On the Air

 My work is done alone, as a rule. The roads I follow are often little more than suggestions etched into the side of a canyon, bench cuts left by men who were hunting not light, but vanadium and uranium. My wife, who understands passions, does not share this one. Her craft is with sourdough, with the patient cultivation of a living starter—a wild yeast colony captured from the air. She presides over the slow magic of fermentation, the transformation of flour and water into something complex and alive.

Her patience is measured in the slow rise of a loaf in a warm kitchen; mine is measured by the movement of a shadow across a rock face. For her, this endeavor would be an exercise in torment—the unfiltered sun, the imperceptible biting gnats, the sheer, unmoving stillness of it all. There is no fault in this. It is simply a matter of knowing which wilderness is your own: the one of stone and light, or the one of flour and yeast.

Since I am generally working in solitude my governing principle for staying alive out here is an attempt to avoid posthumous embarrassment. I have no desire for my final act to be recorded in a Local Newspaper or News at 11, as a case study in poor judgment. We lose people. They come from places where the landscape is gentle and forgiving, like the corn-sweated fields of Iowa—a place I know has its own steel-blue beauty—and they step into Arches National Park wearing flip-flops, carrying a single bottle of water, armed with a profound faith in the infallibility of the cellular network.

That faith is a dangerous thing. A cell phone, out here, can be a killer, for it offers the illusion of connection without the guarantee. The signal is a creature of topography and congestion. It is strong on the rise, nonexistent in the draw. Round the shoulder of a mesa and the bars on your screen vanish. The towers around a place like Moab, which serves as the spigot for the human floods into Arches and Canyonlands, become congested. The air, already thin, fills with a digital babble—a thousand voices narrating their hikes, a thousand pictures of Delicate Arch flying toward a thousand distant relatives. The glory of the place is gobsmacking, to be sure, and one cannot blame a soul from Davenport for wanting to share it. But when your flip-flop breaks and your ankle twists and the battery dies from the strain of searching for a signal that isn’t there, that digital chatter has crowded out your one chance to call for help.

Your first line of defense is analog: a note left for your significant other—mine is a sourdough artisan, a story of wild yeasts for another day —or tucked under the windshield wiper of your car. Your second is a slim battery pack that can grant your dead phone a brief resurrection. A voice call might not push through the congestion, but a simple text message, a small, lean packet of data—Trouble. On this trail. Send help.—just might. You send it three times. You take a picture of your surroundings; a ranger knows this terrain like his own hand and can place you from the silhouette of a single juniper. It might also get through. 

Because I am usually alone, watching the light move, I carry more. The silence and it’s solitude is the very thing I am there to capture, but I do not trust it completely. I carry radios. I carry a Citizens Band radio, a GMRS, and a multi-band UHF/VHF amateur set. The CB is for the truckers on the interstate down in the valley, a profane and practical network. The others require a license, a test, a call sign I will not post here. (Call signs can be easily traced. I need to stay private for safety) They are for reaching farther. 

There is a code for this, an architecture of safety for the empty places called the Wilderness Protocol. It is a simple gentleman’s agreement among radio operators to listen to certain frequencies at certain times, just in case. A cheap GMRS radio from a big-box store, a small Chinese Baofeng that costs less than a good water bottle—these are the keys to the system. A license is required for transmission, but in a true emergency, the FCC will forgive your trespass. The rangers who have to carry you out will be less forgiving of your lack of preparation. Trail kill is not a good carry.

So while the light performs its slow ballet on the canyon walls, my radios are scanning, their quiet, rhythmic hiss a counterpoint to the wind. I am a node in a network of listeners, alone but connected. I have time to think out here, to run through the permutations of "what if." Unexpected things happen. But the plan, the gear, the signal—they are the answer. They are the way you ensure you can come back and do it all again.

If you want the specifics of my communication gear and recommendations, leave a comment or send me an email. If you are coming out here, learn about the Wilderness Protocol and share that information with others. Prepare.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved.

The Geologist's Eye

 A photographer might see a handsome scene, a place of pleasing color and form. A geologist, squinting into the same light, sees a story reaching back into a time so deep it is functionally unimaginable. The picture, for the geologist, is merely the final sentence in a very long paragraph.

