Tubular

This week for the most part was relatively uneventful, I guess.

But this weekend was Memorial Day, and it's a Melville family tradition to go camping in Fillmore Canyon on Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. Since I like geology so much, my parents took me out to see the lava tubes near Flowell. A lava tube is a place where a flow of lava cooled and hardened on the outside but was still molten on the inside, so the lava flowed out and left a hard shell, a lava tube. I believe the Flowell volcanoes were active around 500 years ago--which is really quite recent.

There was basalt all over the place; this picture doesn't show the vast amounts of basalt. It amazes me that such small cinder cones could produce that much lava.

The lava tubes were awesome and much bigger than I expected.

My mom took pictures of me going down into the tubes. I was the only one who went down at this location.

I came out of the lava tubes to this grassy area. My dad said that when he was young, he and his friends set a fire down in here, thinking that it would be okay, since it was down below everything else. My dad may be responsible for the fact that there is no sagebrush down in here.

 After I saw these big long lava tubes, my dad took me to another one where there was one that went in the ground a good distance. It went so far back that we could turn off our flashlights and it was pitch black. The ceiling of the tube was wet. It was like a cave, except that it was basalt instead of limestone.

Then I climbed up Tabernacle Hill, a cinder cone (miniature volcano) that receives its name from the fact that it looks like the Salt Lake Tabernacle. I thought I took a picture, but I guess I didn't. When I got to the top, I discovered that my camera batteries were dead. It was extraordinarily windy; I had to hold on to my glasses because I thought they would blow off--or at least get bent by the wind.

On our way out, my parents went the wrong direction and we saw a bunch of cattle hanging out near a barchan sand dune.

Then we went camping in Fillmore Canyon, where we were shocked to discover it was hardly windy at all, since it was so windy out in Flowell. I felt proudly nerdy that I was able to identify most of the rocks as arkose and limestone or dolomite. We brought red, white, and blue star-shaped marshmallows so that I could roast marshmallows.

I definitely want to see those lava tubes again.