs drop in discharge about every 60 hours. Of course this is a dam regulated river flow and we know we won't run out of water (which this graph might suggest) , the question is when will the river reach its regulated base flow of 1975 cfs?
If we have water levels greater than 3000 cfs, there might be a bit of mud to content with, in which case the class might spend even more time looking at modern day sediment and sediment transport down the river and on our sandals. If the water levels drop to closer to 2000 cfs, we will have more sand and more sand bars to play with.

A Long Bike Ride

I am back home after riding the 185 mile C&O canal towpath along the Potomac River from Cumberland MD to Washington DC. The canal was a busy place for almost 100 years before the railroads took over the job of transporting stuff between the coast and the interior. Now protected by the National Park Service, this very long and very skinny unit of our National Park System provides an incredible chance to ride a bicycle through the heart of the Appalachian Mountains while not climbing a single hill...pretty cool.

I have to thank Callen for giving me some advanced information to help me appreciate the geology of the area. I am afraid I have that Western bias that assumes geology should be right in front of your nose with little vegetation hiding the nuances.

Now I am off to Lake City where we will attempt some easy 14'ers, and then one more geology class to teach while floating from Green River Utah to Mineral Bottom, 65 miles away.

I love summer!

summer fun

Last week I spent some time in the field with a group of elementary teachers looking at the geology of the Uncompaghre Plateau, specifically along Dominguez Creek and the Gunnison River. The week started at the Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden where we re-acquainted ourselves with simple geologic processes and then these lessons where put to the test in a 3 day field trip.

My big push has always been to try to understand the environment where the rock units we are studying were formed. To get the idea of different energy regimes in stream flows we calculated the discharge of Dominguez Creek near our camp.


To examine the difference in stream velocities we hiked upstream to an area where the creek was had eroded a small channel through much harder Pre-Cambrian Metamorphic rock thus a much smaller stream cross section. Discharge was approximately unchanged but the velocity was much higher. To test our findings we did as any geology class would do...we made a butt dam to see if we could stop the flow of water. We were unsuccessful. The space on the right was left for me and even though I tried I could not fill the gap.


It was a great time where we were able to discuss some local geology as well as how to incorporate more of the earth sciences to elementary classrooms.

geology in the field

I have enjoyed reading about everyone getting excited about leaving the books and chalk boards behind and getting outside where the real geology is stored. My life is a little different. I mostly teach high school. We don't have field camps and their is absolutely no budget for fields trips (beyond to a nearby museum) anymore. However we use the Internet frequently (another great thread using the internet instead of the doing the real deal...but anyway)

So, in my case, I don't "do" geology as much as I "play" in geology, the next month schedule:

• mountain biking in Cathedral Valley, Capitol Reef NP
• backpacking in Escalante region
• teaching a 3 day field class on the Gunnison River in Western Colorado
• biking the C&O canal towpath (Thank you Callan for lots of information)

I am looking forward to seeing how the bigger water from last winter's snowpack will translate into rearranged sediment in some of the desert streams we frequent. Pictures will be coming as the play commences.

Have a great field season (summer)

Basic Soils, Starbucks and the Mancos shale.

The adobe badlands of Western Colorado are the erosional remnants of of the Mancos Shale, itself a depositional remnant of the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway. The shale here in my back yard is made of very fine, organic rich materials that were eroded off of the newly formed Rocky Mountains and Uncompaghre uplift as well as some volcanic ash from somewhere west of home. You can read some more of this in Clastic Detritus' Accretionary Wedge entry.

But we wanted to create a garden. The Mancos shale erodes into a fierce muddy basic glop that is home to just a few hardy plants. So that is where Starbucks comes in. Occasionally, there are bags of old Starbucks grounds that are free to take for the sole purpose of lowering the soil's pH closer to neutral so that perhaps the tomato plants we stuck in the ground can actually live through the summer and produce fruit...


Stay tuned and lets see what happens at harvest time.

Accretionary Wedge, Spring Run Off

My favorite time of the year is spring. My wife and I go on countless "signs of spring" hikes at different elevations and have seemingly months and months of spring. (It is still winter above 10,000') Along with the various plants making their way towards the sun and blooms of different flowers showing their colors, one part of spring I look forward to every year is the spring run off. Small mountain streams slowly build throughout the day. Clear waters becoming more turbid as the discharge climbs with water that was snow just this morning.

The most significant geologic event to me is the spring run off in the Rockies. Every year this rush of water cleans out rivers, moves a boat load of sediment and provides great thrills for those of us who enjoy being particles ourselves and move down stream. Some years we get some big water, and this will be a big water year. You can stand above smaller streams and actually hear the movement of boulders along the stream bed. Rivers will overflow their banks in the "what was a flood plain before the housing development was built" and deposit smaller sized sediment that would enable great riparian health if we hadn't cut the trees down and built our houses there. The Animas Valley near Durango or the Yampa Valley near Steamboat Springs comes to mind. During the big snow years in the late 70's the whole valley would be flooded...now there are really expensive houses there.

I have been studying the changes in sedimentation in the canyons on the Colorado Plateau as a result of the drought. We see larger particles sitting still for a number of years until there comes an event with enough energy to move them. These big snow years can be the energy event that an get this sediment transported a little closer to the ocean... And, its also great fun just to watch the power of big water.

Words that bug

Callan over at NOVA geoblog has asked what words bug us. His rant discusses some of the words we have heard in countless conversations and term papers.

My rant is a small one and shows that my teaching is almost all at the high school level, but can you think of another way to say "a lot"? Some well meaning teacher back in the day pointed out to my students that "alot" is not one word but two words...so "a lot" is a perfect use of grammar even if it is horrible word choice. I cringe and then automatically deduct a few points every time I read "a lot" in a formal term paper, and I read "a lot" of "a lots"

My favorites of course are the misspelled words. Just today I read about "comments" made of ice and dust that orbit the sun.

...and texting is something else altogether.