Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

That bit of vacation back in July seems like another lifetime, despite considerable time spent sorting through the digital imagery.  It was a pretty pic-intensive trip for me, with something like 800 shots over the course of two weeks.  I recently completed first pass through them, rotating here, adjusting light levels there, cropping from time-to-time.  There are a number that are likely to show up here, on Facebook, or elsewhere in the future.  But for the most part they need a story line.

So I will introduce a couple vacation shots here tonight in that spirit.  Believe me, the idea of a Tectonic Travelogue never crossed our mind in planning this trip, in some ways a frilly fandango riff on the trip we made to Sun Valley a few years ago.

But in looking back over it, I was struck that we purposely skidded to a halt for pics at least twice at sites of dramatic land-form changes, traveled through multiple other venues famous on that score, and in general spent a good part of the trip not far from dramatic live geology.  And, when you consider that our trip originated near the Cascade Mountains, home of numerous live and dormant volcanoes, passed through the Columbia Basin, site of remarkable historic lava flows, and then headed over to NW Wyoming, perhaps the frequency of exciting land-form drama is a bit more understandable.

I think it was just a couple years back that we learned of a major landslide in the American River valley, just east of Chinook Pass, the Cascade Crest divide just east of Mt. Rainier.  The highway was closed for a good long while as I recall.  We were detoured for a few miles off the former highway and chose to pull over for a picture.  The scarp where material fell away is quite conspicuous, and the multi-hued result can be seen lower down.

After a couple wondrous days passing through basaltic and Ice-Age Floods territory (don't get me started, but this includes numerous mega-slides and other off-the-scale landscape features), we eventually after many fine adventures found ourselves making a somewhat time-pressed passage through the Valley of 1,000 Springs (or something like that) just west of the apex of Idaho, Mt. Borah.  I had forgotten about the seismic event there a couple decades or so back, but we couldn't resist pulling off and getting dusty on the unpaved backroad to the memorial site.

While a little difficult to discern in the photo, this site is especially impressive because you actually observe a fracture of multiple feet where the valley floor has descended, leaving raw earth for I gather many miles in either direction.  Not exactly your routine back-yard experience.

From there we transected Idaho, passing several apparent cinder cones and the vicinity of plenty of familiarly volcanic-like place names (Craters of the Moon a personal childhood favorite).  I gather there is a semi-consensus that a major hot spot not that far below the earth's surface gets the credit for the major basaltic discharges in the Columbia Basin, those here in the upper Snake River area, and, these days, in Yellowstone, all thanks to the plate we northwesterners are riding gradually moving to the northwest and thus putting increasing distance between us and that hot spot.

Cutting to the chase, we toured some territory that was new to us in NW Wyoming, including Thermopolis, site of major hot springs, but eventually and inevitably made our way to YNP, the Hot Spot if there ever was one.  I will not linger on that here, other than to note that the park reported record numbers of visitors this July.  We noted lots of folks, but not obnoxiously so.

Racing for home after our too-short YNP visit, we traversed the Hebgen Dam/Earthquake Lake locale, where a catastrophic earthquake back in 1959 got lots of attention, including mine.  I must have been in all of third grade, but given my parents' awe over the event, I couldn't help but be agog, probably poring over National Geographic features and such.  I think we made a point of visiting on the major cross-country camper tour we did a few years later.

Marg and I had also done some tourism at Hebgen a few years ago with the kids, and had other fish to fry this time.  But that too, is an amazing venue for anyone interested in the remarkable conjunction of nature at its' wildest and our human dreams.

Rollin' and Tumblin' indeed!