Category Archives: Colorado

Beyond the Boundaries, Colorado, Mountains, Science, The West

The Rio Grande Rift

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Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

Into the Colorado School of Mines last night, its Museum of Colorado Geology, for a second lecture to the Friends of the Museum. This one: Whither the Rio Grande Rift?

The significance of the title escaped me until Vince Matthews, former Colorado State Geologist, explained that the rift was a spreading of the earth’s crust, a spreading that thins the mantle and increases volcanism and creates faults. Then it hit me. Oh, a rift. Like the Olduvai Gorge in the horn of Africa.

There are three faults within the Colorado portion of the Rio Grande Rift that made it onto the USGS hazards map, one believed capable of producing a 7.5 magnitude quake and another of producing a 7.0 quake. Logarithmic scale. Those would be powerful and they would come in the middle of Colorado, toward the New Mexico border.

He used two terms in this dense, finely argued lecture that were completely new to me: graben and lineament.

Graben: In geology, a graben is a depressed block of land bordered by parallel faults. Graben is German for ditch or trench.

 

Lineament: A lineament is a linear feature in a landscape which is an expression of an underlying geological structure such as a fault. Typically a lineament will comprise a fault-aligned valley, a series of fault or fold-aligned hills, a straight coastline or indeed a combination of these features.

The focus of his presentation was the true northern extent of the Rio Grande Rift. Here’s a map that shows its extension in the consensus view (more or less). In this map you can see the Rio Grande rising in southwestern Colorado, then flowing through the San Luis basin into New Mexico and then onto its more familiar location as a major boundary feature between the US and Mexico.

Vince said that current thinking took the Rio Grande Rift as far as Leadville.

 

Leadville in this map is the first black lettered city above the C in Colorado. I use this map to show you the San Luis Basin (the light tan opening to the left of Highway 25 and starting at the New Mexico border. The San Luis Basin is a major feature of the Rio Grande Rift as it comes north out of New Mexico.

Matthew’s argument extended the Rio Grande Rift considerably further north and then hypothesized a turn from its primarily north/south axis to an east/west one. This map of the Colorado Plateau can be used to illustrate his argument:

 

Matthews extended the boundary of the Colorado Plateau east to include the Rio Grande Rift, then proposed that the rift extended east/west toward the area here marked as the White River Plateau. He based his argument on indicators of a rift zone (which I won’t go into here) and on an experiment on a clay model of the Colorado Plateau.

In essence he argues that the Colorado Plateau is a tectonic feature that has been rotated clockwise. When asked how that could have happened, he said, “I don’t know.” But, if you imagine the Plateau as a piece of the earth’s crust that has physical integrity, then a motion pushing up on its southwestern edge would turn it clockwise. One of the other geologists in the room proposed the San Andreas Fault as it developed. (I got lost right here, but I followed the argument up to this point.)

Very interesting. These lectures are helping me orient myself to the unusual topography of Colorado and some of forces that shaped it.

BTW: I loved Matthew’s description of two cinder cones as “very young.” They were only 640,000 years old. Puts 68 in a very satisfying context.

Colorado, Great Work

Mother of Rivers

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

Just spent a half an hour tracing the Rio Grande from its source in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. Then, the Colorado. The Platte River rises here, too, as does the Arkansas. Colorado may in the national memory be mountains, but in the national and international geography it is the mother of rivers, much like the Himalaya are the mother to India’s famous rivers.

It’s interesting to think of the snow hanging right now on the lodgepole pines in our yard melting, then later in the spring finding its way down the mountain into the South Platte and then on to the Mississippi and the Gulf. A mountains seems isolated, feels isolated but gravity and density make what happens on it run down hill.

 

 

Colorado

Jackass Hill

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Imbolc                               Black Mountain Moon

Sourdough Lane. Jackass Hill. Doubleheader Ranch. Warhawk Road. Black Mountain Drive. Place names near our home. How would you like to live on Jackass Hill?

Kate and I went to Highland Ranch today and met our new internist, Lisa Gidday. She had charm, intelligence, wit. I felt comfortable with her immediately.

That’s another milestone of settling in. Getting basic needs like medical care established and comfortable. Kate found Lisa and she found this house. Her judgment is good.

We’ve had, yes, yet more snow. Tomorrow, if it calms down, the yellow cadet and I will go to work.

Colorado, GeekWorld, Great Work, The West, Weather +Climate

The Weather

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

                                                                            Syntax: Physic Opera

 

The bar at Syntax: Physic Opera. This is a bar for working artists on South Broadway in Denver. A physic opera is a medicine show and Syntax says that everything in the place is medicine. This includes a rye whiskey, cinnamon and other spices drink called Tornado Juice and homemade Cucumber Gin. Other specialty drinks of the house are Pop Skull, Taos Lightning, Snake Oil and Brain Salt.

The guns you can see in the case to the right are works of art made by a graphic artist/welder who enjoyed making unique guns. They have a distinctly steampunk look to them. There are works by other Denver artists hanging on the walls.

