This was a great weekend for hospitality of various forms. Friday morning, Gary Stradling and I headed up to Ghost Ranch. I had not been to the paleontology museum here in over eight years, and I don’t believe Gary has ever been to it. And my previous visit was for...Read more

It’s been eight years since I hiked the Mitchell Trail, and called it a wanderlust for the first time. I had a few errands at the office last Saturday (the bugs are ever with us) and, once I was as finished as I was going to get, I headed over...Read more

A collaborationist in the unlawful occupation of November by Christmas.Read more

Dawn at Sand Gulch Campground. The cliff in the background is Ordovician in age, in the ballpark of 460 million years old. My map is not more detailed than that, but a good guess is that this is the Harding Sandstone. It’s apparently a very popular rock climbing area; the...Read more

We awake, eat breakfast, and break camp. Gary has a long conversation with a fellow named Gordon who has a rather nice trailer rig across the camping area, complete with solar panel. Gordon is nominally from Texas, is long retired from a successful career as a machinist, and has been...Read more

Because the New Mexico Geological Society Fall Field Conference was postponed this year (due to COVID), I decided to invite my friend, Gary Stradling, to join me for a week in Colorado to look at various geological sites. Why Colorado? Largely because I have been to Florrisant Fossil Beds National...Read more

Ninety million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, the Farallon Plate was subducting under the western coast of North America. This threw up the great volcanic edifices of the Sierra Nevada, whose weight flexed the North American Plate downwards. This created a great waterway, the Western Interior Seaway, that stretched...Read more