The Grammar of the Land

To stand before a road cut in the Rockies is to stand before a library of stone. Where most see a wall of sliced rock, a geologist sees a narrative—a thrust fault here, an angular unconformity there. That unconformity, that tilted line where flat layers of shale lie upon the eroded stumps of ancient, vertical mountains, represents a gap in the story, a chapter—no, a whole volume—of a billion years torn out by the patient, insistent work of erosion. The geologist-photographer knows this. The knowledge informs the eye. The composition of the photograph is not a matter of simply arranging mountains in a frame; it is a matter of capturing the verb of the landscape—the bending, the breaking, the slow-motion collision of continents. The resulting image is not just a landscape; it is an argument, a thesis statement about the forces that have their way with the surface of the earth.

A Conversation with Time

The shutter clicks—a thousandth of a second. The rock it captures might be a piece of the Morrison Formation, one hundred and fifty million years old, a tomb of dinosaurs. Or perhaps it’s the Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, a rock that was already an old-timer when the first multicellular life was just getting its start in the sea. To a geologist, this isn't just trivia. It is the texture of reality. This sense of deep time, of seeing the present as an ephemeral skin on an ancient body, infuses the photograph with a specific kind of gravity. It is the difference between taking a picture of a pretty mountain and making a portrait of a being that has patiently sat for its likeness for two hundred million years.

The Behavior of Light on Stone

The photographer’s obsession is light. The geologist’s obsession is rock. The geologist-photographer understands the marriage of the two. They know, in a way that is less intuitive and more catalogued, how the low, warm light of a setting sun will be caught by the feldspar crystals in a granite batholith, making it glow from within. They know that a wet slate will absorb the light and offer a deep, satin sheen, while a porous sandstone will seem to drink the light, softening its texture. This is not guesswork. This is mineralogy. The periodic table becomes a color palette. The knowledge of how a rock was formed becomes a guide to how it will behave in the day’s last light, allowing the photographer to be in the right place when the land itself decides to perform.

I'm a geologist, I've learned the earth, and have the eye.

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Working through McInnis

 An analysis of the data collected from the promontory overlooking McInnis Canyons is underway. The objective of the reconnaissance was to assess the location’s potential for capturing the effect of low-angle evening light on the Wingate Sandstone, a formation that dates to the Triassic Period. Visually, the location is sound. The raw image files confirm that the sightlines are clear and the compositional possibilities are strong. The problem, revealed by the audio recordings, is one of acoustics.

When the digital audio is amplified, what seemed to the ear to be a quiet afternoon in a wilderness area is shown to be saturated with a steady, low-frequency signal. The sound is not of wind or water or fauna, but of rolling friction—the aggregate hum of thousands of tires spinning against asphalt. Interstate 70, though miles distant and mostly unseen, imposes its sonic signature across the landscape. Its sound waves, long and persistent, bend over the terrain and fill the acoustic basin. This presents a conflict of definitions. The land below is a designated Wilderness, a place legally defined as “untrammeled by man,” yet the evidence of mechanized society is the most consistent part of its soundscape.

The project, then, becomes an exercise in applied physics and field ecology, an attempt to resolve the conflict between what is seen and what is heard. To capture a visual record of the place is one thing; to pair it with a faithful audio track from the same position is another, as the two sets of data are fundamentally at odds.

The first proposed solution is topographical. It involves descending from the promontory to a position below the main cliff face, effectively using hundreds of feet of Mesozoic rock as an acoustic baffle. The intent is to create a sound shadow, an area of relative quiet shielded from the direct sonic path of the interstate. The limitation of this strategy lies in the physics of sound itself; the long, low-frequency waves of the highway’s drone are prone to diffraction, bending around the edge of the obstacle and leaking into the shadow.

The alternative is not to block the noise but to find a stronger signal. This involves a complete change in venue, moving downslope into the riparian corridor of the Colorado River. In this arid landscape, the river is a linear oasis, and its dense galleries of cottonwood and willow concentrate biological activity. An arrival before dawn would place the microphones in the center of the dawn chorus, a phenomenon of such acoustic density that it might effectively mask the highway’s background hum. The final recording would be a composite—the visuals from the bluff, the audio from the river—a decision that solves a technical problem while raising questions of documentary purity.

From the bluff, the geometry is perfect for capturing light on Triassic rock, but the site also functions as a natural amphitheater for the sounds of the twentieth century. The central challenge remains: to isolate the one from the other.

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McInnis Canyons

From a bluff above the McInnis Canyons Wilderness, the landscape unfolds as a problem of time and light. The immediate sounds are the sibilance of wind moving through piñon and juniper and, from the north, the low, persistent hum of Interstate 70—a river of tires on asphalt, unseen but ever-present. The clock is atmospheric. The sun, dropping into the thicker part of the sky, has another hour before its light achieves the acute angle necessary to ignite the rock. The target is the Wingate Sandstone, a formation that does not slope but simply stands: a sheer, brick-red wall of petrified desert dunes from the Late Triassic.

