What gets pushed up must fall down.
I just experienced something – again – that I thought I would share.,
One of my earliest memories in my three-quarters of a century on Earth was a scout trip to Buckhorn Draw in Emery County, Utah. We camped out for most of a week and in the early spring weather, we woke up early too. It got pretty cold out there in the springtime desert at night.
I was making coffee (I was in one of the few scout troops in Utah not sponsored by the LDS church.) to warm up. The sun was just coming up over the canyon wall. Suddenly, a rockfall happened just across the canyon. Dust billowed out as giant rocks turned into gravel and dirt. The sound was something that impressed me then and still does now.
In a different essay here, I discuss the concept of “Deep Time”. In the geological scale of events, things happen so slowly that mere humans, with our allotted “three score and ten” years, simply can’t conceptualize the millions of years that geological events require.
Or sometimes they don’t. The explosion of Krakatoa didn’t take millions of years. Neither did the Chicxulub meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. But in the 66 million years since the Chicxulub meteor, there hasn’t been another one like it.
I think I was a fortunate teenager to be in the right place and the right time to witness that rockfall at Buckhorn Draw.
It’s not the only time I’ve seen one.. Ten years ago, when was a writer for a local news outlet here, I received a hurried call from the editor. “Get down to Rockville. A rock fell on a house.” I grabbed my camera and ran. The air was still full of dust and it was just getting dark when I arrived because Rockville is only five minutes down SR9. I took the only photographs of the scene just after it happened and the pictures were published around the world. The one here is from a newspaper in England. It was a somber scene. Two residents and their pets were somewhere under that crushed house.
Since I’ve lived in Zion Canyon, I’ve witnessed two actual rockfalls in addition to the one at Rockville. The second one just took place in Surprise Wash right behind my house just a few hours ago. We didn’t see the actual rockfall, but we heard it. The sound of a big rockfall that close to you is like nothing else. When I rushed out to the back patio with my camera, the dust was still rising.
That so many rockfalls have occurred in just the brief flash of geological time when I have lived here has to be more than significant. This is canyon carving that, on the geological time scale, is like the speed of a hummingbird’s wings.
Zion Canyon is a young part of the Earth’s surface. It’s carved into the edge of the Colorado Plateau which is only 13 million years old so the entire canyon is younger than that. The Chicxulub meteor that killed the dinosaurs is over five times older. My Utah red horn coral is over thirty times older.
I’ve been able to witness all of this canyon building only because Zion is still growing so fast. All those rocks falling is canyon building.
I have never witnessed a rockfall like this before but growing up in Alaska it wasn’t too uncommon for large snow berms to collapse on the mountain top and make quite an avalanche. It was fully visible from the town and was very impressive.
i never knew that you were a writer and photographer; makes total sense.
The fact that we are able to witness fragments of deep geologic time with our gushy human eyeballs amazes me. At the moment the cliffs of Palos Verdes are crumbling quicker than cookie crumbs.
The ground is literally play dough and the land is eternally in flux as the rocks fall. At first the early builders didn’t know better than to build. But now the Sunken City and the ruins of Marineland remind us not to build too close.
That’s pretty cool!!!