By Larry Larason

Image by me

Here’s a good trivia question: Which chemical element was discovered before anyone knew it existed on Earth?  That seems impossible, doesn’t it?  Scientists usually found an element, studied it in their laboratories, and then announced the discovery.  Helium was different.

So where was this element discovered?  Its name gives a hint: On the sun.  How was it discovered?  By spectroscopy.  When chemicals are heated to incandescence they emit light in specific wavelengths of the color spectrum.  Each element has a unique spectral signature, like a fingerprint, for that element.  In 1868 two scientists observed the sun and spotted new spectral lines.  The French scientist, Jules Janssen, had traveled to India to observe a solar eclipse; he spotted a yellow signature line in his spectroscope when he focused on the solar corona during the eclipse.   Norman Lockyer observed the same thing from England later that same year while he observed the sun through cloudy, smoky skies.  Lockyer knew it was a new element, which he assumed existed only on the sun.  He named it helium in honor of the Greek god of the sun, Helios.  The “-ium” ending implies the element is a metal, which Lockyer believed, but it is not metallic.  It is a noble gas, like neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon, all of which appear in the right most column of the periodic table of the elements.  All the noble gases are inert; they are known for being very unlikely to form chemical compounds.

Hydrogen is the lightest element.  Helium is the second.  Helium is so light weight that gravity hardly affects it.  The helium in our air gradually drifts to the top of the atmosphere and escapes into space.  Hydrogen might do the same except it is highly reactive; it joins in compounds readily.  Helium is too aloof – “noble” – to join in combinations with other elements; it nearly always exists only as single atoms.

Two independent teams of scientists in 1895 found helium on Earth in uraninite, an ore of uranium.  Alpha radiation issued when uranium and thorium decay is simply the emission of particles that are helium nuclei.

Everyone thought that helium was very rare on Earth.  Then something happened in Kansas.  Today Dexter, Kansas is a small town of 278 people, famous for being where the Dalton Gang pulled their last successful bank robbery in 1892.  Its more important claim to fame happened in 1903 and brought it international attention . . . for a few years.  A well had been drilled in search of oil.  But what they found was described as “a howling gasser.”  The noise of the escaping gas could be heard for miles around.  Everyone thought the future of Dexter was assured, that industry would soon move in to utilize the natural gas.  A celebration was organized.  On that day a crowd gathered, the band played, speeches were made.  Then the town fathers planned to set fire to a jet of gas providing a pillar of flame for a day and a half.

He ignited a bale of hay and pushed it toward the gas vent.  The fire went out.  They tried again.  The fire went out again.  They tried several times, but the gas extinguished the flames every time.  They finally had to concede that their gas would not burn.  You can imagine their chagrin.

Erasmus Haworth, the state geologist of Kansas, was in the crowd that day and took a canister of the gas back to the University of Kansas to analyze.  He and a chemist colleague found that the gas contained about 15 percent methane, and another 72 percent nonflammable nitrogen.  The remaining 12 percent baffled them for a time, but using a spectroscope they found that it was partly helium.  This put Dexter on the map as the place that proved helium was not a rare element on the Earth.

Two questions often occur about helium.  First: Why is there helium on the Sun?   Hydrogen fusion, which powers the Sun, produces helium. A helium atom is essentially a doubled hydrogen atom.  Second: How does a gas so light that it floats to the top of the atmosphere and escapes to space come to be underground?  Some of it was primordial; that is, it was incorporated in our planet along with the heavier elements when the Earth formed.  However, it is being created continuously by the breakdown of radioactive elements.  The basement rocks beneath the continents are mostly granites, and almost all granites contain some uranium and thorium, which are radioactive, and spit out helium nuclei.  The helium creeps upward through faults and fractures in rocks until it encounters an impermeable layer where it becomes trapped.

Photo by Crystal

The Four Corners has a lot of helium.  At the Rattlesnake Oil Field, which I wrote about last month, helium was found in the gas from a well drilled in 1942.  This was the first helium produced in the Four Corners.  It has also been produced from the Dine bi Keyah field in the Chuska Mountains; one well there had 4.2 percent helium.  There were helium processing plants near Shiprock for a couple of decades.  Production in San Juan County ceased about 1990.  Some of the world’s richest helium wells were found in the Holbrook Basin, which produced helium in the 1960s-1970s.  Kerr McGee built a helium plant in the area, but after declining production the plant and wells were abandoned in 1976.  Gas containing helium is considered commercial if the helium content is better than 0.3 percent.  One well drilled on the Pinta Dome in Arizona tested at more than 8 percent.

This noble gas is about more than party balloons, which use about 8 percent of the supply.  About a quarter of the helium used in the US cools magnets in MRI machines.  It also cools magnets in particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider.  It’s used in welding and several manufacturing operations.  Scuba divers use it in part to produce a breathing gas for deep diving.