The Weather5280 blog brought me to Syntax. It was a meetup of folks interested in the weather, meeting to talk weather then listen to three presentations by some of the folks responsible for the blog. I had an easy 30 years on everybody there. This was a young, hipster crowd with knit hats, blue jeans and retro dresses.

During the conversation before the presentations one guy said, “My wife and I have 5 or 6 quarters just over the line in Texas.” That’s as in 5 or 6 quarters of land, each quarter defined as a mile square or section has 640 acres. “We rent it out to our cousins. They run a few cattle, some sheep. We also just put up some wind towers.” A Chinese professor talked about the inadequacy of certain weather models. A tall blonde, beautiful, was eloquent on troughs and ridges.

Mostly I was out of my depth. These were weather geeks, many of whom had studied meteorology with Sam, the professor, and Matt, Brian and Brendan, the meteorologists who write Weather5280. Sam gave a mostly incomprehensible 20 minutes on snow banding, focusing on instabilities that cause it. Incomprehensible to me, that is. Others were nodding.

The most accessible presentation of the night was Brian, the longrange forecaster for Weather5280. He used analog years and maps focused on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PD) and the ENSO regions where El Nino and La Nina come into being. One thing he said had me nodding. “This is not a historic drought in California. Show me a drought that stretches 65 years, then I’ll call it historic. This is weather. It’s cyclical. The real problem is the number of people using the water. That’s what’s historic.”

(PDO is the blue blob between Japan and the US. The ENSO region stretches from Melanesia toward South America, most of it here is in orange.)

It was, overall, an interesting evening. After it was over, I headed out into the snow and navigated snowy roads all the way back to Shadow Mountain.

 

Colorado, Weather +Climate

The Augur (Shadow Mountain Kind)

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Imbolc                                        Black Mountain Moon

Took the cub cadet for a spin this morning. The bright morning sun will melt the snow, but I have to help it along by removing the top layer. More snow coming tomorrow so had to get ahead of the next storm.

The snow blower is loud. It clanks on the ground, its engine has that small engine unmuffled roar and the augur whirs as it chews through white and gray icy matter. A mist of chilled particles sometimes blows back in my face when I put the blower chute into the wind. It’s a fine way to get active in the morning.

 

Art and Culture, Bees, Colorado, Garden, Jefferson County, Latin, Writing

Up Early

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Imbolc                                                  Black Mountain Moon

One of those nights. In spite of the warmth of my electric blanket I was awake at 3 a.m. For good. So I got up, let the dogs out, fed them, but didn’t go get the paper. (too early) It’s now 5:45 and I’m planning on working on Latin as soon as I finish this. Why waste the time?

There was more snow on the deck this morning. Not so much, maybe an inch. I’d say we got 10 inches over the weekend. Snow here is both more present-it snows more often-and less. It melts soon after coming. This week the weather will be cool enough to retain the snow on the grounds, but it should be sunny enough to melt the driveway.

I’m trying to increase my work. The long preparation for, then the execution of the move, distracted me at points, especially over the last couple of months. We needed our focus on the move and that’s where it was. Now though I want to write a new book, continue the work in Ovid and Caesar, dig into art scholarship, especially in aesthetics and Song Dynasty China, and get more deeply into my Reimagining Faith project by focusing on the concept of emergence.

We have a plan for a modest garden using raised beds designed around horse watering troughs. They have a root-centric bottom up watering system and come ready to use. All we’ll have to do is site them and fill them with soil. I purchased material for a Flow Hive set-up like the one posted below, but it won’t come until November, so I’ll give the bees a pass this year. In April I take the first of several classes in a Native Plant Master program.

Exercise is two-thirds of the way back to pre-move intensity and I’ve added three days.

All this happens wrapped in regular visitation with grandchildren, Jon and Jen, going to movies, reconnoitering Denver and our immediate area around home: Jefferson County, Park County, Evergreen.

Settling in. Becoming native to this place. A process.

 

 

Colorado, Family

Marital Bliss

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Imbolc                                        Black Mountain Moon

When I married my Norwegian bride back in 1990 (25 years this March 10th), I did not fully appreciate how different our body thermostats were. I’ve come to enjoy cooler air around me, wearing sweaters and sweatshirts, sometimes a layer on top of that, feeling like a pensioner in an English apartment with a coin-operated heater.

We sleep in the equivalent of a cold dorm, heat turned off in the room and the window open during the winter. I like this, too, except. Except when my blankets became inadequate. Then I would have a hard time getting warm enough to go to sleep. Frustrating when you’re tired.

Yes, I ordered an electric blanket. Why I didn’t do this long ago is a mystery. I think I just wanted to use what we had available. Now, going to sleep is blissful. Warm body, cold head. Just right.

 

Colorado, Sport

Sheepshead

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

Forecasts of 16-20 inches didn’t stop me from driving 45 minutes into Denver to play sheepshead. We had vigorous snow showers in the mid-afternoon, then nothing. No snow on the way in though there was heavy snow in southern Denver and in the close burbs coming back at 10:00 pm.

Cards were better for me last night. We had 7 players and 5 handed is the preferred form of the game. We had enough all evening to play it. The dealer and the person to their right sitting out didn’t seem as disruptive last night, partly because we had a round table.

