Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Spring!




I don’t know about all of you, but I’m ready for a little sunshine on my face.  This is the rainy season here in the Pacific Northwest.  Though I am located East of the Cascades in what is known as high desert, we still gets lots of rain in the spring.  We get a teaser of nice weather around New Years and then the sun disappears for 2-3 months, except for a few sucker holes that tease us with a little blue sky, reminding us why we chose to live here.  Every year about this time I start making sand paintings of the sun and doing little dances calling on the sun gods to at least let us have just a little of the sunshine.  But to no avail.  

So I am putting up this little reminder that the buds on the lilac bushes will soon turn into leaves and flowers and we will be enjoying the fruits of all that moisture.  Then we can begin to curse the heat and having to mow the grass.  Till then I’ll keep dancing, painting and praying for a little sun!

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Mount Bachelor, Oregon



Mount Bachelor is my beacon in Central Oregon. Friends came to visit us from the flat lands of Nebraska and they said one of the things they wanted to see in Oregon was a volcano.  We told them we thought we could accommodate them.  I can sit on my couch and look out my window at Bachelor between the water building and the big water tank. So a nice big volcano is easily visible from our home. 

 I have always loved mountains.  They provide me with boundaries.  I feel adrift without them.  So the Cascades and particularly Mt. Bachelor provide me with my anchor. It looks like a mini-Fuji standing there aloof from Tumalo, Broken Top, and the 3 Sisters. As you drive around La Pine it appears bigger and smaller depending on where you are looking at it from.  Most people come to see it as a ski vacation.  To me it is much bigger. You can see it in many different places.  The picture I have here is from the Wicki up Reservoir.  


 My first view of it and the surrounding Cascades came when we visited Bend to look for a job in 2008. Driving in from the east on highway 20, you come out of the Badlands and onto high desert.  The first “mountain” you see is Pilot Butte.  It seems to appear out of now where.  As you continue driving down around that butte you descend into the Deschutes River Valley.  As you take a large curve you find what the Butte has been hiding.  Bachelor, Tumalo and Broken Top and 3 Sisters all appear majestically over the top of many smaller buttes and volcanic vents.  The beauty of the snow capped peaks literally takes your breath away.  Words just don’t do the beauty of the Bend area justice. These mountains reminded me of the home I had just left in the Rockies.  Though the Cascades aren’t near as high as the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, where 14ner rule, they seem almost as big or bigger just because they are so close.  Bend is built on the lava flows of the surrounding volcanoes and the Deschutes River gets its name from the beautiful series of falls created by the river cutting through these flows. 

Mount Bachelor is a beauty.  The name came because he is set apart from his neighboring 3 Sisters.  Strange he never married!  But Bachelor is not alone.  He is my anchor giving me a sense of belonging, a place, of security.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado




In southwestern Colorado sits a broad valley between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan Mountain Ranges.  One hundred million years ago, Colorado was located closer to the equator in the super continent of Pangaea.  The area that is now the San Luis Valley lay at the edge of an inland sea that divided North America into two sections.  The Great Basin is part of this depression. Sea creatures left their shells and bodies to become limestone and deposits of sand and mud became part of the sea bottom.[1] These deposits were disturbed during the Pennsylvanian period by what was to become known as the Ancestral Rocky Mountains. There were two large uplifts that emerged from this inland sea.    The uplift created two large mountainous islands, known to geologists as Frontrangia and Uncompahgria.  The first, Frontrangia became the general area of the Colorado Front Range and the second at the San Juan Mountains.  They eroded and left behind their sands in the basin of the former inland sea.[2]

After a period of calm another mountain building period began known as the Laramide Orogeny. This was the period that built the present day Rocky Mountains.[3] During this period the San Luis Valley was a highland.  Over time the highlands eroded their materials into the basin left by the, now drained inland sea.  Rifts began to form in the area and the highlands dropped leaving the other side of the fault to form the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.   The process began about 18 million years ago and continues in the area today.

There is a 16,000 ft displacement between the mountains and the valley. This creates some spectacular views of both the mountains from the valley and the other way around.[4]  The main rift in the valley is the filled with the Rio Grande River.  This rift is still pulling apart.  Because of this movement of tectonic plates the San Juan Mountains, the youngest in Colorado, were formed from the folding on the outside edge of the rift. As pressure from the folding occurred molten lava was spewed adding to the San Juan Range.  The unique structure of the valley with the tall Sangre de Christos on the east and the San Juans to the west and the basin of sediment and sand create the unique environment that produced the Great Sand Dunes.

The Great Sand Dunes are the tallest sand dunes in North America rising 750 feet from the valley floor. The dunes began forming less than 440,000 years ago. The prevailing westerly winds racing down the San Juans picked up the sediments from the basin of the San Luis Valley and blew them into the barrier of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.  The winds slowed and the sand deposited began to stack up against the base of the mountains.  The park is an important part of the San Luis Valley ecosystem which helps maintain the underground aquifer that feeds water to the valley agricultural interests. In this area of the valley there is no water above ground do hold the sand down.  The water which is important to the area is all underground here in an aquifer made of the sand and limestone that keeps it in the underground lake.  The constant wind from the west changes the sand dunes on a daily basis. 
Streams that flow around the perimeter of the dunes go underground in this area. The sand from these streams is also blown into the dunes. Digging a couple inches into the dunes even at their peaks reveals wet sand. Part of the motivation of turning the Monument into a National Park was the extra protection of the water, which Colorado's cities and agriculture covet. [5] A very interesting interactive visiual on how these dunes were formed can be found at http://interactive-earth.com/resources/science-visualizations/10-geology-of-the-san-luis-valley.html