Thinking primarily of blimps and dirigibles, the US established a strategic reserve of helium in abandoned gas wells near Amarillo, Texas in 1925.  Lighter-than-air-crafts never became important, but new uses of the gas were found, especially to cool the liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuels of the Apollo spacecrafts during the 1950-1960s.

At that time the reserve was expanded, but by 1995 Congress, appalled by the $1.4 billion debt incurred by the operation, voted to have the BLM sell off the gas and close the installation by 2015.  Today the reserve program supplies about one-third of the world’s helium each year, and while sales have increased, helium production is dropping.  The supply issue has become so critical that many scientists have proposed rationing the gas to preserve it for important scientific uses.  Our own Senator Jeff Bingaman was a leader in the effort to preserve the plant at Amarillo.  So far Congress has not acted, but with the known reserves of helium in the Four Corners we might see some development in the future.

By Larry Larason

Some great stories have come out of Four Corners oil fields.  Some are peculiar, including oil that didn’t need refining and oil found in igneous rock.  Read on.

Photo by Andrew Kudrin

America’s petroleum industry began in 1859 in western Pennsylvania when a steam engine was used to drill the first well specifically to find oil.  Oil had been collected for a long time at seeps, where it flowed out of a petroleum laden rock layer that outcropped at the surface.  It was used mostly as a lubricant and for lamp oil.  The first oil well was not a deep one: it went down only about 20 meters [ca. 65 feet] from the surface.  After the Pennsylvania well, exploration proceeded and petroleum became more abundant.  Then in 1901 a well was drilled at Spindletop, a hill atop a salt dome, near Beaumont, Texas.  It was a gusher spewing petroleum into the air 150 feet high.  The flow was estimated at 100,000 barrels a day, more oil than the world had ever seen before.  The effect was almost immediate.  For example, in 1901 the Santa Fe Railway only had one oil burning locomotive; by 1905 they were using 227.  The oil industry was up and running.

Money was being made and nearly everyone wished they had an oil well in their back yard.  Oil exploration began in New Mexico as early as 1890, but none of the early wells were successful until 1922 when one was drilled near Hogback that produced 75 barrels of oil per day.  Natural gas production began about the same time near Aztec.  The San Juan Basin has continued producing both oil and gas ever since.

S. C. Muñoz loved playing poker.  As president of a small railway company, the New Mexico Central Railroad, he was in Santa Fe for business reasons on the night of October 14, 1923 and joined a game of cards with some men, including a friend, H. G. Hagerman, commissioner to the Navajo Tribe.  During the game Hagerman told the others that for the first time an auction would be held the next day for mineral leases on Navajo lands in the northwest part of the San Juan Basin.  Muñoz attended the Saturday auction, probably thinking he was there only as an observer.  One parcel, called Rattlesnake, was put up for bids twice with no takers.  On the third offer Muñoz made the minimum bid of $1000 and received the right to explore 4000 acres southwest of the town of Shiprock.

He almost immediately regretted his purchase and tried to re-sell the lease, but no one was buying.  Maybe the name – Rattlesnake – was too off putting.  He then hired a geologist – from New York, no less.  In early 1924 the first well produced ten barrels/day of oil and some gas.  The second well gave up even more [300 barrels/day] and the fifth well came in with 1,500 barrels/day.  Before the end of that year Muñoz sold 51 percent of the operation to Continental Oil [later to become Conoco] for an amount variously reported as one million to more than three million.  I haven’t seen any information about how he fared in that poker game, but it made him the first oil millionaire in New Mexico.

The Rattlesnake Field had some unusual aspects.  Oil was pumped out of the ground by windmills of the type you would expect to see in a pasture next to a stock tank.  This was not unique, however; the same technique was also used in some other places.   But the product at Rattlesnake was the lightest oil ever found at that time.  It was so light that some of it was trucked to Cortez, Colorado and sold as gasoline without even being refined.  Of course, auto engines weren’t so persnickety in those days.

Arizona is not known as an oil producing state.  About 85 percent of the petroleum extracted in Arizona came from one place: the Dineh bi Keyah oil field, which is at elevations of 8000+ feet in the Chuska Mountains.  In 1967 Kerr-McGee began exploration of Pennsylvanian rocks in the mountains, hoping to find carbonate strata acting as oil reservoirs similar to ones in Utah, for example at Aneth and other places in the Paradox Basin.  What they found surprised them: an igneous sill full of oil.  A sill is created by magma intruding horizontally into sedimentary rock.  It is sort of a flat dike.  But, oil forms from organic matter deposited in sedimentary rock – usually the remains of sea creatures that died and fell to the sea floor.  So what was the oil doing in an igneous rock?  The sill in the Chuskas was unusually bubbly and porous, almost like vesicular lava that had been extruded onto the surface.  Oil, which formed in the carbonate rocks surrounding the igneous intrusion, became trapped in the sill while it was being squeezed upward.

