Ordinary High Water Mark

Extraordinarily busy at work...

2011-05-15T07:44:00.001-07:00

I hope to resume blogging in late summer or early fall.

Comments from a friend

2010-10-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine sent an email - he can't comment from his work computer due to firewalls and doesn't really have a computer at home. So here are his comments:

Regarding the Terrero spring (I can’t “comment” from here):

According to [a local], a fire once occurred in an upstream side canyon (trib to the Mora), and it colored the water. The Mora is maybe 1/2-mile upstream on the east side of the Pecos. The spring is on the west side.

So, the source water appears to be the main stem within 1/2 mile upstream of the spring.

(Call it a fortuitous tracer study.)

[Note: the Mora here is a trib to the Pecos, not the Mora on the east side of the Sangres that is a trib to the Canadian]

[Another local] took that culvert photo. I think it was north of SF.

The Red Dot Trail runs below White Rock. Down there, I saw a plumed serpent petroglyph near remnant irrigation ditches (lots of springs). (The “Aztec” Triple Alliance apparently arose only in 1300s.)

Saturday Site Visits, White Rock Area, NM

2010-10-12T10:46:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the late post. Busy, sick, picking up mini-coco from ABQ airport, all those good things kept me from writing. I'm still slightly feverish, but hopefully on the mend.

I got the opportunity to drive over to the Los Alamos area on Saturday, to visit the Don Quixote Distillery with a friend. I really like their ports, and the rose wine (roses used in the making, not a pink wine), though somewhat herbal/medicinal, is good when you prefer something a little different. I'm definitely thinking of these for local gifts. The setting in White Rock is quite nice, very close to White Rock Canyon.

Afterward, we went for a little walk at the Tsankawi outlier to Bandelier National Monument. The photo below is looking east towards Santa Fe (and the beautiful fall colors in the aspen band) from Tsankawi. The reddish-buff cliffs in the foreground I believe are the Quaternary Tshirege member of the Bandelier Tuff. San Idelfonso and other Tewa pueblos claim ancestral ties to Tsankawi. I found disparate estimates of occupation on various websites, ranging from a vague 1400s to 1400-1550.

On the way back, an image of the Pliocene Cerros del Rio basalt overlying Puye fanglomerates. We had just crossed the Rio Grande, upstream of White Rock canyon. The canyon formed by the Rio Grande cutting through the Cerros del Rio basalt (yes, I'm a little late to the basalt columns meme). The canyon has been dammed on at least three occasions in the last 3 Ma both by Cerros del Rio basalts and the Tshirege member ofthe Bandelier Tuff, forming lakes that backed up into the Espanola area.

At Tsankawi, a lupine still blooms.

References: various articles, road logs in : Geology of the Jemez Region II, New Mexico Geological Society Fifty-eighth Annual Field Conference, 2007

Link: http://www.nps.gov/band/photosmultimedia/tt-vt-intro.htm

Culverts 2: Piping?!!!

2010-10-06T20:23:00.001-07:00

A friend sent me this photo. It's somewhere in New Mexico. He's not sure where. He suggested calling it "piping" which is the term used to described water flowing around instead of through a culvert.
Umm...clearly piping is what is occurring here. I like the leftover headwall.

That is all.

Saturday Site Visits, Spring at Terrero (Holy Ghost Canyon)

2010-10-03T17:52:00.000-07:00

The spring you see in the picture at the left, flows out of the hillside near the west bank of the Pecos River at Terrero, NM. The flow rate varies during the year from less than one cubic foot per second up to around five cfs. The spring is in a limestone formation, whose name I am not sure. The geologic map for the Rosilla Peak quad is in draft form and hard to read. It doesn't include much detail in the mapping on this hillside, either.

There are also caves just around the hillside (fenced) that have cultural significance to the Jemez Pueblo; when the Pecos Pueblo was so decimated by disease there were few people left, the remainder joined the Jemez. The Jemez were trying to purchase and remove access to this tract (owned by the state, now) some time ago; I'm not sure if they are still working on it.

When the flow increases, occasionally there is some local hullaballoo about cars driving through the spring flow across the road and increasing turbidity and the sediment load in the Pecos, into which the spring flows, albeit through a very nice wetland complex in between the road and the river (just outside the field of view to the right of the photograph to the left). The increased turbidity in the Pecos is not a good thing, and it does piss off the fishermen and women who have likely traveled a ways to get to what is known as a very good trout fishery.

Occasionally, someone will bring up an earthquake somewhere that occurred just about the same time the flow increased. Local knowledge puts it that the flow increase is sourced much more locally (upstream a ways). The rationale is that the flow has, in the past, included fire debris from a canyon about 1/2 mile to a mile upstream that did not occur any further upstream on the Pecos. Presumably, the flow pathways through the limestone include a source in or near that canyon. (Did that make any sense? I'm still a little under the weather.) Nobody knows for sure, as no hydrologic studies have been done on the spring of which I am aware.

It's a lovely spot, and well worth a visit. Just drive up the canyon almost to Terrero, turn left up Holy Ghost canyon, turn right and cross the creek toward the campground, and you'll cross the spring flow in a very short distance.

Accretionary Wedge #27 - Important Geological Experiences

2010-09-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

I have no pictures for this one, just the vivid, graphic impressions of a 9-year-old living in Seoul, Korea in 1972. I was already in a foreign land, where the pine trees didn't grow like the pines at home. When I first arrived, at age 7, I went through quite a bit of culture shock, from the smells, the sights, the sounds of Seoul when sewage ran down the streams and there was still no subway. My hair got touched everywhere I went (I was blond as a little girl) and always, crowds of people would gather around me to see the little foreign girl.

After a time I (mostly) got over that, but visits to art museums and palaces with lots of Chinese art always left me with the sarcasm that only a 9-year-old could have: "Mountains don't grow like that!" That thought crossed my mind every time I would see a Chinese scroll or print with these funny tall mountains that didn't have an inverted "v" shape.

That is, until Nixon went to China in February of 1972. Some of the officers who were attaches on the trip were somehow allowed to go to Guilin. And they brought back pictures. And us kids in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades at Seoul American Elementary School (at the post on Yongsan, for those in the know) were among the first to see them.

It blew my mind that day, that mountains did "grow" that way, that the art I had seen was not all wrong. I looked at those slides with wonder and awe. And they inspired a love of landforms and earth processes I've never lost.

Wikepedia link to Guilin image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rio_li_Guilin02.jpg

Saturday Site Visits, Tecolote Creek Falls

2010-09-25T06:53:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, after offering advice to a sand and gravel mining company, I got to do a quick side trip to these falls on Tecolote Creek, near Apache Springs, San Miguel County.

We turned off Hwy 84 onto CR B27, for a not unpleasant drive south (this road, even though dirt, provides access for a number of folks living out this way). Took about 10 minutes or so to get to the fall. Views of tires used as small erosional feature bank stabilization and bypassed culverts provided for much humor on the drive.

We were hoping there was still a little flow over the falls, but, as you can see, they were dry.

There were still a few small pools, or tenajas. I've also seen usage of aguaje applied, but don't have a very good translation of that term.

The creek, in this area, loosely follows the axis of the Tecolote Creek anticline (plunges to southeast). In the upstream reaches, the overlying San Andres has eroded away, largely exposing the underlying Permian Glorieta Sandstone. As one follows the axis of the anticline to the southeast, more of the younger formations are exposed. The falls occur pretty much where Tecolote Creek starts eroding through the Permian San Andres limestone, to spectacular effect.
A view looking upstream.

A view of the top from below. I'm looking forward to seeing this when it flows, maybe next spring runoff (if La Nina gives, and we get snow).

Google Earth image.

Portion of the Apache Springs USGS 1:24,000 geologic quad map. Falls are in the southwest center, where the dirt road crosses the creek in the Psa.

Thanks to an unnamed compatriot at arms for showing me this great location.

Culverts 1: A case of the F***its

2010-09-20T09:42:00.000-07:00

I'm planning a series on culvert whoopsies that I find along my journeys around the desert southwest. Culverts are a necessity for roads and other short crossings. It is also important that culverts be appropriately sized and placed within/on the substrate. Culverts can also have incredibly damaging consequences on the aquatic environment if improperly sized/placed. Even bad culverts in ephemeral streams can have downstream consequences (via excess sedimentation from erosion, for example). I come across a lot of bad (and some good) examples in my travels and am happy to share them for discussion.

This is a set of culverts on an small, ephemeral arroyo near Apache Springs, NM. Normally, these small (-ish) arroyos only run in response to heavy rain events and when they do flow, they often flow very big. They are characterized by either upland or no vegetation, and in this neck of the woods, are easily erodible.

The landowner, at some time in the past, installed the series of five culverts in an attempt to provide a crossing that would work during inclement weather. You can also see that the culverts have no road base or other roadway material on top of them. It's been eroded over time to the point of being non-functional. If you look to the right of the photo, you can sort of see the ad-hoc at-grade crossing that the landowner has used to bypass the failed culverts. When we drove by, I had my colleague stop and back up so he could see it, as well. We both laughed and said this landowner had a case of the "aww, f***its" with respect to the culvert. It's a pretty common sight, here in the low-income, rural southwest.