Walking the sand dunes is a very interesting experience.  Some people ski down them.  It is best to do so after a snow or rain.  Also you find that when walking the dunes by sing.  It is an eerie sound, a kind of moan as you walk along.  Though I could not find an complete explanation why the sands moan or sing as you walk through them, it is thought that the grains are roughly spherical and as you disturb them they rub together creating a sound.  This usually happens only with quartz sands and it doesn’t happen when the sand is wet because water causes the particles stick together.[6] Some scientist learned that the reason that different dunes make different sounds and volumes as they sing is due to the size of the sand that is moved.[7]
 
The San Luis Valley and the Sand Dunes National Park are one of the most mystical places I have visited.  The view of the valley from the town of Crestone at the base of 14,000 ft Crestone Peak in the Sangre de Christos is awe inspiring.  The view Blanca Peak peering over the top of the red/yellow sand dunes is magic. It is well worth the trip.  Just be warned, if you drive through the town of Blanca please watch your speed coming into the town from the west, you can’t see the sign until you are already on it and there is a “friendly” officer there to make sure you slow down!






 




Monday, October 7, 2013

Crater Lake, Oregon


 Crater lake from the gift shop parking lot looking southeast. (copyright 2009)
Dead tree stump at the western overlook of Crater Lake (copyright 2009)
Since we are on a volcano kick lets talk about one of the most famous volcanic craters in the United States. No not Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Oregon. You will never see water so blue. It is 1943 ft deep, which makes it the deepest lake in the United States and the 9th deepest in the world. [1] It is so clean and clear you can drink from it. How did this beautiful lake get there? It is a story of fire and ice and water.

The earth’s crust is not stable. It doesn’t sit in one place. It moves on a lake of molten lava and has several tectonic plates. These plates float and move from place to place, albeit, very slowly. The Pacific Ocean plate is pulling apart at the middle creating a rift zone that allows the molten earth beneath to ooze to the top creating volcanic islands like those of Hawaii. These volcanoes are not usually explosive but just pour the lava over the plate creating a “shield” volcano. At the shores of the Pacific the plates that are moving east and west from the rift get subducted beneath the continental plates that are denser than the oceanic plates. At the edges of these subduction zones explosive volcanoes form what is known as the Pacific Ring of Fire. Crater Lake sits in the eastern part subduction zone where the Pacific Plate is being subducted beneath the North American Plate.

The volcano that Crater lake sits in is named Mazama. It’s largest eruption happened at 7700 years ago and was probably the largest in North America for more than half a million years. After minor eruptions and a pause during the ice age that changed the consistency of the gases and molten rock beneath Mazama the Rhyolite in the core of the volcano mixed with water it became an explosive volcano known as a stratovolcano with many parasitic vents on its parameter. It isn’t the only stratovolcano in the area. It is part of a chain of volcanoes that is known as the Cascade Range that streatches from British Columbia to Mt Shasta in California.[2]

Mazama began growing over a half million years ago. At 8000 yag it stood at 12,000 feet. Then it blew with great force 7700 years ago. The ash from this explosion can be found as far away as Wyoming and Alberta Canada. It displaced so much ash from the insides of the volcano that the walls collapsed Mazama lost thousands of feet of mountain top in a span of a few short days. It didn’t stop erupting. Evidence of that is found within the Caldera in the form of Wizard Island and others that are under the water now. [3] Over several hundred years rain and snowmelt gathered in the deep Caldera which has no outlet or intake like many other lakes. Because of its depth and the clarity and cleanness of the water it is a deep azure blue. The water is completely replaced about every 250 years[4] Keeping the water in the lake is not a problem since it is in an area that gets large deep snowfalls. One of the pictures shown was taken in late May of 2011. The snow was so deep you had to stand on it to see the lake and the gift shop was hidden to the middle of the first floor with 4 foot basement walls below it. The heaviest snow fall occurred in 1971 was 37 inches. The average yearly snow fall is 488 inches or almost 41 ft. Per year and like most of Central Oregon you can see snow any time of the year with cold temperatures at night sometimes freezing even in July and August. [5]
Crater Lake in late May 2011 taken standing on about 20 feet of snow above the parking lot.

Can Mazam blow again? It is probable that it will become active as will many of the volcanoes of the Cascade Range since they are relatively young and many like Crater Lake show signs of geothermal activity. A submersible sent down to survey Crater Lake found such activity on the bottom of the lake.[6] It is not expected that it will be as large as the Caldera forming event and it won’t pose danger to areas below because the walls show no signs of collapse. However the mixture of rhyolite and water does make for an explosive combination. Earthquakes are another possibility in the area of up to a magnitude of 7 on the Richter scale.

If you come to Oregon in June, July or August seeing Crater Lake is a must. It is one of those places that qualifies as otherworldly in it beauty and geology. Check ahead for the weather since sometimes the lake is shrouded in fog and you won’t be able to see it if it is. Also if you can, try to get tickets for the boat tour. It will give you a much different view than from the rim. You also will get to visit Wizard Island in the lake. Crater Lake Oregon is truly a sapphire gem surrounded by the green emeralds of ponderosa pines. It is well worth the visit.


[1] http://www.nps.gov/crla/historyculture/index.htm

[2] http://www.nps.gov/crla/planyourvisit/upload/Geology.pdf

[3] http://www.nps.gov/crla/planyourvisit/upload/Geology.pdf

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_Lake

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_Lake

[6] http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/national-parks/crater-lake-national-park/