This is by way of a mystery rock sort o’ thing. I took the rock hammer to a loose chunk of the maclargehuge erratic I found behind the house, got a few fresh surfaces, and (unsurprisingly) am still stumped. Identifying rocks from photos is extremely difficult, granted, but perhaps someone will have insights. We may at least be able to narrow things down.
Ready? Go:
Do you have any idea how hard it is to condense 1.75 billion years of history into a single blog post? Not to mention, I made myself thoroughly homesick in the process. Don’t get me wrong: I adore the Pacific Northwest, and it’s got some of the most fabulous geology in the world, but I grew up in Arizona, and it has got some utterly fabulous geology of its own. One of the best places to see it is in the old mining town of Jerome, Arizona. So come explore it with me in Oceans of Ore: How an Undersea Caldera Eruption Created Jerome, Arizona. It’s the first time Rosetta Stones will be joining the Accretionary Wedge, too, so if you’ve got champagne, break it out!
I’m going to go drown my sorrows in that 800+ page paper on Mount St. Helens now.
I don’t usually publish enormous chunks of text from long-dead authors, but this is an instance in which I shall make an exception. I recently finished Volume I of the Complete Works of Robert Ingersoll, and this excerpt cries out for sharing.
I’m fiddling about with settings. Next step is to test. Other things beginning with T and S: Twin Falls on the Snoqualmie River.
I knew nothing of geology when I dragged my intrepid companion here the first time. Also, I didn’t have my super-spiffy shiny Sony Cyber-shot HX5V. So I have two excuses for going there again and collecting photos for you.
Still. I really like this one my intrepid companion shot whilst we were playing down by the river.
His camera kicked my Photosmart’s ass.
Right. So. Some of the changes: I’ve added the G+ and PressThis sharing buttons. I know, exciting, right? You’re under no obligation to use them on this post, unless you want to. But they’re there for you if you ever wish to employ them in the future. And, hopefully, you enjoyed these images, even if one of them was shot with a sub-standard camera.
So, my darlings, what other waterfalls do you recommend?
This song has been randomly playing in my head lately, and it’s gorgeous, so here we go.
There’s one person in particular who’s shaped my musical tastes: Cameron Lee. Saying one person had all that influence may sound like the lexicon is limited, but this is a man who loves everything from Emperor to Aqua (and was not above playing those two sequentially). Put it like this: if only his music collection survived a world-wide catastrophe, you’d still have rescued a considerable chunk of humanity’s creativity. I’m not sure if there’s a single genre not represented.
So, he got me in to black metal. But he also found independent bands and artists who are incredible, some virtually unknown, deserving of far more attention than they get. He introduced me to Daughter Darling, and I shrieked in despair when, after one album, they vanished.
I adore “Broken Bridge.” And I think “Absconding” is one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs ever performed.
So you can imagine my howl of anguish when Daughter Darling was no more. Then I discovered Natalie Walker had continued on her own, and it was okay. There’s one song in particular on the Urban Angel album, “Quicksand,” that I’ve used as an anthem when times get rough.
Things aren’t particularly rough right now, but it’s still an anthem, and hopefully it will lift more than one person up who needs it. Music has got that power.
The thing about Seattle is, it’s possible to live in a place for four years and never notice the maclargehuge glacial erratic practically in your backyard. This whole time my intrepid companion and I have trekked hither and yon in search of enormous boulders, there was one sitting right on the drumlin behind my house. And I never knew.
I didn’t expect to find anything new when I set out on Thursday. I’ve done that walk up the drumlin many times. And I didn’t really mean to go out anyway – it’s been overcast and rainy and a bit cold. So I figured my extra day off would be spent doing actual blogging work. But the rain had been that delicate misty sort that doesn’t soak. It comes down in light curtains, and leaves everything fresh and glittering with droplets, and the way this place smells after a rain like that is delicious. I can’t really describe it. It smells like rain, of course, and has got earth notes, and floral tones, and a lot of fresh green leafy overtones, and a very faint undertone of anise, which I normally don’t like but adds just the right little kick to this scent. If you could bottle the scent of a Seattle forest, you could sell it as a high-class perfume and make millions. I’d wear it every day.