Saturday Site Visits, Folsom Falls on the Dry Cimarron

2010-09-18T08:57:00.001-07:00

In June, I had the opportunity to look at a restoration project on the Dry Cimarron River, near Folsom, NM. On the way back, we stop for a quick look at Folsom Falls. I wished I had the chance to stay longer and really hike around the fall for better vantage points, but we had a long drive back to our respective starting points.

Folsom Falls is formed by the Dry Cimarron River flowing over a lip of what Baldwin and Muehlenberger identified as the Baby Capulin basalt of the Raton-Clayton volcanic field (RCVF). The RCVF comprises mostly basaltic to nepheletic cinder cones, andesitic to dacitic necks and domes, and a very cute shield volcano named Sierra Grande (Baldridge, 2004). The RCVF is Pliocene-Quaternary in age, with volcanism commencing around 7.2 Ma and ending with the Capulin eruption around 60ka. RCVF is approximately contemporaneous with the Ocate Volcanic field, about 50+ miles to the west and is on the Jemez lineament, a zone of volcanism extending from the Springer volcanic field in east-central AZ to the RCVF. The Jemez lineament cuts across tectonic provinces, and as such, its origin is not well understood (Baldridge, 2004).

The view above looks south across the falls. The view to the left is looking downstream. The riparian habitat is well-developed, suggesting the surrounding ranchers aren't letting their cows in to graze (yay!). However, the local kids apparently use it as their party spot, judging from the amount of broken glass and other anthropogenic detritus.

I like the area, because it is very reminiscent of my home country in eastern WA, with lots of basalt, grasslands and the occasional hidden ponderosa stand, much like the landscape near Spokane, WA. There's a Spanish word, querencia, for a place from which one draws strength, which tugs at one's heartstrings. This area of New Mexico is definitely one of mine.

Google Earth image of the location.

Baldwin and Meuhlenberger sketch of Folsom Falls stratigraphy.

Link: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/NewMexico/Capulin/VisitVolcano/framework.html

References:

Baldridge, W. Scott, Pliocene-Quaternary Volcanism in New Mexico and a model for genesis of magmas in continental extension, in, The Geology of New Mexico, a Geologic History, NMGS, 2004

Baldwin, Brewster and Muehlenberger, William R., Geologic Studies of Union County, New Mexico, Bulletin 63, NMBMMR, 1959

Park Meme

2010-06-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm slow on the uptake. Here's mine:

Most visited:
10: Glacier
9: Acadia
8: Grand Teton
7: Cuyahoga Valley
6: Rocky Mountain
5: Olympic
4: Yellowstone
3: Yosemite
2: Grand Canyon
1: Great Smoky Mountains

Least Visited:
10: City of Rocks NR, Idaho
9: Cumberland Island NS, Georgia
8: Florissant Fossil Beds, Colorado
7: Chiricahua NM, Arizona
6: Tonto NM, Arizona
5: Dry Tortugas NP, Florida
4: Katmai NP & Preserve, Alaska
3: Kalaupapa NHP, Hawaii
2: Hagerman Fossil Beds NM, Idaho
1: Russel Cave NM, Alabama

Evidence of change - Relict channels and wetland soils in the Dry Cim and Gold Creek, NM

2010-06-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

In the last couple of weeks, I've been able to see some relict fluvial features that are indicative of a former landscape condition. Sometimes there is enough local history/knowledge to get a very good idea of when major landscape change occurred (as in the case of the Dry Cimarron), in others you can make inferences from historical activity, but it's difficult to derive specific dates of change.

In both these cases, the specific change has been incision due to anthropogenic changes to the landscape combined with flood/erosion events. The Dry Cim has been heavily grazed in the past, and had specific flood events that caused channel avulsion/incision to bedrock in the location where my photos were taken.

This photo shows the relict channel, with fine-grained sediment accumulation. One might think that it is a far-in-the-past feature, until you start talking to the landowner and/or folks who know the local hydrograph. Though one would need to age-date material in the relict channel to get an actual date range of the channel deposits, it's quite possible that it may be quite young. There was a ripper flood in 1910 or so, and the rancher indicated that floods in the 40s and 50s caused an extensive amount of incision - maybe 15-20 feet or more (down to bedrock in this location). So, much of the landscape change isn't actually in the far distant past.

The wider view of the above. It is interesting to note that the sediment in the relict channel is mostly clay-to-sand. Just below the relict channel in this photo is a large gravel bar deposited last year, mostly cobble-sized grains. I saw nothing that size in the relict channel.

The rancher here has reduced his herd from about 1200 to 500 head, and has mostly rested this reach for the past 4 years. The resulting riparian and fluvial changes from the release of grazing pressure have been phenomenal. He has beaver dams/ponds and a well-wetted, vegetated channel bottom, increasing bank storage and aquifer recharge. It's unlikely that the system will aggrade back to its original, pre-grazing, agriculture and logging elevation, but it is in much better condition than I had hoped before I went out there. It helped to have a very wet winter for this region.

We also talked a lot about wetlands, and what anoxic environments are and the soil columns/profiles that occur in these environments. It just so happened that there was a big grey blob of soil on the opposite slope/bank of the relict channel. It was a splendid opportunity to discuss hydric soil indicators such as gleyed soils and oxidized root channels, even if relict. In this photo, you can see the oxidized root channels that occur when roots of hydrophytic plants carry oxygen down into the reduced environment. Rust then occurs along the root channels. In this instance, they are pervasive through the entire exposure. This blob of former wetland is also about 15 feet up from the stream bottom. Again, little grain size larger than sand. There was also a lens of shells near the bottom, and frequent scatterings of charcoal throughout, indicated upstream or adjacent fires. The three of us there that day loved the fact that even without a lab, a handlens, or a rock hammer, we could infer such a great deal about the landscape.

Speaking of relict wetlands, at Gold Creek in Valle Vidal, I got this great bank shot that's actually about 8 feet tall from stream bed to top-of-bank. Below the most recent soil column at the top, you can see a well-reduced horizon. Though I wasn't able to get a good close-up, it too has relict oxidized root channels and other hydric soil features.

Gold Creek had intensive logging in the past, as well as intensive grazing pressure prior to its acquisition by the USFS (it's still grazed, but I don't think as heavily). Looking at the surrounding landscape, we all surmised (me, especially) that it was likely that this drainage and others like it likely had fens at the extreme headwaters, that have now been incised and drained due to the landscape changes. This creek is now incised about 10-12 feet, but the channel bottom seems to be recovering to the point that it is forming an E-type channel. [We kind of puzzled about the gradient, though. Seemed too steep for an E, but my thought is that the source material grain size is too small to support any kind of a step-pool environment that the gradient would suggest. Crappy weathering volcanics, I think.]
Looking downstream towards Comanche Creek. There's probably about 200 or so feet of drop between the photo point and the confluence with Comanche Creek.

I'm amazed everytime I venture into the field about how much of an impact we have had on our environment, even on a little stream up at 9500 feet. I'm also amazed at, and thoroughly appreciate the dedication of the people I work with to restore these landscapes, from the rancher on the Dry Cim, to the folks working here. I may get frustrated on a day-to-day basis, but this, and they make it all worthwhile.

What's Blooming in the Yard?

2010-06-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of wildflowers coming up in the garden. It's hard not to spend at least a few minutes during the day wandering around to see what's up. There are also a bunch of other flowers in the neighborhood that are blooming, but not in my yard. Another post (to include some of the penstemons I've been itching to see on the Mesa).

Oenothera (evening primrose) -

This one is smaller than the first evening primrose that blooms in the spring (that one, I think, is Oenothera caespitosa and seems to prefer disturbed or shaley slopes). This one is about 1.25-1.5 in diameter, and I haven't yet figured out any particular habitat for it. Or it's scientific name, for that matter. But I'm closing in on it.

Linum lewisii (blue flax) One of the books I have differentiates between a Euro import and a native, but I sure can't tell the difference.

Penstemon - I have several varieties that I've planted as well as the ones that come up naturally (or at least from a SF Gardens seed mix for the Sangres). There are about 15-20 of this particular species in full bloom around the yard.

Gaillardia?

Another penstemon - this one I planted. Rocky Mountain
penstemon, I believe.

Phlox.

This one didn't get planted, but it's a different penstemon than all the others in the yard. Found growing under a juniper. It must have been here a year or two, as it is a fairly big patch, but I didn't notice it last year.

Castilleja or Indian paintbrush.

Gaura (whirling butterflies), with a penstemon backdrop. This one is going crazy this year.