Wingate outcrops in McInnis Wilderness. This is my prey. Waiting for the Golden Hour light, but the longer I wait, the more hazy the wildfire smoke becomes.

The medium, however, is compromised. A persistent haze, the airborne residue of distant forest fires, hangs in the air, scattering photons and threatening to blunt the sharp, defining shadows the camera requires. Such haze can diffuse the light into a uniform, featureless glow, rendering an image flat. And yet, to the west, a line of convection is building, the dark bases of thunderstorms pulling moisture from last night’s rain out of the soil. The drama of that weather front, set against a sunlit cliff, could be a worthy compensation.

Below, the plain is static. A scan reveals no motion—no prairie dogs, no coyote, just the fixed geology. The only kinetic energy is auditory: the nervous, unseen twitching of a bird in the brush. My digital recorder is running, capturing the thin tweeters and calls, data that will be fed later to a recognition application—a piece of software that translates the sonogram of a bird call into a species name. For now, the bird remains a disembodied sound.

An ear, capturing nature. Zoom H5Studio. 

The storm front, a mesoscale procession of cumulonimbus cells, continues its eastward march across the high desert, its progress steady enough to be timed. For now, it remains a spectacle of the middle distance, not an immediate tactical concern. The more proximate problem is the exit. The route back to the asphalt necessitates crossing a number of arroyos—three, perhaps four—that have been incised into the soft underlying shale. Dry washes are the country’s latent circulatory system, designed to handle precipitation events that can deliver a month’s worth of rain in fifteen minutes. When the water comes, it does not soak into the baked, impermeable clay but moves across it, scouring the land and filling these channels with a slurry of mud, rock, and debris the consistency of wet concrete. To be caught in one is to be involved in a geologic process. This awareness remains a quiet but constant hum in the back of the mind.

The wait for the light, therefore, is not idle. It is a form of work, a reconnaissance. A mental survey is underway, logging the precise azimuth of the setting sun, noting which buttresses and fins of the Wingate will catch the last direct light, and identifying foreground anchors for a future composition. This trip is for data. The next will be for execution, scheduled for a day when the atmosphere is clear and the sun’s angle has been predetermined to be optimal. And after the sun is gone, the tripod will remain, aimed at the same scene, its shutter held open for thirty seconds at a time. It will collect the faint, ancient light of distant galaxies alongside the bright, ephemeral streaks of truck headlights on the interstate. The final image will be an intentional compression of time: the rock, a product of the Triassic; the starlight, some of it traveling for millennia; and the transient paths of human commerce, all recorded as equals on a digital sensor.

Sight and Sound

A wide view from the bluff.

The desert track I'm following. It's drivability is sketchy in places.

Nature's Plumbing

Thunderstorms to the North over the Roan Mountains. If one of these comes my way, I need to find hard pavement in a hurry. This storm is between me and the Sunset. It hid any low-angle illuminating light.

Here are the field notes, the quick captures from the cellular phone—a device that uses computational algorithms to guess what a picture should look like. They serve as a kind of index, a visual shorthand for the day. The more serious data now needs to be transferred from the camera’s memory card to a solid-state drive. This process involves moving the raw sensor information before any edits are attempted.

The files from the primary camera are not, in a finished sense, pictures. They are digital negatives, containing a far greater range of light and color than a screen can display. The work of editing will involve interpreting this data, making adjustments to exposure and contrast to compensate for the particulate matter in the air. For the panorama, a series of individual, vertically oriented frames was shot with a thirty-percent overlap, a deliberate process to gather enough data for the software to later stitch them together. The algorithm will warp and blend the frames, correcting for the parallax of the lens, to build a composite image of considerable width and detail.

This was, in effect, a rehearsal. A return is necessary. The variables one hopes to control are technical, but the ones that matter—the quality of the air, the angle of the light—are meteorological. The goal is to be here again when the atmosphere is clean, when there is no smoke haze to scatter the light, allowing the low, warm rays of the sun to strike the full face of the cliffs without diffusion.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look.

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved.