Oil men discovered early on that oil is mostly found in anticlines, wrinkles in the crust where the rocks are domed upward.  As it is squeezed toward the surface it may become trapped and pooled in such structures.  During the abortive gold rush on the San Juan River around Bluff and Mexican Hat, Utah, which began in 1892-93, some of the would-be miners noticed oil seeps along the banks of the river, and an oily sheen on the water near Mexican Hat and downstream.  Drilling for oil there started about 1904.  Several companies hauled drilling rigs into the field, despite the lack of decent roads in the region.  Most of the wells were either dry or uneconomical.  But oil was found.  Someone finally noticed that the Mexican Hat field defies conventional wisdom: it is in a syncline, where the rocks dip downward, instead of an anticline.  It seems that oil flows down the limbs of the syncline and floats on the water table beneath the surface.  Even after oil was found, the lack of good roads hindered getting it to market.  Although the Mexican Hat field still produces oil today and the roads have been greatly improved, the small quantity of oil it produces hasn’t led to great prosperity.

It would be interesting to compile the figures and see which natural resource provided the greatest benefit to the economy in the Four Corners: oil, coal, or uranium mining.  In my mind it is a toss-up between coal and petroleum, because coal has been produced longer, but the oil is still flowing, while uranium was a boom that lasted only a couple of decades.  However, our greatest asset is our scenery, which draws people back again and again.  So it’s all down to geology.

By Larry Larason

In 2008 Robert Hazen and seven colleagues presented the idea of mineral evolution.  Minerals don’t mate, mutate, or pass on their characteristics to progeny, so how can we say that they evolve?  It’s not that minerals evolved, exactly, but that the world evolved, changing the habitat of mineral formation, so that different minerals were formed.  Consider this: planets and asteroids formed at the same time in our solar system; the planets are just accreted blobs of the material left over from the formation of the sun.  Meteors are odds and ends of the material that is still being swept up and added to the planets.  In meteorites we find about 250 minerals.  The same is true of the moon’s surface, which has not been eroded or chemically altered in any significant way since it formed.  The primal surface of Earth was probably very similar, with the same suite of 250 minerals, yet today at least 4400 minerals have been identified on Earth, although many of them are rare.  How did this come about?  Hazen, et al., proposed ten stages in Earth’s history; I’ll discuss a few of the high points.

We know that Earth has changed significantly since it formed.  For example, during Archean times both the mantle and the crust were hotter than now, maybe by as much as 500o C.  A type of magnesium-rich lava called komatiite formed in those days and can still be seen in very old rocks at a few places around the globe. Komatiite was so hot when it erupted that it flowed like water.  The minerals in komatiite aren’t so unusual, but one of them, olivine, appears in an unusual form; instead of occurring in its usual stubby crystals, in komatiite it appears as feathery dendrites.  Very nearly all komatiite formed more than three billion years ago.  It is considered to be an “extinct” rock type.

The Earth has more water than any of the other rocky planets, and water plays a part in mineral evolution.  By dissolving minerals it provides an opportunity for elements to recombine in new ways, as new minerals.  Since there is evidence that Mars had surface water in an early eon, Hazen estimates that 500 minerals may be found on that planet.

The red rocks in our area would have been dull gray without the abundant atmospheric oxygen during the Carboniferous Period.

But probably the greatest influence on Earth’s mineral evolution was caused by the evolution of life.  Life appeared about 3.4 billion years ago, but it didn’t do much until a billion years later, when new forms of single celled organisms using photosynthesis to split water, began to fill the oceans and atmosphere with free oxygen.  There was oxygen on Earth before then, of course, but it was locked up in rocks, water, and atmospheric carbon dioxide.  The cyanobacteria, aka blue green algae, lived in shallow water.  When they began emitting oxygen the seas were full of dissolved iron.  The iron captured much of the first free oxygen, became iron oxide [hematite] and fell to the floor of the ocean to create banded iron formations.  These deposits were common around 2 billion years ago.  They are the greatest source of iron ore in the modern world.  The time when they formed is termed the Great Oxidation Event [GOE].  Of course, it wasn’t an event in the sense of something that happened in 24 hours or less.  It took maybe half a billion years for oxygen in the atmosphere to approach one percent of what we now consider normal.  It took that much time for the iron in the sea water to be depleted so that O2 could build up in the air.  Ironically, oxygen was poisonous to many of the anaerobic cyanobacteria and drove them to extinction.

Free oxygen allowed many more combinations of elements to form as minerals.  Some of the most colorful ones we know today are seen only in rocks formed after the GOE, including the copper minerals turquoise, azurite, and malachite.  More importantly, it allowed life to move onto land after oxygen in the atmosphere formed ozone [O3], which blocks much of the ultraviolet radiation [UV] put out by the sun.  UV causes sunburn and can disrupt DNA molecules in both plants and animals.  Without the filtering effect of ozone in the stratosphere, life on land would be deadly.