A day near Mt. Taylor

2010-05-07T06:08:00.000-07:00

I got to spend a day this last week near Mt. Taylor, a composite volcano north of Grants, NM. It was active approximately 3.3 to 1.5 million years ago, and overlies Cretaceous Interior Seaway sediments. The OF-GM-186 for the area is unavailable from the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources at this time, so its difficult for me to tell you which of the Cretaceous sediments are exposed in my photos, but I do assume they include the Mancos Shale in one of its forms.
Mt. Taylor is sacred to most of the Native American tribes and pueblos in the southwest and much of the surrounding mesa-tops and the mountain itself have recently been designated a traditional cultural property, requiring both tribal and State Historic Preservation Officer consultation for federalized projects.
This designation makes uranium exploration and development more complex on private, state and federal lands. The price of uranium has risen in the last few years, making extraction more economically feasible, but the cost of environmental evaluation, permitting, and consultation must be absorbed into development costs. Though exploration companies may balk at the process, it's the cost of doing business in the area.
As an aside, the uranium source is mostly in the Jurassic Morrison and Todilto formations (Grants Mineral Belt), which do not surface in the immediate area where I was (though there has been considerable exploration, mining and milling on the east side in the past).

Photo 1 is a dome/neck on the southeast side of Mt. Taylor, near Seboyeta.

Photo 2 is the scenic potty view through the junipers. Basalt-capped Chivato Mesa, with Cretaceous sediments below.

I don't have detailed geologic maps for the area (see above), but I'm presuming this is Pt. Lookout with Mancos below?

Looking south from atop the mesa.

Looking east, with the Sandias in the distance.

I used the below websites and the 1991 Field guide to geologic excursions in New Mexico and adjacent areas of Texas and Colorado (Bulletin 137, NMBMMR) as references.

http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/tour/landmarks/mt_taylor/home.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_New_Mexico

Palm Canyon, CA, June 2005

2010-05-05T18:49:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of time, but want to post some pix from a hike up Palm Canyon a few years back. I haven't the resources to really say too much about the geology, either, as my references for the area are still packed away. This will have to do. Pictures courtesy of MK, 2005.

One of my favorite places in desert SoCal is Palm Canyon. I first went with the ex on a planning trip for a GSA field trip he was organizing for the Salton Trough and Sierra al Mayor in Baja, way back when. I loved it on that trip, and still do.

In 2005, I had some field work in Coachella Valley, on the Whitewater River. We all had some extra time, so we decided to hike up to Palm Canyon at the end of our work day. It's on the Agua Caliente Reservation, so you have to pay to enter the park, but it's well worth it. The first photo shows the view from the upper parking area northeast towards Palm Springs with the Little San Berdoos in the way background (the thin grey line on the horizon).

This is a waterfall in a side canyon to the main canyon. The stream has carved smooth notches into the boulders making up the canyon walls and floor. As we hiked out from this side canyon, we all felt an earthquake, one of about three that day, if I recollect correctly.
Though it was a pretty warm day out (as summer days in Coachella usually are), it was cool and misty in the side canyon.
The hike up the canyon is spectacular, both geologically and botanically. The palm oases were well-managed as a food, water, clothing, and shelter source for the Coachella Valley tribes (as well as AZ tribes with access to oases). Plant, bird, herp, and insect species pretty much abound. There are a few good references, but Jim Cornett from the Living Desert Museum in Palm Desert, has published quite extensively on the natural history of the Lower Coloradan desert.

Hiking down to the side canyon, just before the earthquake. Palm Canyon is also home to a primary fault in the Santa Rosa Mylonite zone, the Palm Canyon Fault. For about a couple miles or so, as you drive south from Palm Springs to Palm Desert, you can see the deformation of the granodiorite wane as you get closer to the edge of the deformation zone. The fault trends southwest-northeast, and the deformation (if I recollect correctly and please correct me if I misremember) is evident primarily on the southeast side or upper plate.

This side canyon is in the lower plate, and has relatively undeformed geology, as compared to the other side of the canyon.

This speaks for itself. This photo was taken on the main trail, fairly close to the fault. The granodiorites are well-sheared.

Yours truly, gesticulating madly at the surface expression of the Palm Canyon fault. It's pretty beat up, here.

Random photos/thoughts from the last 2-3 months

2010-04-28T19:48:00.000-07:00

IMHO, this doesn't work as an energy dissipation stucture. One ends up with bale structure material floating downstream for redeposition (and remobilization, and repeat over and over until said bale structure material is either in the ocean or a reservoir).

Mid to late March, looking west at the upper Sangre de Cristos. There was snow down to between 8-9K feet. It's now between 9-10K feet, with bare stone showing on most of the high peaks. Most of the lower snow is now gone, and we've reached, essentially, the early low snow peak runoff. Many of the streams draining the Sangres have reached near bankfull. It's hard to tell what the rest of spring will bring. A hard warm rain on the remaining snowpack will bring a rapid peak; a gradual rise in temp from now til June will slowly melt the remainder. All the folks I talk to prefer the latter. Better for towns with constrained streambanks, better for farmers dependent on acequias to water their fields, better for the riparian habitat to thrive through summer.
Last week, I visited a very overwound meander on El Rito de la Vaca. We all stood around and scratched our heads about what to do, and we included a geologist, stream ecologist/geomorphologist, aeronautical engineer, and local rancher. A fire a few years back resulted in floods that dumped a boatload of sediment in the valley, messing with equilibrium and setting this meander up for an avulsion. This would create some awful problems for the rancher, including wiping out his only access as well as the forest road providing the main valley access. The final result? We said to contact the head of the local watershed group and get recommendations for a good hydrologist skilled in natural channel design work who can carefully evaluate the reach and design an appropriate solution. Maybe the watershed group can come up with a grant project (there's one more overwound meander just like this immediately downstream) to help defray the costs. And yes, it was snowing.
Last, this is the first Persian tulip to flower in my yard this spring. I wasn't in Iran early enough ten years ago to see the native tulips bloom, and haven't had the chance, until this last fall, to plant any. I'm awfully excited that they're blooming and that spring is really, truly finally here.

Late April Snow, edited

2010-04-22T19:47:00.000-07:00

We usually get at least a dusting or two between mid-April and mid-May, but I wasn't quite expecting this much accumulation, at least on the ground (the concrete patio retained enough heat to melt the snow).

It's been quite a hard winter, here in the upper hinterlands of New Mexico. We've probably had between 6-7 feet total over all the storms we've had at the house, since October. The last of that just melted last week. It's been hard on me, on the kid (and even the dog) schedule-wise, workwise, schoolwise, and otherwise. Only the SO has been okay with the long, hard winter we've had this year. But, he's a mountain man, so it's to be expected.

I'm a SoCal girl, though, and these hard winters are equally hard on me. Six months of snow and cold weather is more than enough for me to want to bolt to a warmer clime. But I won't, because I quite like NM, and really can't think of taking my daughter away from what's really her home, now. I can't fathom trying to bring her back to an urban environment and expect her to thrive as well as she is here on our little acre of ponderosa/pinyon-juniper. She's very comfortable in her rural, forested environment. I'm getting there, now that (ahem) the worst of winter is over and I can at least wear sandals occasionally.

I think it would be fine with all of us, really, for winter to be over, and to have the apple trees blossom, the penstemons bloom, and green grass abounding enough to make me sneeze. Even the SO.

The color of a snowy morning at the mesa.

Spring Runoff - Coyote Creek, NM

2010-04-08T20:14:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I had all day meetings in Angel Fire. The drive up was beautiful, as the east side of the Sangres always is. Fortunately, I had enough time on the drive home to stop and take pictures of Coyote Creek reaching bankfull during the spring freshet.

I start at the point where Coyote Creek first crosses paths with Hwy 434,near Black Lake Resort. I'm still trying, sporadically, to figure out the local geology. In a nutshell, 434 traverses Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, Pennsylvanian, and Missipian seds in the south end of Moreno Valley, to (?) Pig-Nog and Quaternary basalts in Guadalupita Canyon, to Precambrian metamorphics on the west side of the Crestone anticline and more JTPPM on the east past Guadalupita, once you get to the flat (more or less). The Crestone is a near-vertical outcrop of JTPPM along one of the main Sangre de Cristo uplift faults, the Romero Fault. It extends from near Guadalupita south to past Las Vegas (the other one) and transitions from the Romero Fault to the Hermit Peak Fault. It's a way cool structural feature of the landscape and characterizes the drive north from LV to Angel Fire, at least for me.

This is where Coyote Creek first encounters 434, one of many xings. We (colleagues and me) think its a Rosgen E in these parts. In most locations (where it hasn't been messed with), it has that classic E shape, with overhanging banks great for the fishes to hide under. [Can you tell I'm not a fish squeezer?]

Even with big-ass culverts (in non-scientific parlance), the creek is backing up and flooding.

The other side of the big-ass culvert xing. Channel has a more normal shape. Downstream of this, there's a stocked, dammed pond in the Black Lake Resort property. After the dam, the creek returns to a slightly degraded E, but we're making sure it gets a little TLC.

Between here and the next photo, Coyote Creek starts dropping through the inaccessible canyon, turning into much of a step-pool stream.

After the primary gradient drop, the stream again interweaves with 434. Here, north of the state park, the stream is clearly reaching bankfull. Spring runoff at its best!

Beavers are busy. Still above the park, but right next to the road. If flow increases, NMDOT might have a problem.