After the Storm

 A night of electrical storms over the Uncompahgre Plateau has yielded its dividend: a clean digital capture, an hour and a half long, of rain and attendant thunder. The recording, a high-bitrate WAV file, is a sonic transect of the weather event, from the first percussive strikes to the final, receding rumble. A sampling this morning confirmed its utility. It will serve as an environmental bed, a background layer for a future project—work for another day, when the file is loaded into the DaVinci Resolve editing timeline and married to still images of storm clouds. The result, an accessible artifact of the storm, will eventually find its way to YouTube, there for the audio and less for the images.

Today's work, however, was more mechanical. The old Rancho shock absorbers, which for too long had translated the corrugated surfaces of county roads into a jarring, unsorted ride, are gone. In their place are new Bilsteins, a monotube, high-pressure gas design that promises a more disciplined response to the terrain. With the shocks mounted, the T100 is ready. The usual apparatus of observation is being loaded—cameras, sound equipment, and the radios that bridge the long, silent distances out west.

The destination is, as it often is, West into the Utah back country, where last night's rain will have scoured the arroyos and sharpened the air. You go to see what the weather has revealed. The last run into the Paradox Valley, down that stretch of Utah 128 that clings to the Colorado River, turned up a scene of patient, methodical work. A coyote, Canis latrans, was diligently disassembling what remained of a cow, a casualty of a high-speed encounter months before. The carcass, lying there since spring, had become a fixture of the local ecosystem. There is an initial sadness to it, a life ended on the asphalt, but the desert operates on a different ledger. Cattle, introduced and numerous, exert their own heavy pressures on this semi-arid ecology. In a landscape of unintended consequences, a road-killed cow becomes a subsidy for the scavengers, a transfer of protein from a rancher's column to the coyote's. A brutal lesson in physics for the driver, a windfall for the carrion birds.

What this trip will offer is an unknown quantity. If anything of geologic or biologic interest presents itself, it will be documented and presented here. For now, the last of the coffee is cooling in the mug. It is time to assemble the gear and move.

Once again, thanks for stopping for a look,

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved.

The sound of it all

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A collection, over time, can begin to take on its own logic. With me, it has been images—light and land fixed on a sensor. But light is only part of the story a place has to tell. You also need the sound.

This evening, just after five, a procession of convective cells began to move up from the southwest, and the project became one of acoustics. My instrument for this is a Zoom H5 Studio, a digital field recorder of satisfying utility. I have it set on a small tripod just under the eaves of the pergola, whose corrugated metal roof reacts to the initial, larger drops of rain with a staccato ringing, a distinct timbric signature. It is a sound that speaks of temporary shelter.

The real prize, however, is the thunder. We are situated near the face of the Redlands cliffs, a wall of Wingate Sandstone that serves as a natural sounding board. A thunderclap, which in open country is a sharp, tearing report, here becomes something else entirely. It strikes the rock and is returned not as an echo but as a prolonged, guttural reverberation—a sound you feel in your sternum. The booms roll off the escarpment and funnel down the valley, their frequency dropping, the sound decaying over long seconds.

The mind, of course, does not sit still while the ears are at work. An idea forms for what to do with these captured gigabytes of sound: a synthesis. To lay this acoustic narrative of the storm beneath a sequence of static images taken in the sharp, clear light that follows such events. The sound would give the photograph its missing dimension of time. A further notion presents itself, a product of the current technological moment. One could feed a still photograph to an algorithm, ask it to infer the motion of wind in the leaves, and see what it produces. An interesting, if not entirely natural, problem to solve.

But that is work for another day. Another peal of thunder, longer this time, makes a slow, percussive journey down the length of the valley, its sound shaped and carried by the rock. For now, there is only the listening.

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved.

Monsoon Post Production Notes

 

In the workroom, a collection of digital files had been laid out, a harvest from a recent trip to Canyonlands. The ambition had been grand—a panoramic sweep of a storm front, with the Green River Canyon providing the foreground's necessary weight. It was a classic narrative: the immensity of the land beneath the immensity of the sky. But in the cold light of the editing software, the story fell apart. The attempt at a continuous, seamless image was thwarted by a simple, inexorable fact of the atmosphere. The clouds, dark and bruised with rain, had been in motion, their transit across the frame occurring at a speed that defeated the stitching algorithm. They were not a static wall but a living, breathing entity, and the camera's shutter, no matter how quick, had captured a series of discrete moments. The result was a disjointed seam where continuity should have been. The panorama would not work. The images, it seemed, would serve better as two separate panels, a diptych of the impending weather.

