Critical Thinking

I spent a good portion of Saturday sitting on a cliff, staring into the past. I don't mean this in some weird, melodramatic way. This was no Dark Night of My Soul, it was just a restful break from the grinding activity of employment and civilization. I wasn't looking into my past. My past is insignificant in comparison to what I was seeing.

I was sitting on top of a formation known as Grand Mesa Basalt. Named with the whimsy geologists are loathed for, it sits predictably on top of the Grand Mesa. Basalt is volcanic rock. The Grand Mesa which towers over the Grand Valley in regal snooty contempt, is formed, as most Mesas are, by a cap of erosion resistant material sitting on top of softer, more mutable material. The Grand Mesa is very young. The cap is around ten million years old in mythos du jour. Under the cap, the largest formation is Cretaceous Wasatch.

I sat on the edge of the cap, a cliff section of the western bout appropriately called Land's End. The shale formation know as Mancos formed the low point of my vista, almost seven thousand feet below me, but only twenty miles away. The Mancos formation is the mud bottom of a littoral sea that stretched from Northern California down to Mexico City about 90 million years ago.

To the West of my show was the massive cliffs of two different deserts, millions of years apart. The Jurassic had seen the formation of a brilliant red sand desert with dunes reaching three hundred feet in this area, which a few million years later would be covered by a river much like the Mississippi. Under the blood-red Triassic Chinle, the dark stain of precambria pushed up out of the ground, exploding to the surface hinting at the great forces grinding away in the Lithosphere. This section of rock was 1.7 billion years old.

From my perch, I could see from the very recent history of upright walkers, through the flowering plants, Down through the ages of Mastodon, Stegosaurus, strange amphibia, protozoa, and finally to the very origins of life. It was stretched out like a scroll with tick marks millions of times the span of my years.

My friend engaged me in conversation. As I usually do, I engage in incredibly small talk when I'm thinking massive thoughts. I mentioned camping out on this rim in my old 1975 International Harvester Scout. He looked at me funny. Not at the waterfall right next to me or the towering cliffs, ten million years old. The far Uncompahgre with its claim to age in the billions did not raise a pulse of thought on his brain. He commented flippantly, "Man, that Scout that was a long, long time ago, dude."

"Yeah, six whole years," I laughed, "Dude."