Just downstream of the state park, the valley widens (out of the volcanics and into seds on the east). This view shows the extensive willows/wetlands in the valley.

Saying goodbye to Coyote Creek as it goes through a water gap in the Crestone. Not sure of the formation forming cliff in distance. May be Glorieta SS, from map in NMGS 1990 "Tectonic Development of the Southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains." As there's no topography in the map I've been examining, it's difficult to tell.

Gallinas River at the USGS gage

2009-11-14T06:29:00.001-08:00

I got to visit the USGS gage on the Gallinas River recently. This is near Las Vegas, NM, on the east side of the Sangre de Cristos Mountains. Luckily, I recently purchased and have been perusing the NMGS "Tectonic Development of the Southern Sangre de Cristos Mountains, New Mexico", so I actually know a little bit about what I got to see.

West of Las Vegas, the Gallinas River has cut through the Crestone Anticline to expose some of the Precambrian metamorphic and igneous intrusive rocks in an area between the Crestone upstream and west to around Trout Springs. This exposure, and the bedrock-controlled river substrate (an F in Rosgen parlance), make this a great place for a stream gage.

The Precambrian rx have been well-sheared and folded as observed in their exposures along the faulted frontal zone of the Sangres uplift. In the first photo, you can see the gage equipment box, and the folded Precambrian adjacent to it. The picture barely does it justice.

A shot upriver from the gage station. The canyon is steep, with poorly- to-undeveloped riparian areas, clearly due to the lack of flood terraces. This changes immediately downstream of the gage station. Between the road grade and areas of less-cohesive, more mafic, weathered zones (fault splay, maybe? - I don't do structure for a living), the river has a greater ability to form riparian habitat/flood terraces.

Here's a shot of the near-vertical Precambrian with a boudin of felsic material. This is just downstream of the gage, in the canyon wall/roadcut.

A little further down-canyon (east), a well-weathered zone of mafic material interspersed between the more competent rock. The mafic was easily crushed by hand. It's very similar to the exposure of the Romero fault zone near Mora (post to come), so I wondered if there might be fault splays along this stretch. There aren't any noted in the references I have, but this stretch also has restricted access.

I should note that this location is also occupied by northern leopard frogs, petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act. The person accompanying me had surveyed for them in the past, and had, with others, determined that the frog occupied adjacent rock pools and wetter zones; habitat much more favorable during lower water years. During freshet or high water years, this habitat would be inundated, lowering the species' ability to reproduce. When the habitat is well-exposed and well-wetted, the species would thrive.

We had a fine time exploring the canyon and discussing the habitat and hydrology drivers. I was heartily reminded of a friend's comment (Josh Collins, who works for the San Francisco Estuary Institute and whose wife was a grad student of Luna Leopold) that habitat occurs at the intersection of hydrology and geology. The Gallinas at the USGS gage is a fine example.

It should be perfectly fine to prove your restoration works...

2009-10-30T04:17:00.001-07:00

I recently was made party to complaints regarding regulating agencies, well, regulating.

In this particular instance, the colleague (doesn't work with me, but is in my industry) was complaining about post-construction monitoring requirements being imposed on in-stream restoration projects. They weren't particularly onerous, just some longitudinal- and cross-sections as well as photo-monitoring, with an annual report for three to five years.

I fail to understand why my colleague was upset that he might have to assure the regulators that his project would do what he said it would do. First, any impact, whether beneficial or adverse, is still an impact, and you need to prove to the agencies that what you're doing is appropriate and feasible and won't cause lasting harm. Second, they quite have the authority to place conditions on permits that they issue in order to assure that the impacts are what they call "minimal." Third, restoration projects fail. Sometimes they fail big, sometimes they fail small. Finally, although I've come across some pencil-pushing dorkbutts, most of the regulators I've worked with are fair, consistent, and very concerned about the overall health of resource that I'm proposing to impact.

My recipe for a succesful application and project:

1. Give your local regulators a well-described and depicted project. What's obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to the harried regulator who has 30+ people clamoring for their permits, so you need to make it obvious in your submittal. Quantify the impacts, the need for the project. What's the land use history of the watershed? Why is the stream impaired? Do you have a reference reach that you're trying to emulate? Give them clear, measurable performance standards for your project and tell them when and for how long you will monitor, and tell them when it will be successful. Most agencies have brochures or checklists for complete applications; use them.

2. Be ready and humble enough for all sorts of questions regarding your design and the need for the project. Prepare for potential changes/post-project fixes in your budget and design.

3. Watch your contractors during construction, and put clear damage/non-performance clauses in your contracts. I've heard of contractors driving up and down a narrow stream looking to see how high the splash would go, for a non-profit's fish habitat restoration. I've also seen j-hooks and vanes installed so high that they impeded boats during lower flows. It's not good when your fish habitat project's poor construction really pisses off the fishermen and the regulators.

4. If you have to change design or structure location during construction, tell the regulators. Call them up or email them, tell them what you need to do, and ask if it's okay to keep the contractor mobilized and supply as-builts after construction. If they say no, give them change drawings and ask for a permit modification, ASAP.

5. Do your post-construction monitoring on time. Don't blow it off. If big things happen in the watershed that affect your project, tell them soon afterwards, and include it in your report.

6. If you see that your structure(s) isn't/aren't working, tell them and propose a fix. Make sure your client is aware that sometimes, structures need tweaking and build that into your budget.

Restoration is not an exact science. There's lots of schools of thought (and lots of arguments, too), and no single prescribed method of conducting restoration. If you're prepared to have an honest, humble dialogue with your regulators and give them the information they need to evaluate your project up-front and after construction, you'll likely have a very successful restoration business.

Fall's first snow...

2009-10-21T06:49:00.000-07:00

Snow at the Coconino household early this morning.

Back again

2009-10-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've taken about a month and a half off of posting and reading blogs, Twitter, etc. It actually took much longer to recover from the surgery than I had anticipated, but it was well worth it. I went back to work earlier than I should have, and thus ended up with a minor infection and more cramping/pain than was originally indicated. I spent many days on the couch with a book and pain killers. But I'm better now, and doggone it, the surgery worked. I still have a period, but happily pranced through field work on the worst day this last week. Astonishing. Still might need hrt, though, but I'm a little more disposed to it now.

From what little I've read of other folks' blogs today, I can see I have some catching up to do. After reading Anne Jefferson's post on Highly Allocthonou s , I see a post on stream classification might be needed. It would also be a good refresher for me - I have some stream stuff to wrap my head around in the near future, anyway. Also need to post something on the Quivira Coalition's annual conference and water symposium. Bill Zeedyk will have his new book on Induced Meandering available at the conference. I also need to see what my daughter's k-garten class is doing for Earth Sciences week, if anything, and maybe (cough) volunteer if I can break away from the work thing. I'm also peripherally participating in a "used tire bale as bank stabilization research project" and may have some thoughts about that in the next month or so. I also have a picture of a road cut near Mora, NM that needs posting. I have no geology references for that area, and so know little about it other that it looked like a fault through meta-seds with granitic intrusions. I don't work much in rx anymore, so I'll welcome any info to clue me in. Say tuned.

Red dirt girl

2009-07-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

With appropriate homage to Emmy Lou Harris and east Texas, I live in red dirt country. Specifically, dirt derived from the Permian Yeso and Sangre de Cristo formations (yes, it's a hint to where I live). It is pretty dark red, as seen in the photo below, and stains everything (if anyone has a suggestion to how to get it out of my five-year-old's clothes, I'm all ears). When dry, its clay content makes for great adobe trails and the dirt roads in the 'hood get well compacted and easy to drive. It would make a nice house from adobe bricks, but that's a large project for another lifetime.

The reason I bring this up is that geology is often the root of many incidents in my house, including this morning's. Because of the red dirt, and the current monsoon storms, I have a policy of no shoes in the house, in an exercise in futility to keep the red dirt off my new fake-wood flooring. [The kitchen floor tile and grout is actually the same color as the dirt, as I presciently knew the result of putting my mud puppy-child and significant other together in this environment, so close to the back door.]

The occasional result of this policy is shown below. The outside shoes end up in the once black and white dog's mouth (now black and white with reddish-brown legs), with the following results.
As I was reading other blogs this morning, I looked out the dining room window, to note the black, white and red dog wandering by with a distinctly hot pink small Timberland sandal in her mouth. She got yelled at. The shoe was saved. I got a blog post.

The offending dog, happily posing for a picture.

Franciscan Melange, Oak Woodland Savannah and MJ videos

2009-07-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

The five-year-old was curious about MJ and all the media fuss over him and his demise. Having reached my majority around the time when he was releasing his first solo albums and becoming "king of pop", I set about to educate my little one on the finer points of moonwalking while simultaneously reliving a wee bit of my late teens and early twenties through watching a series of his videos this last week.

What struck me the most, at least in the outdoor videos, was the fact that most the scenery seemed to have been shot at his Santa Ynez valley ranch, Neverland. I know because one of my favorite hiking trails for about 9 years, in the 90s, was right next door, while I lived in Santa Barbara.