About the time that banded iron formations ceased growing in the sea, a new type of rock began appearing on land.  These rocks are called “red beds.”  The sandstone or shale red beds contain iron which has been oxidized – rusted.  During the Carboniferous Period oxygen in the atmosphere may have exceeded thirty percent.  The red beds deposited during that time of abundant atmospheric oxygen and in the succeeding Permian are often bright red.  Consider our Red Rock Park just east of Gallup; the red Jurassic sandstones, those beautiful cliffs, would have been dull gray without atmospheric oxygen to rust the particles of iron contained among the grains of sand.

What about Mars, the red planet?  The amount of oxygen on Mars is miniscule, but water vapor in the atmosphere loses some of its hydrogen to space, leaving a bit of oxygen to rust the planet’s surface.  Hazen proposes that Mars is red only in a thin veneer on the surface

Hazen admits that nothing is new in his rewrite of mineralogy; almost all of it was known previously, except the concept of mineral evolution which ties it all together.  And the insight that life and geology go hand in hand in shaping our world, making it a suitable place for our kind of life to thrive.

By Larry Larason

You’ve probably heard of “Peak Oil.”  That’s the idea that we’ve used more than half of the world’s petroleum and now production is beginning a steady decline.  Well, we seem to have averted that, at least temporarily, by horizontal drilling and fracking.  But it’s only one of several doomsday scenarios in the wind.  Such predictions go back at least to 1798 when Thomas Malthus published his essays proposing that human populations were increasing beyond the ability of agriculture to produce food to feed them.  He foresaw famine and disease in the near future.  I remember, in the 1960s and ’70s, books like the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, about how the world was running out of stuff, and Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which echoed Malthus in many ways.  None of the dire predictions in those books came to pass . . . yet.

“]”I’m sure that there have been many more similar doomsday predictions but I don’t want to try to look up all of them.  One of the most recent was brought about by some squabbles with China.  Here’s a simplified version of the story.  The Mountain Pass Mine in California had been a major supplier of rare earths elements until a mine in China began production and, with its low labor costs, undercut the prices of the American supplier.  Mountain Pass was also facing some environmental problems, so it shut down in 2002, giving China a near monopoly.  In 2010 China set up export quotas for rare earths, then later, stopped exporting rare earths to Japan over a dispute about fishing grounds.  This caused a bit of panic in world markets, because rare earths have become so critical in high tech applications.  The China scare prompted Molycorp to reopen the Mountain Pass Mine last year, and American mining companies are exploring for new deposits to assure than we have our own sources of rare earths.

So what are the rare earth elements?  In the periodic table of elements you generally find them in a separate row, below and detached from the rest of the table.  They range from lanthanum [La] to lutetium [Lu], with atomic numbers from 57 to 71.  Scandium [Sc] and yttrium [Y] are generally included in the group, although they appear in column 3 of the table and have atomic numbers of 27 and 39, respectively.  That’s a total of 17 elements.  At the time most of them were discovered they were known to occur in only one place in the world – at a porcelain mine near Ytterby, Sweden.  [That’s pronounced it-er-bee.]  Seven of the 17 rare earths were discovered in rocks from Ytterby and several named for the locale: ytterbium [Yb], yttrium [Y], terbium [Tb] and erbium [Er].  Now we know that they are not so rare – cerium [Ce], for example, is more common in the Earth’s crust than copper – and chemists prefer to call them lanthanides, although the term “rare earths” is still a synonym.

Although we know they are not that rare, they seldom occur in deposits concentrated enough for economical mining.  Also, they usually occur together.  They are all chemically similar and, thus, are difficult to separate and purify.  Some isotopes are mildly radioactive.  Some deposits are “contaminated” with strongly radioactive thorium, so the ore is considered undesirable for mining.

So why are the lanthanides so important?  Here are just some of the uses.  Without europium in the phosphors on your television screen the reds would not be as vivid and without terbium the greens would be tepid.  Rechargeable batteries depend on rare earths.  Every Toyota Prius on the road has about 20 pounds of lanthanum in the batteries, although because of price increases for that element, Toyota is looking for substitutes.  Scandium [Sc] is used to strengthen bicycle frames and aluminum bats.  Various lanthanides are used in X-ray machines, catalytic converters, lasers, fiber optics, and LED light bulbs.

Probably the most important role for lanthanides is in the field of magnetism.  To me, magnetism is spooky. Science can tell us how it works, but not necessarily why.  Still, we use it everyday and rely on it in many of our devices.  For example, you can’t have speakers for announcing ball games or hearing someone on your cell phone without magnets.

Somewhere around the house I still have an alnico magnet that my dad picked up sometime in the 1950s, probably as a curiosity.  Plucking it off a steel panel is almost a two-handed operation.  The name comes from the alloy of aluminum, nickel, cobalt, and iron.  Until recently it was the strongest permanent magnet compound known.  It’s hard to imagine that today’s rare earths magnets are five time stronger!