This current disappointment was a footnote to an earlier, more successful encounter with the same light. Hours before, on the drive south on Utah 191, a distinct, isolated beam of sun had struck a distant rock feature. The event had been fleeting, a single, compelling illumination that had prompted the search for a place to pull over, just south of the Moab Airport. A 14mm wide-angle lens, a tool for context, had been brought to bear on the scene. It captured the broad, encompassing view—the striated rock, the vast, empty sky, and the line of power lines that had to be digitally erased to preserve the purity of the landscape. It was a capture of a trigger, of the initial impulse that sends a photographer scrambling for a parking spot.

The same image served as a kind of meteorological forecast. The right side of the frame was a clear, unblemished blue—the sky the photographer had hoped to find awaiting him in the national park. But the left side showed the darker reality, the storm that would ultimately become the subject of the failed panorama. It was a useful lesson in expectation versus reality, a reminder that the land and the sky are not always in agreement. The storm, though it had scuttled one project, had provided a different one. The images from the rain-soaked sky were, in their own right, a success. The trip had not been a loss.

A comparison had been made between the wide-angle shot and a subsequent one taken with a 400mm lens. The same rock feature, now isolated and magnified, filled the frame, a clear demonstration of the long zoom's utility in landscape photography. The 24mm provided the context, the "here is where I was," while the long lens provided the "here is what I saw." It was a simple, instructional pairing, a testament to the idea that a photographer must be prepared to capture both the whole and the detail. The work, it was clear, continued. The post-editing of the trip is an ongoing process, a way of understanding not just what had been seen, but what had been captured, and what could be made from the fragments.

You can comment below. I welcome your comments, questions, and critiques of my work. Another reminder, if you are coming out here for a vacation, send me an email with questions and I'll give you my insight on visiting the Colorado Plateau.

Post editing continues..

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved.    

Thanks for looking in. Take care of yourself.

 

This is the light that caught my eye and prompted me to search for a suitable spot to shoot. The storm coming up from the South is what I found in Canyonlands. The actual spec on this image is ISO 200, 24mm, f/11, 1/640 s

This is shot from the same pullover as above. Here you can clearly see the difference between a wide and a long zoom. My two lenses at work here are Nikon Z, 14-24 mm and 100-400 mm Zooms. Looking at the image specs, it is actually ISO 200, 200 mm f/1,1, 1/160s

A Dive into Geology: Canyonlands White Rim Sandstone

This landscape, in a place like southeastern Utah, is not a place you simply look at. It is a place you read, a book with chapters laid out one upon the next, each page a testament to eons of slow, deliberate change. The pages are the stratigraphic column, a chronicle of deposition, of what was, and when. And as I review the images captured last week at the Green River Overlook, my eye falls once more on the most prominent of these chapters, the one that gives a name to so much here: the White Rim Sandstone.

It is a layer that announces its presence, a ribbon of white stone that traces a line around the Island in the Sky mesa, a geographical calling card for both geologist and off-road enthusiast. It is, to a degree, the reason for the Island itself, a durable caprock resting above softer, more easily eroded layers. To stand on the mesa is to look out over a vast and layered world, a series of canyons, each descending into the next. The White Rim is the highwater mark, a band of white suspended above the striated red of the Organ Rock Formation, the latter forming the deepest canyons, its hues repeated in the spires of Fisher Towers, miles to the east, in the Paradox Valley.

The White Rim Sandstone forms the edge leading into the deeper Canyon of the Organ Rock Formation

The White Rim Sandstone is found in the upper part of the Cutler Group.

For the adventurous, the White Rim is more than a layer of rock. It is a road, a hundred-plus-mile track that circumambulates the Island in the Sky. It is a commitment, a journey that demands a capable vehicle and a permit, a piece of paper so sought-after that planning for it often begins a year in advance. This is a road that does not forgive. Rain, a significant factor in this arid landscape, turns the track into something else entirely—a quagmire of mud and sand. A disabled vehicle is not just an inconvenience; it is a problem that requires a very expensive solution. The National Park Service, a patient and long-suffering organization, has its rules, and one of them is that you move your vehicle out. So you plan ahead, you stay flexible, and you have alternative routes in your back pocket. The landscape, after all, is full of them.

For those wanting to go into more depth about the Geology the White Rim Sandstone I've put this summary together and I'll revist this subject in a later narrative.

Canyonlands and Moab Region Geology

This briefing synthesizes information from various geological sources to provide a comprehensive overview of the key geological themes, ideas, and facts pertaining to Canyonlands National Park and the wider Moab region, with a particular focus on the White Rim Sandstone.