I pretty vividly remember the last time I hiked that trail. It was spring, and a very good flower season. One of the peaks above, a triangular-shaped one whose name I forget (Zaca Peak?), was bright orange with eschscholzia california, California poppy. I came across one of the more beautiful groups of sisrynchium bellum (blue-eyed grass), I'd ever seen. It was a different blue, lighter than what I was used to seeing. The lupinus longifolius, bush lupine, was in full flower giving off that wonderful grape-juice scent. Down on the valley floor, the quercus lobata, or valley oaks were dripping with the green of their fresh spring leaves.

Out of all the landscapes I've been, that driven by the Franciscan melange is my favorite, and the drive from Los Olivos up to Figueroa Mountain across the main ridgeline and over to the saddle between Figueroa Mountain and the San Rafael peaks best exemplifies that landscape to me. [Figueroa Mtn Road to Happy Cyn Road back to San Marcos Pass Road] From the serpentine Franciscan knockers, to the grassed shaley slopes, to the tall foothill pine forests at the top of the range, this landscape speaks to me like no other.

The Franciscan melange in the San Rafaels along Figueroa Mtn Road is composed primarily of marine sediments, with serpentine Franciscan knockers showing up occasionally at the top of the mountain and along Happy Cyn Rd. The mix of differing sediments, each of which supports its own mini-ecosystem of flora, gives rise to a ruffled, patchwork landscape which is like no other I've seen, and is definitely one of my favorite.

Though I don't have any photos (didn't have a digital camera back then), this one shows the triangular peak and really exemplifies the beauty of the area: Figueroa Mtn, Flickr image courtesy of Kimberly Perkin.

Though any fascination I might have once had with the "king of pop" is long gone, whenever I see one of his videos, I'll fondly look for images of the Santa Ynez Valley.

Blogger comment window

2009-06-16T21:10:00.001-07:00

Does anyone have a problem with Blogger only opening a dinky comment window with no means of expanding it, so that you can't post comments because you can't see all the word verification or most of your comment? Scrolling doesn't work. I seem to have that problem with my home mac and haven't been able to find a work around. Have any of you? Thanks, in advance.

Bad Geology Movie

2009-06-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

I ended up wasting my evening alone (both the 5-yr old and the SO are away for the week, on different sides of the continent) watching the continent get ripped in half during the ludicrously bad "Apocalypse 10.5" or whatever in the heck it was called.

I really had a hard time willingly suspending my disbelief for this one. From Sun Valley erupting to Las Vegas sinking at least 200 feet into the vegas (did they really try to say it was sulphuric acid-eroded limestone in the alluvial valley?), it was a really horrid portrayal of natural events gone badder in much less than geologic time. If I had Emeril's smell-o-vision, rotten eggs would have been wafting from the set.

I really loved (not) the rift fault propagating through the midsection of Canada and the U.S. in less than two days without any failed rift arms (would they have propagated and died in less than a day?).

When my ex worked as a prof at an unnamed SoCal bastion of higher learning, he regularly got calls from "the industry" looking for quick answers to geologic questions (it helped that his last name is closer to the beginning in the alphabet - the industry geeks tend to go down the list). Some were interesting, but some were rather infantile. I remember him talking about some whining sod trying to find a good movie location and practically begging for a warm, but Iceland-like locale to shoot in a few weeks (it was the middle of winter-southern Idaho was right out). It has occurred to me, more than once, that I could probably have found some work as a geology "consultant" to the industry. I couldn't bring myself to even check into it, though, as I presume the writers and directors for movies like the one I saw tonight repeatedly shine on their consultants' pleadings for a dramatic geological activity that could actually happen in real time.

At the end of the movie, everyone, from the president to the former head of the USGS and his now head of the USGS daughter, was crying crocodile tears. Myself, I can't imagine any geologist worth her/his salt not at least thinking: "Whoa, dude. That was so incredibly awesome!" as they watched a rift split the continent in half and fill up with ocean. In two whole days.

Accretionary Wedge #17 Time Warp in Water

2009-06-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

I thought long and hard about where and what I would like to see. I thought about adventures in evolution (I would love to see the Burgess Shale critters in action - talk about living sci-fi), and some of the more renowned geologic features in geologic time (I would love to be a fly on [or in] the wall to see the onset of the San Andreas strike-slip movement or to watch the very young San Jacinto fault (~700,000 years) from start to present in fast-forward).

What I would really love to see are two water-related events from Quaternary time. The first of these are the Missoula floods originating in western Montana from the repeated failures of ice dams on the Clark Fork River. The second are the Quaternary lakes of the Mojave desert.

The repeated Missoula floods (potentially 40+, from the varve-like slackwater deposits in southeastern Washington called the Touchet beds) carved out the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington. The lakes, coulees, and river channels of the scablands were carved by the massive floodwaters (up to 500 cubic miles) that occurred repeatedly through the Pleistocene. They were identified in the 1920's by Harlan Bretz, who was derided as the flood theory of scablands creation just didn't mesh with the theory of uniformitarianism. Bretz's theories were finally accepted after years of research by himself and others, and I believe he was awarded the Penrose Medal for it. The flood events are also called the Bretz floods in his honor. The remaining lakes provide refuge for migratory birds, riparian and wetland habitat, and recreation opportunities for locals and visitors. I spent my childhood driving through eastern Washington passing by little pothole lakes, large, wide valleys with little ribbon creeks and riparian in the middle, scraped basalt ridges, and the windblown loess hills of the Palouse, wondering how on earth they got there. Luckily, between my geotech/engineer dad and local natural history class in junior high, I got to understand why way before college.

While living in SoCal, I spent lots of time in the Mojave, especially going up to Owens Valley or over to Panamint and Death Valleys. I occasionally went to Saline Valley and twice, maybe, to Deep Springs Valley. All of these valleys contained pluvial lakes, the largest being Lake Manly. The Mojave River flowed (just like in 2005) from the San Bernardino Mtns into a string of lakes ending in Lake Mojave. [I vaguely recollect that Lake Mojave may have had a discharge into Lake Manly via the Amargosa River]. I spent a very long day in 2005 driving a circle around Death Valley with my mom and 11-month-old as I couldn't get a hotel room. That year was probably the only time in my lifetime I would see Lake Mojave with water, the Amargosa River (in the distance) flowing, and Death Valley Lake a lake. It wonderfully blew my mind, and I would love to have seen all the rest of them full, as well. A few pictures from 2005 are below.
Silver Lake (filled from Lake Mojave/Mojave River)
Death Valley Lake

Caja del Rio trip

2009-06-07T07:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's sightseeing tour was to Caja del Rio, slightly southwest of Santa Fe. We haven't had much time to do fun sightseeing since moving, so this was a nice opportunity to see the lay of the land in the Santa Fe area. I've generally only been there for meetings, so I got to be a bit of a geo-tourist and passenge, instead of drive. Yahoo.

The road to Caja del Rio (the Rio Grande River canyon south of Otowi Bridge) goes past Santa Fe's landfill and across the Cerros del Rio volcanic field (as best I can tell from my limited home references). Once we got fairly close to the Rio Grande, we did a loop along the canyon edge on a Forest Service two-track. This was the five-year old's first two track drive on a bumpy road in a very long time (we did need to put it in low in several locations), and at one point she said "this road is making my underwear creep!"

The view across the canyon towards White Rock and Los Alamos. I think the tall, triangular-faced mountain in the background is Polvadera Peak. You can see the Rio Grande at the bottom of the canyon.
The five-year old and the SO looking north at a tributary canyon wall.

Part of what they were looking at - interfingered sediments and basalts. I have the Geology of the Jemez Region II (put out by NM Geological Society, 2007) at the office and plan to try and figure out the possible formations in this shot.

The windshield view from looking across the canyon. The five-year old said "We're gonna die!" (she says that about a lot of things, tongue-in-cheek).

Another underwear-creeping part of the drive. Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment wrote recently about two-track driving, so I'd thought I'd include these to continue the meme.

A set of beautiful lupines at the last part of the loop, near a stock pond.

More on Deep Creek...

2009-05-30T07:32:00.000-07:00

I had found several nice, though informal, bits of information regarding the Deep Creek pillow basalts while hunting around on the internet last fall, but haven't found the one or two really good ones this time around.

However, I did find this link Major Rock Types of the Spokane Area.

The author discusses the Latah Formation, which underlies the basalts at the northern end of the canyon in the state park. The aforementioned slide (in the last post) occurred at the contact between the two. Below is my best shot of that contact.

Eastern Washington Pillow Basalts

2009-05-27T20:43:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite hikes as a teenager, visiting family in Spokane, WA, was the disappearing stream at Deep Creek, a tributary to the Spokane River. I loved hiking there in the summer, when the creek was low, and popped in and out of view. It was another of those places that sparked my interest in earth sciences. Of course, when I was a young and fairly ignorant high school student, I never knew about the pillow basalts, just the stream going to ground. It took my ex and a lovely winter hike years later to note the pillow basalts. It has wonderful pillow basalts about a quarter to half mile upstream of the confluence of the two water bodies. In another post (when I have a little more time), I'll share more about the local geology there (think lots of basalt). I got to share it with my mother and daughter (and a friend, via cell phone) this fall. There had been a small slide upstream, and the trail through the canyon was rather obliterated, but the 73-yr old and the 5-yr old did very well at negotiating the basalt boulder field that comprised most of the hike.