In a cell phone the magnet for the speaker needs to be small enough to fit in the chassis of the pocket sized phone.  Only lanthanide magnets have enough power at that size.  Similarly, for wind turbines you need powerful magnets to generate more electricity, but they can’t weigh too much or you would have to build a stronger, more expensive pylon to support the turbine.  Again, lanthanides come to the rescue.  Some of the larger turbines contain up to 700 pounds of neodymium [Nd].

So are we going to run out of lanthanides?  The supply is skimpy and the demand is rising along with the prices, but reserves are still in the ground.  And, for some good news: New Mexico has lanthanides.  Six mining districts in our state have produced ores in the past, and a report from the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources in the summer of 2011 stated that several mining companies were exploring deposits around the region.  Exploration and permitting procedures may take many years, but we might have a lanthanide mine in New Mexico sometime in the next decade or two.

You may not have heard of the lanthanides before, but they are already important and new uses are being discovered all the time.  They are almost sure to be increasingly in the news.

I sort of made fun of doomsday stories, but I’m not really unconcerned.  Global climate change, for example, has me worried; last summer was miserable.  The National Climatic Data Center recently said that July of 2012 was 3.2 degrees warmer than the average for the entire twentieth century.  I also feel that our huge population is straining our resources.  Don’t get complacent; one of the doomsday scenarios is going to bite us at some point in the future.

By Larry Larason

I had an epiphany of sorts the other day.  It started me thinking about street food.  I’ll explain my insight later, but first, what do I mean by “street food”?

Street food is food that is convenient.  You don’t have to sit down to eat it.  You can hold it in your hand to munch on as you walk down the street, or hold it in one hand as you drive your car with the other.  A burrito is a perfect example, although when you get one in a restaurant it is usually swamped with chili and grated cheese, which destroys its one-handed convenience.  A burrito is an enchilada packaged as street food.  An egg roll is a Chinese burrito; these days most egg rolls are pretty small [and probably just off the Sysco truck], but I remember back in the mid-twentieth century getting some that were at least as big as burritos.  Consider the hot dog: the bun fits well in one hand – unless you put chili on it, then it becomes a gloppy mess.  I’ll use the burrito as the standard here because I’m sure that all of you reading this are familiar with them.

John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, 1783, by Thomas Gainsborough

Sandwiches are also convenient food.  You put something greasy or gooey between slices of bread to keep the messy ingredients off your fingers.  I consider a sandwich too mundane to be called an “invention,” but the man usually called the inventor of the sandwich was John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich.  Many of his contemporaries considered him a despicable character; he was a member of the Hell Fire Club, for instance, but he was also influential as First Lord of the Admiralty and other positions, so historians are more cautious in their judgment.  Legend has it that in 1762 he was gambling late at night and became hungry; he had a servant bring him some roast beef between two slices of bread so that he wouldn’t get his fingers greasy and ruin the deck of cards he was using.  On similar subsequent occasions he did the same, and his name became attached to such a concoction.  It is likely that workmen in the lower classes had been building such creations for a long time before him, but his name has stuck.

The snack is not the only thing named after the Earl.  He financed Captain Cook’s voyage in 1778 when he discovered the mid-Pacific islands.  Cook named them the Sandwich Islands in honor of the Earl; they are now known as Hawaii.  But there are still others in the Atlantic near Antarctica called the South Sandwich Islands.  Sandwich, by the way, is a place name in Kent, England; the word means place on the sand.  Sandwich is one of the oldest towns in England, with a modern population of nearly 7,000.

The way sandwiches are served today, with meat and veggies hanging outside of the roll, sort of defeats the purpose of a sandwich – keeping your fingers clean.  The last time I tried to eat a Subway while driving, I got a lap full of lettuce.

So, what led me to my epiphany and thoughts about street food?  Well, let’s have a little more history before we get to that.  In 1762 Catherine the Great, impressed by the efficiency of German agriculture, invited German farmers to settle in Russia.  She promised that they would be allowed to maintain their language, religions, and customs; in addition, they would be exempt from military conscription.  Those who answered the call mostly settled near the Volga River.

Catherine died in 1796.  The promises she had made to the German settlers remained in effect until 1871, then the settlers came under pressure to assimilate and the ban on military conscription was lifted.  By 1875 many were looking to migrate to the Americas, especially the pacifist Mennonites.  By 1900 at least 100,000 had left the Volga region to settle in the U.S., Canada, Argentina and Brazil.  In the U.S. they favored the plains because this region resembled the land they had left behind.  They are credited with the introduction of winter wheat to the U.S.  Two famous descendants of the Volga Germans are the bandleader Lawrence Welk and Senator Thomas Daschle.

Where I grew up in Oklahoma there were many Russo-German families.  They brought with them a recipe that I dearly loved: bierocks.  It’s fairly simple in concept, but tedious to make.  A bierock is a mix of hamburger, cabbage and onion sometimes with a dash of allspice, seasoned with salt and black pepper, encased in yeast bread forming a square “bun” about 4-5 inches across.  These one-dish-meals were available at most church socials and bake sales in my home town, and I looked forward to them eagerly.