I. Fundamental Geological Principles

Understanding the geology of Canyonlands requires a grasp of fundamental geological principles:

Uniformitarianism: "The present is the key to the past." This principle posits that Earth's processes have operated consistently throughout geological history, allowing us to interpret past environments based on present-day observations. For example, ripple marks observed in ancient rocks closely resemble those seen in modern rivers or lakes, providing insight into past conditions.

Original Horizontality: Sedimentary layers are almost always deposited horizontally under the influence of gravity. If curved or tilted layers are found, it indicates that deformation occurred after their initial deposition, with the deformation of lower layers preceding that of overlying, undeformed layers.

Superposition: In undisturbed rock sequences, the oldest rocks are at the bottom, and the youngest rocks are at the top, laid down chronologically in layers.

Rock Types:Igneous Rocks: Formed from the cooling and solidification of magma or lava (e.g., La Sal Mountains).

Metamorphic Rocks: Rocks transformed physically or chemically by heat, pressure, or liquids (e.g., schist in Black Canyon of the Gunnison).

Sedimentary Rocks: Formed from the deposition and lithification of sediments, prevalent throughout Utah and Canyonlands.

II. Geological History and Formations of Canyonlands and Moab

The geological landscape of Canyonlands and the Moab area is a result of a long history of depositional environments and subsequent tectonic and erosional processes, spanning hundreds of millions of years.

A. Depositional Environments and Key Rock Layers (Oldest to Youngest):

Paradox Formation (Base Layer):

Formed approximately 300 million years ago from the evaporation of an ancient ocean, consisting of mineral salts like gypsum, anhydrite, and halite.

Crucially, this salt layer behaves like a liquid under pressure, causing "salt tectonics" which significantly impacts overlying rock layers, leading to warping (anticlines and synclines) and movement. This is critical for understanding structures like Upheaval Dome.

Cutler Group: A package of sediments shed from the Ancestral Rocky Mountains (western Colorado/northeast of Moab) during the Permian period (290-275 million years ago). In Canyonlands, it's divided into four layers:

Hagashiya Formation (not extensively discussed)

Cedar Mesa Sandstone (The Needles):Composed of near-shore sand dunes intermingling with darker red sediments from periodic floods originating from the Uncompahgre Mountains, creating a "candy cane" striped appearance.

The distinctive "needles" formations are a result of jointing (small cracks or fractures) where water weathering and erosion have cut into these weaknesses.

Organ Rock Shale:A darkish brown-red layer found in the deeper parts of the canyons, deposited in marine lowland, braided stream, and tidal flat environments.

It is "very easily weatherable."

White Rim Sandstone:Age and Origin: Permian age (290-275 million years ago), a member of the Cutler Formation. Deposited in a "coastal eolian and associated interdune environments" during a period of marine transgression.

Sediment Source: Sand grains were shed from the Ancestral Rocky Mountains to the northeast.

Uniqueness: Stands out due to its "off-white color, and the fact one can discern the edge of its ancient sand dune environment."

Localized Nature: "Very localized to island in the sky district," thinning significantly to the east near the Colorado River. It provides a "strong foundation for everything else to sit on it," protecting the softer Organ Rock Shale below and contributing to the formation of the Island in the Sky mesa.

Depositional Units: Comprises two main units: a dune unit (coastal dune field) and an interdune unit (related ponds).

Dune Unit Structures: Characterized by "large- to medium-scale, unidirectional, tabular-planar cross-bedding," "high-index ripples," "coarse-grained lag layers," "avalanche or slump marks," and "raindrop impressions." Cross-bedding indicates deposition as transverse ridges by a dominant northwest to southeast wind.

Interdune Unit Structures: Shows "wavy, horizontally laminated bedding, adhesion ripples, and desiccation polygons." These features suggest alternating wet and dry conditions and water-table fluctuations in coastal ponds or sebkhas. Bioturbation (evidence of biological activity) is also present.

Coloration (Diagenesis): Its white color is not original but a result of post-depositional chemical reactions (diagenesis). Originally reddish due to hematite (rust), it was later "bleached through chemical reactions that removed its iron-bearing minerals" by migrating petroleum and hydrocarbons between 35 and 40 million years ago.

Economic Geology: Contains "major petroleum reserves and contains the largest tar sand deposit in the United States." These deposits are largely in the Elaterite Basin, trapped by the updip pinchout of the White Rim. It is generally unfavorable for economic uranium deposits.

Moenkopi Formation:

A "muddy brown rock" that often gets overlooked but contains significant sedimentary structures.

Sedimentary structures like "ripple rock" are direct evidence of past environments, supporting uniformitarianism by resembling modern features (e.g., river or lake bottoms).