The five-year-old, looking at a larger example.

A nice shot of several pillows.The 73-yr old and 5-yr old, in between columns of basalt, looking downstream near the confluence.

I'm back!

2009-05-23T15:15:00.002-07:00

I've finally gotten internet access at home after my move last October. Phew! It took almost six months of wrangling with my provider to get the correct gadget with the correct software with the correct locational settings, and hours of phone calls talking to several folks (some helpful, some not) each call. Thankfully, it's done, and I can get back to the enjoyment of reading you all's blogs, writing comments, and writing my own posts. I have lots of photos and musings that I'm anxious to get into the blog and I hope to have two or three postings a week, now that I'm reconnected. Thanks to those of you who queried as to my whereabouts over the last months. Cheers! Coconino

Thoughts spurred by newly found blog...

2008-09-20T07:58:00.000-07:00

Silver Fox over at Looking for Detachment posted about a newly found blog, Accidental Remediation. Short Geologist's posts are primarily about working in the HTRW investigation and remediation arena, a field I left about 10 or so years ago.

One of her posts talks about the "indentured servitude" of entry-level geologists (aka field grunts). This type of activity on the part of consulting firms was certainly a portion of why I left that field of work.

I had friends who worked for firms that would charge their clients for overtime worked, but not pay their employees for that overtime. They were on salary, right? I myself worked for a firm that had me work 5 months' worth of hours in 3 (I was working about 12-15/7) - unpaid overtime - and got a lovely $500 bonus that year. Other folks in my firm and other firms in the area were similarly overworked. I had one friend who got herself hooked on ritalin to accomplish the senior project manager work that she needed to get done (more 15/7). I've heard of firms that had a very "enhanced" (aka stimulant-laden) atmosphere to produce results from their junior and senior project managers. Not all engineering/geology firms are this way, of course. There are a lot of very good firms out there who treat their employees well and understand the relationship between sound product/reputation.

Regardless, about 10 years ago I decided it was nuts and changed fields within the environmental industry. Luckily, I had the background that helped me accomplish this transition. The consulting in my arena, wetland delineation, is much more sane and not as subject to that type of servitude. It's harder to get crappy work by the state and federal agencies as they generally need to field-verify the work firms are doing, which is highly visible and mostly above ground (except for those hydric soil indicators). Projects tend to be smaller, and when large, the clients tend to be savvy enough to understand that good data is necessary.

That said, the quote about consulting I continually tell people is "Good, fast, and cheap; pick any two. You can't have it all." And it's true.

Kids and science

2008-06-29T07:32:00.000-07:00

I am quite proud of my 4-year-old daughter. She takes catching bugs to put in her bug box, my somewhat feeble explanations of scientific principles and processes, being taught minerals in stone countertops and my continuous absences for work (with or without her along) in stride.

Yesterday was one of those cases in point. On our way to that horrid bastion of low-cost consumerism originating in the south (aka Wally-world), she asked me very pointed questions about the difference between dry ice and regular ice. For background explanation, when we travel to larger communities with decent food stores (TJs and Whole Paycheck), I bring a large cooler and go gaga. The last time this occurred, she was along for the search for dry ice to keep the frozen things frozen and the rest well-cooled. [Note: In NM and AZ, Smith's almost always has dry ice. Occasionally, Wally-world will have it as well. Albertson's recently dropped selling it.]

It was interesting to see her reaction to the explanation, especially that carbon dioxide comes from air and is separated out and cooled from a gaseous state to a solid (ie., frozen) state.* It's a difficult concept for a small child, first that air that you can't see is actually made up of different gases, and second, that you can actually separate out one of them and cool it to a solid state.

The non-scientific world tends to think of ice in terms of frozen water; most preschool teachers and day care workers don't have a scientific background and have limited ability to present difficult scientific concepts to children of small age. It's one thing to explain to a child what you can see (trees, bugs, plants growing, rivers flowing); it's quite another to explain what you can't (and really don't understand yourself).

I've noted gender-related test score differences for verbal and math/science in the school district to which I will (hopefully) soon be sending my child. Girls lead boys in test scores in every elementary school in the district for both verbal and math/science until 4th grade. At that point, the verbal scores equalize and the girls' math/science scores tank (from about 95th percentile to 75th or less). In discussing this with friends who are both educators and mental health care professionals, we came up with several possible explanations, the most plausible being a combination of non-science background for the teachers and a male-oriented curriculum (scientific ideas and processes being presented in a way easier for boys than girls to grasp). Before you gasp about this statement, anyone with children of both genders will tell you that boys are very different from girls in the way they play and verbalize (certainly with ranges of behavior in each - my ex had his dolly along with his tonka trucks and my girl is not much of a girlie-girl). With the differences in learning abilities and behaviors, it is not a stretch to imagine that an elementary school science curriculum taught by a non-scientist could be easier for one gender to grasp than another.

I'm obviously very concerned about how well my girl learns math and science (and English - see May 15 post) in school. Occasionally, my fears are allayed and today was a case in point. She took the explanation of separate gases forming air and freezing one of those to make dry ice in stride. Her questions made it clear she grasped the basic concepts. Though she may have a bit of a difficult time verbalizing what she understood, I'm quite proud of her ability to understand the concepts, and grateful that she gets the opportunity to do so.

*[1. I left out the discussion of its liquid state existing at higher-than-atmospheric pressures and low temperatures. 2. She easily got that it was colder than regular ice.]

[As another aside, her 13-year-old babysitter can drive a backhoe and dress an elk with the same ease as sending a text message or doing her hair and makeup. I'm quite proud of her, too.]

Art and Architecture in Geology: Accretionary Wedge #10

2008-06-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

As I am in the middle of redesigning a kitchen with my significant other and just spent many hours looking at hurking slabs of rock in near three-digit weather (I picked a garnet granite in the remnant yard), my contribution to this version of the Accretionary Wedge (#10) are two of the buildings in downtown LA that had some of my favorite geology in architecture.

The first is 601 Wilshire, or the Figueroa at Wilshire: http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=1357
Construction was finished in 1990, and the architect was Albert C. Martin. As monolithic downtown office buildings go, this is one of my favorites. I spent many hours both inside and in the outer courtyard of this building, faced with pink granite apparently from Brazil (also used on the inside). My favorite building feature: the pink marble sconces in the hallways, sliced thin to be translucent and give a warm pink glow to the interior. I've craved marble sconces like that since, and just raved about them again to a friend, while discussing use of stone in the home.

The other is the Los Angeles Public Library: http://www.lapl.org/central/art_architecture.html
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Public_Library

I also spent many hours in this building, constructed in 1926 by architects Bertram Goodhue and Carlton Winslow in that quintessential southern California meets Egypt style, like many other buildings in SoCal constructed during that era. It apparently had an arson fire in 1986 and was restored to be called the Richard Riordan Library. Unfortunately, the websites don't have a discussion of the floor tile, a beautiful Devonian shale/slate apparently quarried in the British Isles. I don't quite know if this is correct, as I emailed the docents and received that info in reply. It is a beautifully calming dark green clearly showing the sedimentary structures contained within the stone. I've also craved a floor of this, to bring calm to home and a reminder of the ebb and flow of the tides and the seas.

Not my summer vacation...

2008-05-29T18:30:00.000-07:00

I'm off to tribal lands tomorrow, to look at a proposed small ag dam rebuild location. Then I'm off to an unnamed location in NM, to make home decisions with my significant other. Then back home, a week of work, then it's off again to give two talks and do some field work on the way. The rest of the summer runs somewhat similar. In between all the travel, I need to organize my both my home and work belongings enough to be able to be schlepped to the above-mentioned unnamed location at the end of summer. And amongst, all of that, I need to take care of child, make child school decisions, regular work, home, meals, bills, and dog. phew. When's that lottery ticket gonna win?

Let it snow...in May?

2008-05-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

This is the view out my significant other's back door yesterday. I'll be moving here in August. The elevation is close to 8000 ft. This was a somewhat freak system; there were slight accumulations at lower elevations across NM and CO from this event.

One of the little pieces of local wisdom I took to heart when I moved here is that the gambel oaks won't leaf out until after the last danger of frost has passed. I don't think that was the case this year. It's ten minutes to seven, and it's 33 F outside.

Regardless, I don't put out plants until after the oak leaves have shown up (that was around the beginning of last week). It seems as if the hummingbirds appear around the same time. I'm looking forward to the wildflowers this spring. More to come.

Go to the source before forming your opinion...

2008-05-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

I somehow came across this http://womanscholar.blogspot.com/2008/05/do-you-know-what-your-government-is.html blog post this morning. I had not intended to get this political in my blog, but this post raised my ire.

The author is seriously misinformed and is using a quote from a politician to form her opinion instead of the actual text of the bills before the House and Senate, and the judicial, regulatory, and technical history of the issue. [Personally, I rarely form an opinion in direct response to a politician's quote, noting that there is almost always an underlying agenda. I form my opinions surrounding political issues based on fact, not party line.]