So I headed off up the drumlin, intending to do the usual path along the transmission towers. I figured something interesting may have washed out along that road with the winter rains – this, after all, is where I found my garnet mica schist. I’ve never taken the side paths. They look like they would peter out quickly and people have used some parts of the drumlin as a dumping ground. But I decided to take one this time, just cuz, and within moments I’d found a respectable-sized erratic.
It’s very smooth and polished, a lovely shape, with those interesting dark streaks where the water seems to cling better than in other spots. I shall have to go visit it when it’s dry to see what it looks like, and perhaps figure out what it is. It’s got a fracture running down it, but appreciable bits haven’t fallen off, so I didn’t have anything to drag home. Still. Nice erratic! Shame about the trash, but at least there were angles I could shoot from where the trash didn’t show.
I continued on, happy I’d found some new geology. I took another side trail, and found a kind of grove on the hillside where the scents of the forest were blissfully concentrated, and I almost got a picture of a rufous-sided towhee (or spotted towhee, if you insist), but it hopped away into the undergrowth before I could bring the camera to bear. Still. I know they hang out there, now, and I shall someday lie in wait.
Onward, ho. The winter rains hadn’t done much in the way of washing out fascinating rocks. But the light spring rain had done gorgeous things to the plants, clinging in silver drops to leaves and petals and seed heads.
By the time I hit the top of the hill, my jeans were soaked and I was immensely happy.
I’d meant to turn round and come right back. But I figured I’d walk on and discover what that little glade looked like now that everything had leafed out. So I headed down the road, looking this way and that, amused by how much different things looked now that it was all covered with green.
And I caught sight of some gray amongst the green.
You have to understand, I’ve looked at that part of the hill every single time I’ve gone by. It’s got “No Dumping” signs standing there behind a concrete barrier, and I’ve always looked at the heavy foliage and wondered how anyone managed to dump anything off the hill with that in the way. And all I’ve ever seen is trees, bushes, and trees. Also, trees. And bushes. But this time, a little gray amongst the green, and my breath caught, because it looked like a mini-mountain pushing its way up, and I thought I knew.
A slightly different angle, and there, there.
Doctor Who fans will no doubt recall Martha’s first experience inside the TARDIS: “But it’s huge!” That was my exact reaction here. I dodged round the concrete barrier and crashed past the blackberry brambles, and the thing just got bigger with every step. It’s bloody enormous is what it is. It’s a kind of bluish-greeny gray, and it’s got some portions where it’s been smoothed and striated by contact with moving ice, and crags and fractures, and chunks of it have fallen to the ground after some particularly vigorous frost weathering, and it’s huge.
I was at a loss. I could take a picture, and the trees in it give some sense of just how bloody enormous it is, but they’re not good scale. I hadn’t got anything for scale except myself. And I hadn’t brought my intrepid companion along, so there was no one to take a photo. There seemed nowhere to prop the camera for a little self-portrait-with-erratic wizardry. But I eventually located a rock, seemingly a piece of the same stuff the erratic’s made of. Granted, it was way down low and the angle was funky, but it did in a pinch.
Keeping in mind I am 5’6″, you can get a sense of just how big this boulder is.
So there it is: rafted from who-knows-where on an ice sheet 3,000 feet thick, left on a drumlin in Bothell, and very nearly hidden by lush vegetation. I’m not yet sure what it is, aside from an erratic. I picked up some bits that had fallen off, and took the hammer to them when I got home. It’s meta-something-or-other, I’m fairly certain. It’s finely crystalline, with sparkly bits of what seem to be mica, and there’s something even more sparkly that looks suspiciously like tiny bits of pyrite. I’ll take photos through the hand lens when we get some sun round here, and you can have a go at identifying it.
Amazing, isn’t it, how you can walk past something that big so many times and never know it’s there? That’s Seattle, though. You can never quite know all the delights she’s got hidden. That’s why she repays repeat visits, no matter how well you think you know the path.
As for the glade, well, you’d never even know it’s there now:
Makes me wonder what else ye olde drumlin’s got hidden away behind her veil of trees….
(If you want to go visit it yourself, let me know, and I’ll give you directions. I’m not going to post them online – some idiot’s already been at it with the paint, and the last thing I want is to have vandals stumble across its location here and decide to go have a bit more fun with it.)
