This will be a long series of posts. The trip lasted more than a month.
It started with a call to go work for Apple Computer in California. ‘Twas to be a temporary job: they needed to fire a crew in India, have this one American guy (me) replace them while Apple hired and trained a new crew in India, and then I would be let go.
I jumped at the opportunity. APPLE COMPUTER! That would be the high point of my career, of which only a few years were left. After that, I could go anywhere, do anything.
The hiring paperwork was all done except for the background check, which I knew I would pass: every recent job I’d had involved a background check. So I started heading west to what the Beverly Hillbillies called “Californy” in a rig just a little more sophisticated than theirs.
I took no photos worth sharing for the first two days. After an exhausting, frustrating Thanksgiving day after which I swore I would never, ever spend even as much as a dime in the town of Durango, Colorado ever again — I finally espied an RV park right beside the highway between Mancos and Cortez that looked pretty good. It was dusk. I pulled in.
The Mesa Verde RV Park between Mancos and Cortez is one of the finest, friendliest, cleanest RV parks I’ve ever been in, and the price was reasonable. I highly recommend them.
The next morning, I crossed the highway and took this shot of a prominence that looked interesting:
Turns out it was Point Lookout, the bluff that guards the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park. Note the road going up the side (you might have to click the photo to zoom it). I had time to burn, and the next day I would go up that road - but right now, there’s a geology lesson here.
Geological formations (a “formation” is a distinct layer of rock) are named after the town or locality where that formation was first scientifically described by a geologist in a journal. The capstone of this bluff was originally known as the Mesa Verde formation (it is now three formations, called the Mesa Verde group). Below it is the grey, crumbly rock of the Mancos Formation. Mancos is a town a couple-three miles east of here.
The Mancos shale was laid down in a seabed around 95 to 80 million years ago - just before the Rocky Mountains began to uplift, but while the dinosaurs were still alive. It is mud and clay, erodes to mud and clay, and is very soft and unstable. Nothing will grow in it. It erodes quickly and easily, and is only found today where there is a layer of harder rock above it.
The harder rock above it is one of the three formations known as the Mesa Verde Group. What we see here, at the top of the bluff, is the lowermost of them, the Point Lookout formation. It is sandstone.
In the next post, we’ll go up that bluff, beyond it, and down to the famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. Consider this post Day 2 of the big, BIG road trip because I took no shots until Day 3.
to be continued…