Due to the 2001 SWANCC and the 2007 Rapanos-Carabel Supreme Court decisions, the federal government has had isolated waters lacking interstate commerce and waters without a "significant nexus" to a navigable water removed from regulation. This has reduced the reach of the Clean Water Act and limited the ability of the federal government to regulated discharges of pollutants to the waters in question, ranging from prairie potholes and vernal pools, to ephemeral washes and arroyos in the southwest. In the absence of federal regulation, theoretically, states are supposed to fill the void. In reality, that only happens in the most progressive of states. Most states have limited ability to emplace new water regulation due to state and local politics and funding limitations, much like other sorts of regulation, like health care and education.

The persons who brought those cases to court and the supporting interests had the underlying interest to reduce the scope and breadth of the federal government's regulation and reduce the regulatory burden on the regulated community. Unfortunately, it has had the opposite effect, making the determination of regulation much more difficult, time-consuming, and burdensome on both the regulators and the regulated community. Where federal jurisdiction was once clear-cut, now it is fuzzy and takes considerable time and effort on everyone's part.

Personally, these two cases have made my work, my customers' work, and especially the work of regulators I work with much more time-consuming, onerous, and burdensome. It has also confused the cross-regulation of different sections of the Clean Water Act, making communication between several different branches and agencies of local, state, and federal government critical. A behemoth task.

The Clean Water Restoration Act mentioned in the above blog would restore the previously-removed regulation and effectively ease the regulatory burden [on the federal government, on states, localities and private interests] by making the geographic scope of federal Clean Water Act regulation crystal clear.

My office

2008-05-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

The first is in uranium country in NM. The circle you see is a rock shelter structure. I haven't yet seen the archeological reports for this area, so I can't tell you who built it or when. I'm not giving out any details of the location (the photo doesn't, either). This is to protect cultural resource sites from unscrupulous people.

The second is an example of a culvert placement gone bad. Hyper border collie mix for scale. There are actually three or four more in similarly bad shape along this NM creek, effectively stranding the residents in this canyon as they need to keep their cars on the other side of this crossing in order to travel. Just outside of the picture, there is a footbridge across the creek the residents use (including children and older folks who have to walk several miles from their homes to the footbridge).

The last is the Rio Grande in Colorado. The structure is a rock structure designed to effect bank stabilization and create fish habitat by working with, instead of against, the river's energy. I sometimes have a problem with the aesthetics of these structures, but they're better than some of the alternatives (gabion baskets, riprap, channelization).

Another oldie but goodie...

2008-05-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

I promised Tuff Cookie over at http://magmacumlaude.blogspot.com/ that I would post some text from my 1914 Handbook for Field Geologists by C.W. Hayes, Ph.D. (a former Chief Geologist at USGS)*. It's a second edition, the first being published in 1909 (?).

Some of my favorite selections come from the first chapter of the book, "Pre-requisites for a Field Geologist." Take this one:

"The first qualification is a good physique and a strong constitution, for sooner or later severe and long-continued physical exertion will be required, and a defect in ability to sustain this exertion will result in serious handicap [ADA was clearly not an issue then]. The second is adaptability. Few occupations present so wide a diversity in conditions under which work must be carried on as that of the field geologist. His [no her yet] surroundings may vary all the way from the luxuries of a summer resort hotel to the bare necessities which he can pack on his back, and he must be able to adapt himself with equal readiness to either extreme. If one cannot so adapt himself, but is dependent on any particular kind of surroundings, he should abandon the idea of becoming a field geologist, for he will find the occupation extremely unsatisfactory. A geologist must possess a practical knowledge of horsemanship, of boating, and of general woodcraft, so that he will equally be at home in the saddle, in the canoe, or on foot in a trackless forest. One is fortunate who has already acquired this practical knowledge, but if he does not possess it he must be sure that he has an aptitude for acquiring it quickly."

There are actually few geologists I know who have and regularly use horsemanship skills in the course of their field work (I've only known a few who needed pack animals and a muleskinner usually came with the mules/ponies/horses/burros - my grandfather needed dog-sledding, fishing, and hunting skills for his gold-mining in Alaska). Besides that and a little gender-bias, his words remain fairly true. At least a couple of profs I've known over the years have wanted to instill this understanding in their field-oriented students. More to come...

*Hayes, C.W., Handbook for Field Geologists, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York 1914.

More words that bug...

2008-05-15T17:49:00.000-07:00

Geology Happens http://geologyhappens.blogspot.com/2008/05/words-that-bug.html and Callan Bentley http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/words-worth.html have asked for additions to words that bug you. My issues are more with grammatical usage. Having a four-year-old in whom I am trying to instill an appreciation for proper grammar (thus far not very successful), I am acutely aware of grammatical improprieties in my local area that make me cringe.

Without further adieu:

"It works good." "It plays real good." Any usage of the word "good" for "well" creates an immediate impulse for correction. I have actually hear this usage from one of the my child's pre-school teachers. My significant other is being continually subjected to this correction, much to his chagrin. We live in the southwest, we have college degrees, therefore there is no reason to subject your audience to this incorrect term usage. There shouldn't be a reason if one has graduated from junior high, yet it persists.

The action of ending a sentence with a preposition. "Where's it at?" "Where are we going to?"

"Anyways" There is no "s" on the end of "anyway."

"Located" as a redundancy, as in: "Where is it located?" I regularly strike out the word when used similarly by my employees or colleagues. True writing skill is getting the most across with the least amount of words.

Loss of definite articles, such as the British usage "He went to hospital." No, "he went to THE hospital."

Finally, a misspelling that is a clear indication of never having seen the correct spelling of the word. Examples I have seen recently: "Escavate" for excavate (the writer is first generation American of Hispanic origin and so I give him/her great credit for trying) and "spicket" for spigot. Enough said.

What worth ephemeral?

2008-05-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

One of the questions with which I am repeatedly faced regards ephemeral streams, washes, and arroyos. These systems have an ordinary high water mark (a easily noted bed and bank), clearly convey flow, can be only a foot wide, but are dry most of the year, only run in response to a storm event, have no vegetation or upland vegetation only, and are written off by most consultants, regulators, and the general public as having limited to no value.

In the generally accepted classification schemes for wetlands and riparian habitats, we talk about functions and values. Functions are a fairly easily defined activity conducted by the aquatic resource, such as infiltration to the water table. Values are the socially-defined worth we give to that function or resource. My value can be different from your value, which is why we don't usually use values in the whole aquatic resource regulation scheme.

Clearly, headwater ephemerals do something. They convey water and sediment, they allow some infiltration. But what I find little of in the literature is any other function they conduct in the whole biogeochemical scheme of southwest aquatic systems (related to water quality and system function as opposed to strictly fluvial geomorphology). There is research that suggests (I don't have it at hand, otherwise I'd cite it here) that headwaters in wetter systems conduct some pollutant attenuation and act as a buffer between uplands and the perennial reaches, and there's plenty of research on biogeochemical activity in an intermittent-to-perennial stream system in AZ (Sycamore Creek) but I haven't seen any research in the southwest on strictly ephemeral systems, other than grey literature on what flood event to which the OHWM actually corresponds (Lichvar, et al, Corps of Engineers ERDC-CRREL). (Funding is probably an issue; Sycamore Creek is lovely and inviting, an ephemeral wash is not so much, what hypothesis to test, durability of equipment in the summer monsoons, etc.)

With such limited information, it is hard for consultants/regulators to have concern regarding the regulation of ephemeral systems, much less argue with clients/applicants that piping, wholesale filling, or otherwise constricting the inconveniently-located dry washes in their development is not a good idea. We've been trained to think "green is good, brown is not" in our aquatic values (inherent in Clean Water Act regulation - wetland is better and more precious).

I'd love to have a biogeochemical argument other than flooding/water conveyance as to why it is important to avoid/preserve our ephemeral headwaters here in the southwest. There's nothing I like better than to walk through a large wash in the lower Coloradan, Sonoran, Mojave, and Colorado plateau deserts on a spring day, with wildflowers abounding, birds chirping, and lizards scrambling away from the day's sunshine.

Attachment to place

2008-04-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

I spent the last week in SoCal, and passed by a familiar landscape with which I had become intimately involved over a number of years by working on a long-term project in the area. I had become very attached to this certain landscape that is really quite trashed from anthropogenic activity, through many visits with a variety of colleagues, from hydrologists to ecologists, soil scientists to botanists. I had tears in my eyes as I drove through the area, once (and now barely) home to three endemic plant species (spreading navarretia, SJ crownscale, and threadleaf brodeia). Between the ag, previous recreational bulldozing in the waterway, sheep grazing, and sludge spreading, there is limited potential for restoration. Most of my work frustration in SoCal was related to this area, and the knowledge that this place had been a wonderfully functioning habitat for a variety of species that had perfectly adapted to the arid but occasionally very wet, alkaline but wetland, tectonically spectacular environment (the closest large fault system is around 700K years old and is one of the most active in SoCal). I really fell in love with the place, and shared that passion with some of my colleagues (a place only a mother could love).