In those days no one knew how to spell bierocks.  The spelling I preferred was berox.  There are still variant spellings; the one I’m using seems to be the most popular on the Internet.  The Volga Germans in Argentina call them piroks, a name probably related to pierogis, the pan-Slavic filled dumplings.  When I lived in Nebraska, I found there was a similar food called a runza; it was the same thing as a bierock, except for the shape – more like a hot dog bun.  A chain of eponymous restaurants covers most of Nebraska now.  I had my first non-traditional bierock at a small eatery in Pagosa Springs, Colorado; the owner of the place, from Darrouzett, Texas, as I recall, served some with green chili in the filling.  Unfortunately, he was only in business for about six months.

So, the epiphany . . .  My wife made some bierocks recently.  This was after she had discovered that she could use frozen bread dough instead of laboriously making it from scratch.  I was eating one of her creations when I was struck by the thought “this is a German version of a burrito!”  That started me thinking about all the stuffed, or filled, bread recipes around the world – street food.

A Cornish pasty is another filled sandwich from England.  The ingredients are meat [originally venison, now hamburger and/or ground pork], onion, potato, and swede.  The latter is the name given to turnips or rutabagas in England.  This recipe is considered “traditional,” but the English weren’t eating many potatoes, which came from the Americas, until about 1870.  [How long does it take to establish a tradition?]  The pasty is in a pastry crust that is usually folded over into a “D” shape, like an empanada or fried pie.

Well, I could go on, but I’m sure you have the idea.  The concept of food stuffed in an edible crust or wrap has cropped up in many places, in many times.  Cooks adapt favored local ingredients and create a variation of the basic plan of portable meals.  You can make them at home to put in your lunch pail, or purchase them from a street vendor, but convenience is their supreme virtue.

Note: If you want a recipe for bierocks or runzas you’ll find many on the Internet.

By Larry Larason

New Mexico has an unusual geo-site in the south-center of the state: White Sands National Monument, where the visitor is treated to views of sand dunes almost pure white in color.  Most sand in dunes is silica, quartz, but at White Sands about 96% of the small grains are composed of gypsum.  White Sands is not unique; there are similar places in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert, the Texas Panhandle near Guadalupe Mountains National Park, and in northern Mexico.  But that’s all I turned up with a web search.  So, the occurrence of gypsum dunes is quite unusual, and White Sands, with its 275 square miles of glimmering white dunes, is the largest known gypsum dune field on Earth.  However my web search found that similar dunes were discovered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and then examined by the rover Opportunity.  There are gypsum dunes on Mars.

White Sands, with its 275 square miles of glimmering white dunes, is the largest known gypsum dune field on Earth.

Gypsum isn’t a very exciting mineral, but it is an important one in many ways.  For instance, everyone reading this article has some gypsum in his or her house.  That’s because gypsum is the base material in plaster and drywall.  It consists of calcium sulfate with some water in the crystal lattice: CaSO4x2H2O.  The water is called water of crystallization.  If you pulverize gypsum and heat it above 136 degrees F, the water of crystallation evaporates.  What is left is plaster, sometimes called plaster of Paris.  Add water and it will reconstitute as gypsum.  As a kid I tried making my own plaster by baking gypsum in my mother’s oven; the results worked but were not entirely satisfactory since I lacked the means to adequately pulverize the rock.  Sheetrock, or drywall, is plaster between sheets of tough paper.  So you put up the drywall, then cover and texture it with more plaster, and you have a lot of gypsum in your house.  White Sands has about 8 billion tons of gypsum in the dunes.  That’s enough to make all the sheetrock the US would need for the next 1000 years.  And we do produce a lot of drywall: annually 28 billion square feet.

Gypsum is soft; it is 2 on Moh’s scale of mineral hardness; you can scratch it with your fingernail, or cut it with a handsaw.  I picked up a large piece several years ago which had been recently uncovered by a road grader in the Texas Panhandle.  I cut a block out of it, sanded the block, applied some furniture wax to bring out the color, and used it as a bookend.  The remainder of that piece is sitting in my yard, and because it is soft and moderately soluble, it is slowly disintegrating.  The sister mineral, anhydrite, is calcium sulfate without the water of crystallization and it has a hardness of 3 to 3.5.  Depending on the situation, gypsum may lose its water and alter to anhydrite or conversely, in a wet environment, anhydrite may become gypsum.  Gypsum occurs in several forms, including selenite, satin spar, and massive rock, sometimes called alabaster.

In the Four Corners you most often encounter gypsum in the form of selenite, which was probably deposited by groundwater in cracks in shale and sandstone.  You may notice these glittering shards of transparent selenite on the sides of hills as you drive around the region.  Some people confuse them with mica, which is a totally different mineral.  And a couple of times I have stopped by a glittering slope expecting selenite only to discover that the  sparkles are caused by broken glass from beer and liquor bottles.  Again, a wholly different mineral.