We played for $.10 a point, the first time I’ve played sheepshead for money. When I left at 10 pm, I picked up my dime in winnings and left it on the table as a tip for the waitress. (whom I had tipped when I checked out, too.) That sounds like I didn’t do too well, but the only other player in the plus column was Terry, the Wittenberg, Wisconsin retired dairy farmer. He had 40 points when I left. Everyone one else sat in negative numbers, the best -5. So not too bad.

The drive from Conifer to the Village Inn goes on 4-lane Highway 285 north until Sheridan Avenue, then 285 continues as Hampden Street. It’s also four-lane most of the time, sometimes six, but has stop-lights. I actually enjoy the drive through the metro area, seeing the changing neighborhoods, the different retail and residential configurations.

Once I turn north on Colorado Avenue, the drive gets even more interesting. There is a stretch with several Mediterranean spots: The Marrakech, the Shawirma Palace, The Beirut. Just beyond them are some Asian restaurants including a couple of sushi joints. Colorado is a main street running from Hampden all the way into the northern neighborhoods of Denver.

 

 

Art and Culture, Colorado, Jefferson County, Our Land and Home

Dialectic: Reason or Soul

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Imbolc                                     Black Mountain Moon

When Kate and I went out last night, we went to a Regal cinema and afterward across the street to the Macaroni Grill for dinner. We could have been in any upper middle class retail enclave in the country. While there is a soothing, predictable quality to these often brick or stone centers, virtues not insignificant in a huge and varied nation like our own, we both commented that we could have been on France Avenue in Edina. In fact, we couldn’t tell the difference while inside the theater and eating at the Macaroni Grill. That’s ok once in a while, but visited frequently these standardized spaces can, like the electric light bulb, begin to blur, then obfuscate the true nature of a place.

Becoming Native to This Place, the book by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute which I quote from time to time, is the antithesis of this form of shallow standardization. He insists, like Aldo Leopold in his land ethic and Wendell Berry in his work on his family’s farm in Kentucky, that we root ourselves, both literally and figuratively in the place where we live. Particularity, not universality is key to their thought.

The core goal of Die Brücke, a movement among young Dresden based artists at the turn of the last century, was to embrace the German/Nordic soul, one based in the particular physicality of the soil and geography of Germany and the people’s nurtured by it, and give expression to that particularity, not the universality presumed by the application of reason.  Die Brücke rejected the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason, distanced themselves from art’s classical tradition, favoring the Fauves, other key French artists like Cezanne and Gaugin and the Dutch Van Gogh.

This dialectic of reason and soul is a main theme of this new millennium, one with its trailhead deep in the ancientrail of Western philosophy. It may be the main theme of my life, a driving energy behind most of what I do.

Colorado, Family, Mountains, The West, Third Phase

Here. And Not.

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Imbolc                                   Black Mountain Moon

IMAG0948

With the books in organized clumps, art still in boxes, files in the horizontal file, journals, dvds and novel notes stacked together in banker’s boxes, and the exercise area functional I’ve reached a stasis in terms of organizing the loft. Kate got back to sewing yesterday, making a table runner from a pattern both she and Annie bought this last week. Her sewing area has also begun to take shape with her table, cutting surfaces, stash, sewing machine and Matilda (the dress mannequin) in usable, if not permanent places.

We await now the new Stickley table we purchased for downstairs, which will make that space more flexible when entertaining or during family game nights. The reading room, the bedroom, the living room and the kitchen all have usable, if not permanent configurations. The garage and the homeoffice remain hangouts for the cardboard set, art in the latter and mostly gardening/beekeeping/tools in the former.

Over the next few weeks Jon will install built-in bookshelves up here, attach my pull-up bar and help us IMAG0950hang art in the house. He’ll also develop plans for linking the house and the garage, a current problem spot for us. Why? There’s no straight line into the house from the garage and no path that can be cleared. We have to move through the snow to get to the truck or upstairs to the loft. Not a big deal, but one that could be better.

Kate went in yesterday and had a day as grandma, doubled with Barb’s presence. They were at Barb’s apartment with Gabe and Ruth who were out of school for teacher’s conferences. In one of those mysterious moments we humans have from time to time, Kate went from Minnesota grandma to Conifer grandma, a change that began at the birthday cum house warming celebration on Saturday. She’s now fully here (as I sense it) and in the life she dreamed about as we prepared for and executed the move.

There’s a bit further for me to go. I got a very sweet book from Ruth as a birthday present, a compilation of IMAG0942poems and images about Grandpop plus comments from her. I feel completely here as Grandpop and did perhaps sooner than Kate, but the Self that has begun to grow here, a Colorado, Western Self has barely emerged. In part I need to get my old rhythms back, the ones I mentioned yesterday: Latin, writing, art history, exercise, sheepshead, perhaps some political work. But, too, I need new rhythms: exploring Colorado and the near West with Kate, hiking and snow-shoeing in the mountains, learning the history and the geology and the biology of the land we now call home. It will be the dialectic between the old, stable patterns and ones possible only because we live here that will finally get me all the way here. For now, I’m neither fully here nor fully gone from Minnesota. Liminal. Again, still.