Seeing
The room is twilight dark, save for the electric ghost of the monitor.
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No, not a canyon. The canyon. The Grand View Point from Canyonlands. I am perched, electronically, on the sheer, red-rock vertigo of the Wingate Sandstone, looking out. And down.
I am editing. A simple word for a strange magic. I am sliding levers, whispering to the shadows, coaxing the highlights. I am working through a deep well of digital information, artifacts not of pottery or bone, but of photons. I am looking for the truth of the moment I stood there, chilled by an early morning’s high-desert breeze.
But the machine is slower, than my mind is fast. As the pixels churn, my mind... drifts. It slips its moorings. I am a geologist by training, and the view from this precipice is not just a landscape. It is a library. It is a stack of novels written in catastrophe, bound in silence, telling the story of a world that died a thousand times.
I am staring at Deep Time. And Deep Time, with its slow, mineral gaze, is staring back.
My mind's eye falls from the Wingate cliff, tumbling 290 million years in a single second, past the sleeping Triassic giants, down to the bottom of the view, down to the red heart of the Permian.
The Red World (Organ Rock)
I see it, clear as the image on my screen. The lowest, reddest layer. The Organ Rock Formation.
It is not a desert. Not yet. This world is wet, and slow, and rusting.
This is a world of mud. A broad, flat coastal plain that stretches to a horizon you can't quite see, a horizon lost in hazy, iron-rich air. The sky is a different color. The sun is a different star. This is 290 million years ago.
Geology calls this a "fluvial system." A lovely, sterile name. I call it the Land of Sluggish Rivers. Rivers born in mountains I will never see—the Uncompahgre Uplift, the ancestral Rockies—bleed their sediment across this plain. They are not the clear, cold rivers of my Colorado. They are thick, silty, and slow.
I can smell it. The air smells like wet iron. Like blood. The red of this rock is not a dye; it is an oxidation. It is the color of a world breathing a new, oxygen-rich atmosphere. It is the planet’s first great rust.
In my daydream, I am standing on the banks. The silence is absolute, broken only by the sucking sound of the mudflats and the lazy slip of the river. There are no flowers. No birds. No dinosaurs. The land is populated by whispers, by strange amphibians and mammal-like reptiles hiding from the pale, distant sun.
The rivers swell. They overtop their banks, not in a rushing, violent flood, but in a slow, creeping inundation. A sheet of red-brown silt, fine as flour, blankets everything. It settles. It hardens. It waits. This is the "floodplain" deposit, the "muddy appearance" that makes up so much of this formation. It is the signature of a slow, patient, muddy world.
And then... a change. A sound.
It’s the wind.
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| The White Rim Sandstone overlying the Organ Rock Formation, view from Grand View Overlook, Island in the Sky, Canyonlands, National Park. |
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| The Organ Rock (Organ Pipe) Formation in the Paradox Valley, East of Canyonlands NP, is locally known as Fisher's Rocks. |
The Ghost Desert (White Rim)
The wind comes from the west. It comes from an ocean that isn't there anymore, a shallow Permian sea that lapped at the edges of this crimson plain.
And this wind carries... sand. Not red, iron-heavy mud-sand. But clean, fine, white sand.
My eye moves up the canyon wall, from the deep reds of the Organ Rock to that impossible, brilliant white line. The White Rim Sandstone. My notes call it the "frosting around the edges of the lower Canyon," and that's what it is. It’s a ribbon of pure, captured light.
Geology calls this an "eolian system." Wind-blown. A coastal desert. An "erg."
I call it a war. A slow, silent war between two worlds, fought over millennia.
In my mind, I see the landscape shift. The red rivers still flow, choking on their own mud. But from the west, the white dunes advance. They are mountains of travelling sand, ghostly and silent. They migrate, pushed by that relentless Permian wind. They creep over the mudflats. They choke the rivers.
For a time, they exist together. The transition is "intertonguing." The rivers wash their red silt into the valleys between the white dunes. The white dunes blow back, burying the red river channels. It is a dance, a push and pull. A river of mud meets a desert of bone.
I look at my photograph, at that clean, sharp line. What I am seeing is the moment the desert won.
It is a snapshot of the end of that dance. The moment the rivers finally dried, or were pushed back, or simply gave up, and the great, white, coastal desert claimed the land. The White Rim is a tombstone for the Red World. A desert of pure, wind-scoured quartz, its slopes frozen in the "large-scale cross-bedding" that shows the angle of those ancient, migrating dunes.
It is beautiful. It is sterile. It is a world scoured clean.
And then, just as my mind adjusts to this white, windy silence, the universe holds its breath.
The Great Silence (The Permian-Triassic Unconformity)
I look at the layers above the White Rim. The thin, flaky reds of the Moenkopi. But I am not looking at the rock. I am looking at the line between them.
The line is a knife cut.
My geology texts call it a "disconformity." A "major erosional surface."
I call it The Great Dying.
The screen in front of me flickers, as if in sympathy. I imagine the world after the White Rim was laid down. The land was uplifted. The shallow sea retreated. And then... fire.
Not a forest fire. A planet fire.
In Siberia, a world away, the land tore open. For two million years, volcanoes erupted. Not mountains, but fields of fire, miles long. The Siberian Traps. They poured enough lava to cover the entire United States in a crust half a mile deep.