Recently, I spoke with a coworker about the differences between where we used to work, and where we work now (somewhere in the southwest with not too much housing development, but lots of other activity). We both came from larger metropolitan areas, with precious aquatic resources in limited supply. We both realized in our conversation that it was only infrequently that we privately felt dismay and, frankly, heartbreak at the potential loss of these special places where we are now. Where we once felt this heartbreak on an all-to-regular basis, it only comes very infrequently in our current location. I'm lucky in that most of my work currently is focussed on repairing an already-impaired aquatic landscape or just dealing with legal or regulation-related minutiae, instead of watching the wholesale demolition of 200-1000 acres with no vestige of the former topography left (except perhaps in the development's name).

My significant other must have thought I was nuts, sadly proclaiming my attachment to a landscape that looks like mostly a trash dump and meth lab haven, a place only someone with intimate knowledge of its potential could love. I disparaged the sheep, the sludge, and once again, wished I'd win the lottery so I could just buy the floodplain up and return it to its former glory (along with a spa weekend, anywhere). I also realized that it's really kind of nice not to feel that heartbreak on a daily or weekly basis; that it is quite a drain on one's soul to live with that sense of landloss regularly.

Even though many of my recent conversations have centered around "no, using car bodies as riprap in designated critical habitat for endangered fish species isn't really a good idea...", I'm doing a lot of proactive, restoration-oriented activities, as well as assisting industries and local governments to buck up their maintenance and construction practices. It's satisfying in a way I didn't get to feel in SoCal. I'm glad I'm here.

Other places, other riparian habitat

2008-04-29T21:17:00.000-07:00

Over the last month or so, it's been irrigation ditch, canal, and acequia clean-up time over the southwest. Much of the water in AZ and NM used for agriculture comes from surface irrigation supplies, especially in NM. The supply canals, ditches, and acequias are mostly unlined, so they end up supporting a wide variety of riparian and irrigation-induced wetlands. When it is clean-up time, the vegetation gets burned and the ditches get dug out. In some areas of CO that I've visited this spring (if you could call it that a month ago), even the freshwater marsh (i.e., cattails) that inhabits some of the low-lying swales gets burned.

We use these agricultural resources, and I understand the need to have a clear-flowing ditch or acequia to supply water to pastures and food/hay crops. Unfortunately, in many areas of the southwest, the acequia-induced habitat is most of what's left of the fairly vast riparian zones along the once-perennial or strongly-intermittent stream systems with occasional tenajas to supply water throughout the year. When the riparian habitat gets burned, there's that much less during the year for southwest critters to use as forage, nesting, and refuge habitat. One could argue that the riparian veg grows back, but the temporal loss still remains.

This all reminds me of the two months one summer (before the axis of evil) spent in the mountains of a central asian country, one with a very tall volcano. Like NM, the mountain villages (and the desert communities, too) have well-developed irrigation supply systems to provide their fields with water. The systems are called qanats (covered in the desert), some which have been in place for over a thousand years (or so I was told). I wasn't there during spring qanat-cleaning, but one of the practices I saw made me shudder all the same.

I was there as a tagalong with a more official research team. I was lucky enough to be looking at Neogene fluvially-derived sediments for a independent study-type project, of which there is a fairly large wedge in the local area. There are also springs in the hillsides of these sediments which support a diverse, fairly native (as far as I could tell) riparian habitat. There is little riparian along the creeks and rivers for both natural and anthropogenic reasons (primarily because the streams run big and carry lots of coarse-to-fine grained sediment - boulders to silts/clays - that blow out streamside veg). As such, the hillside springs support riparian veg that acts as forage, nesting, and refuge for the local central asian critters including these big, honking grouse-like birds that were about small turkey-sized. Each spring-fed riparian zone would house about 2-3 of these grouse, about half an acre in size. The locals would torch the zones to drive out the grouse-y birds, which they would then shoot for sport and dinner. In the area in which I was working, I recollect about three of these zones along one large stretch of hillside. There weren't very many, over all, and they housed what was left of the native habitat (probably having been grazed/flooded out centuries ago). I still think it was a shame to destroy those, even temporally, for one or two dinners, when a whole herd of goats and sheep were there to provide cheese, yogurt, milk, and meat on a very regular basis.

My other main recollection is that, like Europe, there is no place without people. I could not go about with my head uncovered, even in the mountains, as there was always the chance of coming upon a goatherd or another local, or even one of the religious police (yes, even in the mountains). I still think how lucky I am to live and work in the southwest, where I can always escape to fairly empty places, without a headscarf.

Not enough time on my hands...

2008-04-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

The last month has been spent in plenty of overtime and lots of travel. Not much time to write then, but I now have a little space to play catch-up and put all the thoughts I've had over the last month or so to e-pen and e-paper. I've been all over the southwest this last month, from LA to Denver, from Redlands to Moab, and all sorts of places in between. It's really good to be home for awhile. I have lots to write about, so keep looking in to see what's new.

Need more education

2008-03-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

I'd like to post more often, but the demands of job, parenthood, and now, dog-training, altogether too often take precedence. Add to that my wish to retain at least a modicum of anonymity by posting only from home, and getting the time to post is often difficult.

There's considerable discussion both in the news and the politico-econ blogs I frequent about the economic fallout from the subprime mess, as well as plenty of talk about how it started and who's to blame. What doesn't get discussed is the amount of environmental damage to the desert southwest and its aquatic resources (not to mention T&E species habitat) as a result of the overwhelming amount of development brought on by low interest rates, and quite frankly, the greed of the development industry and investment banking.

I've heard that some of the most heavily developed areas in the southwest, such as the Inland Empire of Southern California, the areas around Tucson and Phoenix, the greater Las Vegas area, and the Santa Fe-Albuquerque area have also had some of the most significant impacts to riparian habitat and T&E species habitat in the country in the last 10 years. Those homes that were constructed and now stand empty, were constructed in areas that hosted habitat for a number of species such as the southwestern willow flycatcher, the California coastal gnatcatcher, the pygmy owl, among other plants, herps, mammals and birds.

Riparian corridors are crucial in the southwest to provide cover, forage, and nesting areas for most of the desert inhabitants. I'll saved the loss of water for another discussion, but the funneling of species into degraded, suburban or urban channels is clearly to their detriment.

Part of the problem, especially in the more arid areas, is there is not enough public education as to the function and the value of intermittent and ephemeral waterways, including amongst regulators and consultants. I frequently come across colleagues in my industry who have little understanding of the functions of an arroyo, which include pollutant attenuation, water infiltration, stormwater and sediment conveyance, and cover and corridors for herps, small mammals and birds, amongst other functions. Other colleagues don't understand that an arroyo's banks are where they are because they do convey that much water on occasion (and it isn't necessarily a hundred-year event when it does, more like a 2- or 5-year event).

If educated biologists, geomorphologists, and other environmental professionals in my industry have such limited understanding of how desert fluvial systems work (or just haven't bothered to keep up with the literature), how can we expect the general public to have any?

First Post!

2008-03-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome! Thanks for visiting my new blog, mainly focusing on natural resource issues in the greater southwest. I'll likely cover a variety of topics, ranging from geosciences, botanical and wildlife science, to environmental regulation, with an occasional rant on SW politics and women's issues.

In my first post, I'd like to give kudos to Dave Rosgen, Bill Zeedyk and all their philosophical adherents. These folks have done a lot to find ways of effecting bank stabilization and river/creek channel restoration without making it look like an explosion of concrete and rebar (or gabion baskets, just as bad in my book). I've seen at least a few of these structures get installed in AZ, NM, and CO and they seem to be working well to provide areas for riparian regrowth and increased fish habitat (where appropriate).

Zeedyk seems to be the only one that I know of (I'm sure there are more) who works on smaller intermittent and ephemeral systems. One of the nicest I've seen is along Ganado Wash near the Hubbell Trading Post in AZ. He used post and other structures in the wash to effect stabilization/aggradation which, in turn, provided ample opportunity for riparian revegetation. I'm pretty sure that the structures helped effect greater infiltration to the water table, as well. Aesthetically, the whole scene is very pleasing. Unless you know exactly what you're looking for, you would have no idea that any restoration had taken place in the wash. It's probably come fairly close to looking like (and more importantly, functioning like) it's pre-Columbian condition.

I like Zeedyk's general approach to restoration (and rural road building/maintenance for better/more natural water distribution to the land surface). He takes a low-tech approach, mainly looking for the easiest and cheapest ways to conduct the channel work, primarily using hand labor. Most of the restorations I've seen or read about were installed by hand using small structures or rock placement. I've included a link to the Zeedyk/Quivira Coalition's publication http://quiviracoalition.org/Detailed/QC_Publications/Field_Guides/An_Introduction_to_I..._82.html

Send me your favorite restoration, and I'll post a description and a photo here on OHWM. Please be sure to give credit where credit is due. We need to thank the folks who do this work and make sure to pass the word around so more restoration like this gets done!