Gypsum also occurs in shale beds as satin spar.  The crystals in satin spar are fibrous and oriented vertically.  This produces the shimmering appearance on the edges that results in the name.  Much of the satin spar you find lying on the surface has altered to anhydrite, so it is harder than the original gypsum would have been.

Alabaster has been used since ancient times for bowls, sculpture and decoration.  Its use is confined to interior places because it weathers so rapidly when exposed to the elements.

In northwestern Oklahoma, about 50 miles from where I grew up, are many gypsum caves.  A gypsum cave is much like one in limestone, except there are no stalactites, stalagmites, or other weird cave formations.  One of these caves was made an Oklahoma state park with the name Alabaster Caverns, and there are many others.  As a young man I explored several of the caves with friends.  One of the largest we found had its entrance through a hole in a roadcut just large enough to crawl through.  Inside it opened into an enormous room with a creek flowing through.  We found no other entrances, so my friends and I may have been the first humans to access this cave.  Even the bats hadn’t found it yet.  The whole area mimicked limestone karst, where the surface collapses into sinkholes and subterranean caverns.   There are also gypsum caves in eastern New Mexico.

And speaking of caves . . . The Naica Mine in Chihuahua, Mexico extracts lead and silver minerals.  In 2000 the miners made a remarkable discovery.  About 1000 feet underground the miners broke through the wall into a chamber 100 feet long and 35 feet wide filled with huge crystals of selenite.  The crystals were up to 36 feet long and 4 feet thick, oriented like telephone poles dumped at random into the space.  It could be a prime tourist attraction, except the temperature in the cave is 140 degrees F and the humidity is nearly 100 percent.  No one can survive more than a few minutes in the space without a special suit to keep them cool.  (To see some amazing photos, go to www.naica.com.mx/english/index.htm.)

Where did all this gypsum come from?  During the Permian Period about 250 million years ago, an arm of the sea extended over much of what would become the central and southwestern states.  The times must have been arid, because the sea water was evaporating.  When the dissolved minerals became saturated in the water, they precipitated and fell to the sea floor.  The resulting beds of gypsum range up to 200 feet thick.  White Sands lies between mountain ranges where gypsum dissolves and flows into the Tularosa Basin.  During the Pleistocene the basin was a lake, which dried out leaving a highly saline remnant, Lake Lucero.  Gypsum crystallizes from the lake water, and when the lake shrinks a bit, the crystals are exposed and begin to break down.  The New Mexican winds pick up pieces and blow them into the dune field.  Since gypsum is light in weight, it blows about easily.

Gypsum is a component in Portland cement; it is used in an array of personal care products; it is a favored soil amendment; and it even appears in some foods including tofu.  I think I have convinced myself that it’s an exciting mineral, after all.

By Larry Larason

I’m tooling down I-40 at 75 mph headed to Albuquerque.  While I’m driving, a fault in Alaska slips and causes an earthquake.  Is there a connection?  Is the earthquake my fault?

Well, I’m not to blame directly, but I am in part.  So are you.  We are all involved to some extent.  Here’s how.  On my trip to Albuquerque my car is spewing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; carbon dioxide contributes to global warming; and geologists are seeing evidence that global warming is related to earthquakes in high latitudes such as Alaska.  We tend to think of faults as mechanical, so how can temperatures affect them?  Well, it has to do with the melting of ice as the Arctic warms.

Let’s start with some basics.  Try this thought experiment: Take the small plastic boat toy you play with in the bathtub, but instead of floating it in water, put it into a bowl of pudding.  It will sink in a little way but basically ride high on the pudding.  Now put an ice cube on the boat and watch it sink farther into the pudding.  Take the ice cube off and slowly the pudding will flow back under the boat and lift it back up to about where it was before.  Note: This is only a thought experiment; please don’t try it at home.

What’s the point?  Think of the boat as a piece of the Earth’s crust, a continent.  The ice cube represents a continental glacier.  The pudding is a stand-in for the Earth’s mantle.  This thought experiment illustrates isostasy, also called buoyancy: A floating object is held up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced liquid.

The Earth’s mantle is hot.  Temperatures in the upper mantle range from more than 900 degrees F to well over 1600 degrees F.  This is hot enough to melt rock, but the tremendous pressure from the weight of the overlying crust prevents the mantle from becoming a seething mass of lava.  At places where the crust is weak, the hot mantle rock sometimes boils up to the surface to erupt in volcanoes.  Convection cells within it churn slowly, probably providing the motive force for continental drift.