But it wasn't the lava that killed the world. It was the breath. The poison gas. The carbon dioxide. The methane. The air became unbreathable. The oceans turned to acid.
The Permian period ended. Life on Earth nearly did, too.
Ninety percent of all marine species, gone. Seventy percent of all life on land, vanished. The world became a silent, poisoned greenhouse.
And here, in Canyonlands? Nothing.
For millions of years, no rocks were made. This isn't a transition; it's a gap. It's a chapter torn from the book. The land, uplifted and raw, was scoured by acidic winds and rain, but no new life, no new rivers, no new deserts came to cover it. The time is simply... lost.
When I stand on the White Rim and look up at the Moenkopi, I am looking across a tomb. I am staring at a gap in time that represents the greatest catastrophe this planet has ever known. The silence in those few inches of missing rock is louder than any thunder.
The World Re-Awakens (The Triassic)
My mind, shaken, climbs past that terrible, invisible line. Life, as it always does, finds a way. The planet heals. The Triassic dawns.
The next layer is the Moenkopi Formation. It’s a reddish-brown, "rippled" layer. It’s thin. It’s hesitant.
The world it represents is a shadow of the old. The sea, that Permian ocean, crept back in. But it was a different sea. A sick sea. The environment was a vast, flat, coastal plain. Sluggish rivers, yes. Tidal flats. Shallow, evaporating lagoons that left beds of salt. It's a world of crawling things, of survivors. The "ripple-marked" sandstones are the fossilized tracks of shallow, hesitant water. Life is starting over in the mud.
And then, above it, the Chinle Formation.
Ah, the Chinle. The great recovery. The rivers return, but they are different. They are jungle rivers. This is a continental basin, a swampy, wet world of lakes and massive river systems. The air is thick, humid. And for the first time... there are trees.
Great forests of them. This is the world that gives us the Petrified Forest. In my mind, I see a lush, green, violent world. This is the true dawn of the dinosaurs. The land is teeming. Giant amphibians lurk in the swamps. The first crocodile-like phytosaurs hunt in the rivers.
It is a world reborn. It is loud. It is green.
And it, too, is doomed.
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| The Wingate Formation, my perch for photography. |
The Red Desert and the Second Fire (The Wingate)
I zoom in on the photograph. I am looking at the cliff face I was standing on. The sheer, magnificent, terrifying vertical wall of red.
The Wingate Sandstone.
The transition from the lush, swampy Chinle to the bone-dry Wingate is not a transition. It is an execution.
The rivers of the Chinle did not gently dry up. They vanished. The swamps did not slowly recede. They burned.
Look at the boundary. The End-Triassic Extinction. Another mass dying.
As the supercontinent of Pangea began to rip apart, the land screamed. The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) tore open—another volcanic event on a scale that dwarfs human comprehension. The air filled with fire and poison again.
The green world of the Chinle was incinerated.
And what was left?
Silence. And sand.
The Wingate Sandstone is the monument to this second apocalypse. It is a massive "erg." A desert. One of the largest sand seas the world has ever known. Those sheer, 400-foot cliffs are not cliffs. They are the petrified hearts of colossal sand dunes, dunes that marched across a dead continent.
The red color is the old iron, the blood of the Organ Rock, resurrected and scoured by a new, toxic wind. This is not the coastal, gentle desert of the White Rim. This is a continental monster. A Sahara on steroids. A planet of rust.
The Final Emptiness (Kayenta & Navajo)
My gaze, and my mind, drifts to the layers above my perch.
The desert relented, for a moment. The Kayenta Formation. A brief, fleeting whisper of water. Rivers and streams, thinner and more complex than before, snaked across the dunes. Life tried to come back. You find dinosaur tracks in the Kayenta. A final, desperate gasp of green.
It did not last.
The desert returned, and this time, it returned to end all things.
The Navajo Sandstone. The great white domes of Zion, the frozen waves of Arches. The largest sand desert in Earth's history. It buried the Kayenta's rivers. It buried the world. It is a world of nothing but wind and sand, a white, silent emptiness that dominates the Early Jurassic.
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| Navajo Sandstone, Rabbit Valley, East of Canyonlands NP at the Colorado/Utah border. |
The Screen. The Room. The Seeing.
I click the mouse. The "Save As" dialogue box appears.
The digital file is processed. The daydream fades. I am back in my chair, in my dark room, in the year 2025.
My photograph has merit. The light is perfect. The shadows hold detail. But I am no longer editing a picture. I am a curator of apocalypses.
The photograph is a lie.
It shows a single, solid, permanent landscape. It shows a place. But there is no "place." There is only a stack of worlds. A library of ghosts. I am standing on the tomb of a jungle (the Chinle), which sits on the grave of a tidal flat (the Moenkopi), which sits on a memorial to a mass extinction (the Great Dying), which rests on a white ghost desert (the White Rim), which covers a world of red mud (the Organ Rock).
And here I am, the newest artifact. A man with a camera, a "fluvial system" of blood in his own veins, breathing an "eolian" wind, on a planet that is just catching its breath, waiting for the next layer.
I am editing. I am seeing. And I am humbled by the sheer, terrible, tragically beautiful weight of the stone.
Thanks for stopping by for a read!
buzzshawphoto.com
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