I Walked With Dinosaurs

 

While trekking in the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve near St. George, Utah, I trudged over a small hill and looked ahead into a small dry creek, much like many I’d crossed on the way to the red cliffs in the distance.  Whitish bedrock in the dry creek differed sharply in color from the red sand I had been trudging through.  An odd arrangement of holes in the rock suggested the pattern of footprints that bipeds make.  

On approaching, and seeing how the holes, some eight feet apart and staggered side to side, I wondered if they might be dinosaur tracks, for which these hills are known.  At a local museum I’d seen pictures of Jurassic age tracks believed to be preserved as natural casts of original dinosaur footprints.  

Several three-toed tracks were set about six inches deep into the rock, all the same size and pointed in the same direction, arranged in a walking pattern.  Notice the human shoe print beside this one, which shows its size.  They look like bird tracks, but such a huge bird!  And how did these tracks become set in solid rock? 

Lake Dixie, 190 million years ago

Paleontologists and geologists have joined disciplines to date most of the tracks in this area to the Jurassic Period about 190 million years ago. A lake was here then, Lake Dixie, and its water level rose and fell many times over thousands of years.  Creatures who walked its muddy shores left tracks, and sometimes those tracks filled with new mud as the lake rose.  Only a few of the millions of tracks left along the shoreline would be buried, hardened into rock and later revealed by erosion. 

Dilophosaurus 

Three-toed tracks like these are difficult to associate  with  skeleton feet found as fossils. But using size and shape, these just might be Dilophosaurus.

 

Great Blue Heron
 photo by Robert Stewart

They look like bird tracks because birds evolved from dinosaurs.  One of the most ancient  birds, and one that most resembles dinosaurs, is the great blue heron.  Our recently lost friend, Robert Stewart, took a liking to great blue herons.  He took hundreds of photographs of them along the Los Angeles River.  

 

 

Columns

. 

A row of marble columns recedes in backward view, tall with heavy Corinthian bases.  Beautiful Ionic capitals, on which nothing rests, glimmer in the morning sun.  I consider their gigantic size, and marvel that I could sculpt them with my father’s tools.  

 

I placed these columns along the way to add grace to the road and to link the various buildings to one another, an esplanade to the theater on Saturday nights, and later to the third floor of Motel6.  

 

Looking at them now, life seems a series of columns, marching along like days.  I have never had enough columns or enough days. 

 

How many marble columns did I sculpt?  Five thousand? Ten thousand?  They are the unifying beauty—the reasons that last. 

 

I’ve made a forest of marble: Death Valley, Rocky Mountains, Wind River Mountains, and now red-desert places of Utah.  I have erected these silent marching men of marble who bring grace to the roads they walk. 

 

What difference does it really make whether he comes today or six days from now?  I am still lean as when tramping Mt. Shasta, and stubborn as when selling the farm in Tennessee.

 

I found early the one man I was destined to love, and though there were times of joy in his graceful company, I always returned to my lovely columns.  He, pour soul, has known ten wives, and has grown to hate them all, while I have drifted in a small boat, as down a river, toward the sea of obliteration, always finding new pleasures in scenery along mossy banks.  

 

I knew his glory intimately, and since then have worked hard, imagining myself an athlete of the Olympiad.  

 

These recent columns summarize thousands left along pathways less traveled.  How they shine in their variety, how perfect in their proportions.  I keep seeking out ideas for the most perfect pillar.  If the others were shown, it would not improve upon this group.  Stand there my shimmering columns bearing nothing upon your heads. 

 

All along I have been more smiled upon than many and more fortunate than most, with many columns to chisel out with those old tools of father. 

 

 

Column of Air

Please comment on the blog if you want your comment to be public.  Otherwise you may comment by email. 

A note to cell phone users: In the past, some of you complained that you were not allowed to comment on the blog when using a cell phone.  I offered solutions, and usually my solutions failed.  

I believe the problem is now understood:  You can only comment using a cell phone if you are logged in with a Google account.  You cannot even comment as “anonymous” unless you are so logged in.  (Using a laptop computer, you do not need to be logged in to leave comments.)  This is a major flaw in Blogspot.com, and I was unaware of it for years.  Google (which includes Blogspot) seems unwilling to fix it due to their ongoing war with Apple.  If you find this explanation inaccurate, please let me know.  

 

 

Welcome to the Desert

 

months since Death Valley
one intoxicated dream
turns and returns to where it was
or somewhere like it
another desert 

 

Red rocks jut upward on the west side of Zion National Park just as they do on the popular and crowded east side, but the only way to see them is to hike.  Tyler Creek is fine route if you start early to catch the sun’s first rays on the peaks and avoid the afternoon heat. 

 

High on the canyon wall, a lizard begins to warm himself in the rising sun, I imagine he does.  

 

Manganese, carried by sliding water and fixed by bacteria, adds black stripes to the red sandstone here on the western flank of the Colorado Plateau, where it joins the Basin-Range Physiographic Province—that great stretch that extends from here all the way across Nevada.  Many kinds of rocks are reported to resident here, and I hope to find some of them in the weeks ahead.  

 

Deep in the canyon, Tyler Creek follows a crack in the Colorado Plateau and waters a host of oaks, pines and firs.  They provide just enough breaks in their canopy to the see the red cliffs above.  

 

An unearthly feeling to arrive among the red rocks of Utah.  This landscape so foreign to the trees of Pasadena.  A strong reminder of how far away from home I am.  

To enlarge any picture, just click on it.  Escape to return.