Chinle Formation:

A "very flashy layer" known for its "striking greenish purple" and other diverse colors.

Represents a "swamp-like environment," similar to modern-day Louisiana, rich in organic matter, including abundant petrified wood.

Uranium History: Historically significant for uranium mining in the Moab area during the 1950s due to the Cold War. Uranium, a naturally occurring weakly radioactive element, is thought to have concentrated in these swampy, low-oxygen environments through chemical interactions with volcanic ash and petrified wood.

Charlie Steen and the Mi Vida Mine: The discovery of high-grade pitchblende by petroleum engineer Charlie Steen, who drilled for uranium against conventional wisdom, led to significant wealth and contribution to the Moab community.

Wingate Sandstone:

Forms the "striking cliffs we see at Canyonlands," representing "wind blown sand dunes deposited in the Jurassic."

Very resistant to weathering and erosion, breaking off in "huge chunks" and creating the area's characteristic "very vertical look."

Kayenta Sandstone:

A thin, "brown ledge forming sandstone" representing an "intermittent period where braided streams and kind of monsoon came through."

Notable for containing dinosaur tracks.

Navajo Sandstone:

The "youngest layer in Canyonlands" and "one of the largest examples of windblown sandstones in the rock record."

Famously known for its distinctive cross-bedding, a pattern formed by wind blowing sand grains over dunes, which then fall in parallel rows, with subsequent changes in wind direction or erosion creating the crisscross effect. It is much thicker further west (e.g., Zion National Park).

B. Uplift and Erosion of the Colorado Plateau:

Laramide Orogeny: Around 50 million years ago, during the Laramide Orogeny (the same mountain-building process that created the Rocky Mountains), the Colorado Plateau experienced significant uplift. This was caused by the Farallon plate subducting unusually shallowly beneath the North American plate, grinding across the bottom and pushing up the region.

Canyon Formation: The uplift raised environments originally at or near sea level (like oceanic deposits, tidal flats, and swamps) to an elevation of approximately 4,000 feet.

Differential Erosion: The carving of canyons by rivers (Colorado and Green Rivers), along with flash floods, rain, freeze-thaw cycles, and gravity, results in varying canyon morphologies.

Canyonlands: Features "very wide canyons" due to a mix of hard and softer rocks, leading to a "stair-step look" (e.g., hard Wingate, soft Chinle/Moenkopi, then hard White Rim). Water tends to erode horizontally before going down if rocks are soft.

Grand Canyon: Deeper canyons due to harder schist layers at lower depths, causing the river to cut down rather than out.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison: Very narrow canyons formed by rivers cutting straight down through extremely hard schist.

C. Upheaval Dome: An Enigma:

A prominent geological feature in Canyonlands, characterized by a "huge hole in the ground" with material rising in the center.

Two Primary Theories:Salt Dome Theory: Pressure from surrounding geological changes caused the underlying Paradox Formation salt to flow upwards, dragging overlying material with it to form the central uplift.

Meteor Impact Crater Theory: A meteorite impact created the crater, and the central uplift is a result of isostatic rebound, where material springs back up after the initial impact compression. The material in the center is estimated to be 400-500 feet higher than it should be.

Combined Theory: The most compelling explanation suggests a combination of both: a meteorite impact initiated the deformation, and the underlying salt layer facilitated or enhanced the isostatic rebound, contributing to the uplift. This highlights the "gray area" in geological interpretation, where phenomena are not always "black or white."

III. Key Takeaways

The geology of Canyonlands and Moab is a dynamic story of sediment deposition in ancient marine, coastal, and terrestrial environments, followed by tectonic uplift, and continuous weathering and erosion.

The White Rim Sandstone is a critical geological unit, representing an ancient coastal dune field. Its distinctive white color is a post-depositional feature caused by hydrocarbon bleaching, and it plays a significant role in shaping the landscape of Island in the Sky.

The underlying Paradox Formation salt is a major geological driver, influencing the deformation of overlying layers and potentially contributing to unique features like Upheaval Dome.

The region has a rich economic geology, particularly with the historical uranium boom tied to the Chinle Formation and the significant petroleum reserves within the White Rim Sandstone.

Geological interpretation often involves piecing together evidence from sedimentary structures, mineralogy, and stratigraphic relationships, sometimes leading to complex or combined theories to explain phenomena like Upheaval Dome.

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved.

