This week, my friend Emily asked me to teach her small third-grade class about the Mesozoic. Of course, I love talking about that, so I agreed. I took some Triassic shell fossils and tried to give a very brief overview of the Mesozoic--having to check myself before sharing too much that they wouldn't understand. I drew a foot-long line and told them that if one inch equalled 1,000 years, then at half an inch would have been Columbus, and at a foot would be woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers--but I couldn't draw a line to the time the dinosaurs died, because that line would be over a mile long. That kind of blew their minds.
Then on Friday, my parents and I went down to Capitol Reef National Park. I'd never been there until August last year, and this was the third time I've been there. Capitol Reef is an underappreciated place. It was fairly busy because it was UEA weekend. On Friday, we took a small hike through Wingate Sandstone, which was deposited in the late Triassic and early Jurassic when there were lots of sand dunes in the area. In May, I went to Capitol Reef with my Provo ward, and we went on a little hike. At that time, I was sure we were in the Navajo Sandstone--but now I think it might have been Wingate. Both sandstone formations were deposited from sand dunes, which I didn't realize before, thus my confusion.
As usual, I fully acknowledge that my photographs are terrible, with a little cheapo camera where the settings are annoying to change, so the pictures are too dark. On our walk, we saw some Indian drawings.
At another place, there were lots of pioneer writings, which they wrote as they drove through the canyon with wagons. It was hard to distinguish between pioneer writings and later writings. I was amused by one at the end. Someone made their own writing this year, and there was an accompanying sign saying the vandals had been found and were facing prosecution. With the nature of this one, my guess is they were just ignorant people. Sometimes, there are jerk people who write directly on top of Indian writings--those people should be punished by being required to have a tattoo that says "Moron," "Jerk," "Vandal," or something similar.
We stayed at a hotel just outside the park, and we were amused by the little playset by the parking lot. My dad advised me not to play on it.
The next day, we drove up a really bumpy road (in the 4WD Pathfinder my parents bought from my sister) to look out over the Waterpocket fold, a geologic monocline where the crust has folded the strata. There are flat strike valleys where easily eroded rocks (shale) have weathered down, while the more resistant rocks stick up. In the foreground of this picture, you can see red rocks of the Carmel Formation butting up against the whitish/yellow Navajo Sandstone. The Navajo is actually older, so it should be below the Carmel, but because of the folding, it is sideways and actually appears to be above it.
Then we drove up to Goblin Valley State Park, where I had never been before. It surprises me that it was only discovered in the 1920s. In the late Jurassic, an interior sea was in North America, and near the sea, sand was deposited as the Entrada Sandstone. Because of differential erosion (shale eroding more easily than sandstone) and physical weathering, the rock forms the hoodoo goblins.
Of course, I had to play "Get Down Goblin" on my phone.
But despite my time in the Triassic and Jurassic this week, it's time to get back to the Holocene Epoch of the Neogene Period of the Cenozoic Era.
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