Thanks for this. I’ve marked it on my map for when I’m up there.
Independence Rock WY (Oregon Trail landmark)
Thanks for this too. I’ll be near there in August so I might be able to visit.
I was there recently in SoCal and it brought back some good Star Trek memories.
Cool. I’ll be near there in August and might be able to swing by there.
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Another favorite area of mine is in eastern Washington state called the Channeled Scablands (or the Ice Age Floods of Glacial Lake Missoula). I’ve visited once but would like to return. The landscape is very interesting, especially in light of the massive, violent forces that carved out those lands. When I visited, that’s when I went to that Yeager Rock glacial erratic I mentioned in the OP.
I’ve been to a few otherworldly landscapes. Craters of the Moon, Pinnacles, Haleakakala. Reno.
But the craziest one I’ve ben to personally is Blue Basin in Oregon. Near the Painted Hills and John Day Fossil Beds, it’s a smallish canyon carved into an unremarkable, brown plateau. You can’t see it from the trailhead, but walk the trail for about a quarter mile, you turn a corner and suddenly everything is a turquoise blue in ruggedly eroded canton walls that would be dramatic even in an ordinary color.
The American southwest is full of these sorts of things. Pinnacles, spires and hoodoos. It’s truly a geologist’s paradise.
One odd thing among the many I’ve seen was the Okavango Delta. The Okavango River has no outlet to any body of water. It simply just ends in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. It does have flood stages during the rainy season, but the river still just ends.
I wouldn’t call John Day Fossil Beds is “under rated” but maybe “under the radar” for casual visitors. As cool as the multicolored hills and canyon walls are, my best memory is of a late afternoon hike after a thunderstorm had passed through. The crickets had come alive and the air was full of the scent of sagebrush. It was one of those “moments of zen” you hope for but can never really plan.
I’m pretty impressed with White Sands, New Mexico. The park road goes through the dunes that are ‘unnaturally’ white – but there they naturally are – and there’s quite the feeling that it would be far too easy to get hopelessly lost by hiking among them for any distance.
One of my favorite places! WSNP, White Sands National Park.
WSNP is gypsum sand, and is very slippery. You can literally surf the dunes — people go sledding on plastic disks or pieces of cardboard and slide down the dunes. One year I got a back country camping pass and me and my brother and our 5 kids sledded on the dunes all night long.
Delicate Arch in Arches National Park in Utah. Been up to the arch twice. One of my all-time favorite rock formations
There’s a story that someone mixed up the names of Delicate Arch and Landscape Arch, both in Arches Park. I don’t buy it, but agree that the names work better the other way around. “landscape arch” looks so thin and delicate that it ought to fall apart at any moment:
Arches National Park, by the way, has over 300 natural arches in it, alhough some are only arches by technicality. The structures in the park feature prominently in the opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, starting with the rock that the Paramoun logo fades into.
Ruby Falls, a towering underground waterfall, in the Chattanooga area.
Imposing, and going on a guided tour of the caves is fun.
BUT DO NOT WANDER AWAY FROM THE GUIDES OR THE TOUR ROUTE!
I’ve never been to WSNP but you can do the same at Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. The two times I’ve been there I’ve seen quite a few people dune surfing.
Speaking of which, GSDNP is anomalous in one way: it has a cyclical movement of the sands, which is how so much sand making up the dunes stays in one place. A small creek moves through the valley, but it does not have enough volume to make it all the way to the next stream. And the prevailing winds blow back right up the valley. So the creek carries the sand downstream, but it dries out and deposits the sand, whereupon the wind will pick it up again and blow it back up the valley. The two times I went there, the creek was running well enough that you had to step through it to get to the dunes, and you could see it carrying some sand particles if you looked close enough.
I also appreciate that in GSDNP, the park realizes that the dunes are ephemeral enough that they don’t force you to stay on marked trails and thus can wander wherever you want within the dunes.
Following the mentions of Arches, White Sands, and Great Sand Dunes National Parks, I’d like to add my personal favorite in that area, Bryce Canyon NP. It’s not a big as some of the others, but to me and my wife it has more beauty and awe inspiring vistas packed into that smaller area.
For an enormous numbers of hoodoos, don’t skip Goblin Valley State Park. It’s not that far from Aches NP and the other Utah NPs.
But for sheer unexpected weirdness, it’s hard to beat Monument Rocks in the middle of nowhere Kansas. Large rock formations standing in an otherwise flat, featureless plain.
I love Bryce, and have been there numerous times. One time we camped there and hiked through. The appearance of the sandstone changes during the day, depending on how sunlight hits it.
Bryce, by the way, is one of the homes of the “hoodoos” – those formations where the top of a column might remain relatively unchanged because it’s hard, but the softer parts underneath get eaten away. The kind of thing you see of i n the distance in Roadrunner cartoons.
I was amazed at how fragile the sandstone is – if you simply rub your finger across it part of it will crumble away. So don’t rub your fingers across it.
Also, don’t feed the squirrels, no matter how much they beg and how cute they look.
Cool. I’ve hiked to Landscape Arch. But not yet to Delicate Arch. Arches NP is in the heart of some beautiful country! Moab UT right there, and Canyonlands National Park too. Utah has so much to see! And Monument Valley is one of my absolute favorite places and not too far away.
I’ve camped at Bryce too and it is a unique experience to be able to see the hoodoos from the trail at nighttime and sunrise.
Speaking of fragile, I haven’t experienced that myself at Bryce but my nephew did notice the friability of the soft tuff in Bandelier National Monument - that when he rubbed his hand across the stone, bits of sand-sized tuff came off. That same softness allowed the Native Americans to easily carve artificial caves in the cliffside (as opposed to building them out in the open or under rock shelters like I see elsewhere in old dwelling sites of the southwest.)
Oregon has the Bellevue Erratic, a 90 ton rock that traveled some 500 miles on an iceberg during one of the great Missoula ice age floods. It sits on top of a 250 foot hill, with no other rock formations nearby.
Palouse Falls in Washington may look at first like just another waterfall, but this is also a remnant of the Missoula Floods, and the size of the plunge pool and the ensuing canyon is evidence of that mega-event.
It really is quite a sight. We happened upon it completely by accident while transiting across the Scablands (also worth seeing) to Walla Walla. Ended up staying in the smaller of the two campgrounds there for a couple of days. I highly recommend reading “Bretz’s Flood”. He was the geologist who first posited that that area was the result of catastrophic flooding as opposed to the general consensus that it took place over millennia.