Monsoon Part 2

 Ah, yes, let us proceed. The tale of a man, his camera, and the wild, untamed lands of the American West. Here is the 'to be continued' 

With the storm-gods themselves in attendance, I mounted the 400 mm lens first, a foolish, doomed maneuver that instantly gave me the grim reality: too much of the foreground was gutted at 100mm, and at 400, all I'd get was a faint, hazy rainy mirage of mesas. I'll get 'em next time, when the air is still and the Sun is high.

I switched to the 14-24 mm wide-angle lens, a considered, last-ditch effort, and set the camera for three-stop brackets at ISO 400. This gives me three images to blend together when I edit in post, and I would have good dynamic range to work with. The Sun wouldn't set for another 40 minutes or so. There it is, 40 again. But the light was in deep storm-driven twilight. Unfortunately, I wasn't getting any low-angle light cutting through the storm clouds. I started firing, covering every scrap of what I could see. I tried a few different compositions as the clouds scuttled through, then took a few matched horizontals for a possible panorama.

I had to take the lens cover on and off a few times, a dance of pure frustration. Light rain, a hot, humid, miserable drizzle, and then the sand, a fine, grinding powder whipped up by a wind that blew up from the canyon and ended the party.

The cascade of fast wind was wholly unexpected, and my eyes were full of sand; the lens was coated in the stuff. I looked around, seeing nothing but the clouds from angry gods. Unless I could conjure up Carlos Castaneda himself to help me with the 'great power' roiling in front of me, it was time to go. My eyes, in fact, were full of sand. I have a pair of goggles I carry with me, along with a headlamp, but they were buried in the back of the 4Runner, useless as a politician's promise. So I squinted through the opening, unlocked the tripod, collapsed the legs, zipped the camera into the shoulder bag,  and stumbled back to the parking lot. The Adventure Van was still there. I stopped at the pit toilet for a drain, just behind the van. All was quiet, with a purple glow emanating from the side windows. The van light across the parking lot gave me thoughts of Carlos C once again, but I don't think Carlos would be comfortable in a Mercedes Adventure Van. Though it was a nice desert tan color.

It was time to go. I should have pulled into the campground, taken a room in Moab, or ridden out the storm in the back of the 4Runner, but I had a meeting in the morning, an unholy obligation at 8:40 AM. Yes, 40 again. My wife will confirm that.

The trip home was a ride through one of the hearts of darkness. There was a brilliant light show in front of me, sheets of lightning off in the distance as I drove back up Utah 191. The grey light turned to a crushing black, the light rain to an occasional deluge. I pulled off a couple of times to let the biblical downpour and the double-trailer trucks roaring up behind pass me by. At one of my pull-offs, I checked the Accuweather map on my phone; it didn't look too bad to the East. I let one more squall pass, then headed out on I-70. Going from the 919 to the exit to home 'eighty at eighty', though, because of intermittent rain in the area, I was running sixty-five at times. The speed drops to seventy-five when you transition from Utah to Colorado, though few notice or care.

I pulled off at the Danish Flat exit to ride out a short, heavy rain squall and sent an 'alls well' text home. Always keep the wife informed and the cat happy, for they are the anchors in the storm. I was listening to the CBC on Utah NPR, with a constant NWS flash flood warning blaring —a chorus of doom. There was more trouble ahead. I made my way home, a watchful ghost in a machine running through the storm. It was eleven-something when I pulled into the garage. It was 10:38 when I exited off I-70. ...and not 10:40.

The next day, after a disappointing night's sleep, I downloaded the RAW files from the camera, which served as evidence of my descent into the Western Monsoon. I've loaded the images into Luminar Neo and took a quick, paranoid look. I've posted one of the edits below. The trip was a success, albeit a hit-and-miss affair, with more hits than misses. I had 248 miles on the odometer the next morning, a number that meant nothing and everything at the same time. I had one of those sleeps you have with a head full of road travel, a restless, unholy dream. It was a good trip, worth the journey, and from what I've seen in the RAW images  I've managed to bring back a few treasures. Looking across the canyons, watching storm gods argue, it's time well spent, a moment of sanity in a mad, howling world. I have at least one good picture, and promises of a nice panorama of the storm. A single, lonely triumph. Yes, it was a good trip. I'll do it again.

This is my first bracket merge and the initial edits. I have six more bracket sets to work through, and there is still a promise of a nice panorama. Confidence is high.

Thanks for stopping by. As I work through the post-production editing, I'll walk through the results here. I'll also go into the archives and show you some of the other images from the Green River Overlook.

Take care. Watch the skies.