Even if the mantle is not molten, the upper portion is viscous, deformable like pudding.  The crust above it is brittle.  The ice cube on the toy boat illustrates how loading the crust can cause it to sink into the mantle, but it does not illustrate the effects of loading on brittle rocks.  Here’s an example: Construction of Hoover Dam was begun in 1931 in Boulder Canyon – this is the reason for the alternate name “Boulder Dam.”  Lake Mead began filling in 1935 and reached its full size in 1939.  Although faults existed near the dam, the region was seismically quiet with no earthquakes known in the fifteen years prior to 1930.  But that changed as the lake filled.  By 1936 several hundred small shocks were felt as the rocks adjusted to the weight of the water building behind the dam.  Happily, none of the quakes was severe.  The greatest tremor in the area reached magnitude 5 in 1939 after the lake had reached its maximum capacity.  The tremors affected more than 3000 square miles.

Earthquakes after dam building are not uncommon.  Here’s one more dramatic example:  The Zipingpu Dam was built in Sichuan, China in 2006.  Two years later a quake of 7.9 magnitude destroyed villages and killed at least 70,000 people in the district.  The epicenter of the quake was 3.5 miles from the dam on an existing fault.  The fault might have been poised to slip before the reservoir filled, but the loading of the water is believed to have either advanced the timing or increased the severity of the tremor.

What must be the most severe loading of the lithosphere occurred during the Pleistocene.  Continental glaciers nearly two miles thick covered the high latitudes of both North America and Eurasia.  The weight of all this ice would have depressed the continents severely into the upper mantle.  By about 11,000 years ago the glaciers had melted away, and the land began to rebound.  But the rebound is slow.  It’s been going on since the glaciers disappeared and is expected to continue for another 10,000 years.  Just as loading causes earthquakes, so does unloading and rebound.  I wrote about the 1911 New Madrid earthquake in Gallup Journey for September 2011.  The New Madrid region was not covered by the huge glaciers, but some geologists believe that the series of temblors was caused by adjustments in the crust related to the on-going post-glacial isostatic rebound to the north of Missouri.

The rebound is slow, about one centimeter per year these days.  It was probably more rapid just after the glaciers melted.  In parts of Antarctica where ice shelves have broken off, the land is rebounding at nearly two centimeters per year.  In Greenland the immense ice cap has forced parts of the island down to 300 meters below sea level.  Although the ice cap is still in place, it is melting, and the rebound is already more than two centimeters per year.  No one in North America was recording earthquakes as the glaciers melted and the land rose, but geologists have found disturbed lake bed sediments from those times that give testimony to seismic activity.

So, the ice melts and the ground rebounds, fostering earthquakes.  Earthquakes are just one more damned thing to worry about in relation to climate change.  After a miserable July in Gallup, with much of the nation in severe drought, and wildfires burning across the West, I’m worried that we may have already passed a climate tipping point and things are only going to get worse.  As the climate warms, we need more air conditioning.  Given our use of fossil fuels to run our air conditioners, the situation will further deteriorate.  We need to develop the political will to do something about what we’re facing, but our politicians keep kicking the can down the road.  Even they must smell the smoke, but they don’t want to do anything till we see the flames.  By then it may be too late to save the house.

So, back to my trip to Albuquerque.  Is it a necessary drive?  No.  I plan to shop at Whole Foods and take in a movie that I know will never play in Gallup.  It’s a trip for pleasure.  Should I feel guilty?  Yes, at least a little bit.

A few years ago I was pulled over for speeding on a nearly empty “blue highway” in Arizona.  As I recall the citation, I was fined for “waste of a finite resource.”  It took me awhile to figure that out – speeding uses more gasoline than driving at the speed limit.  Afterwards I decided that was a pretty enlightened way of describing my infraction.  Maybe we need a new mindset, new definitions of our problems.

Our politicians won’t lead, but some states, municipalities, and corporations are trying to go green.  Maybe it’s time for us to ignore the politicians and their divisive distractions and take individual actions to reduce our carbon footprints.

By Larry Larason

Here’s an easy day trip to some ancient ruins.  Leave Gallup heading east on I-40.

Exit 26.  Gallup.  The Nutria Monocline, locally called simply “The Hogback,” is the abrupt western edge of the Zuni Uplift.  All the strata here originally overlaid the Zuni Mountains, but most have been eroded away since they were domed up.  The notch separating the east and west portions of the hogback are eroded into the soft Mancos Shale between Gallup Sandstone and Dakota Sandstone.

On this trip you will drive between the famous red cliffs of Entrada Sandstone on the north and the Zuni Mountains to the south.

At Milepost 31 you have a good view of the rows of ammunition bunkers at Fort Wingate south of the interstate.  The old cavalry post was an ordinance depot from 1918 until 1992.

Exit 33.  McGaffey and Fort Wingate.  This is the second location of Fort Wingate.  The first was east of here near San Rafael at Ojo del Gallo.

Pyramid Rock looms just to the west of Red Rock Park.  Church Rock, the one with the spires, heads a canyon north of the park campgrounds.  There is a hiking trail that will take you to near Church Rock, and a trail that takes you to the top of Pyramid Rock.  The mesas on the north are composed of Jurassic Entrada Sandstone at the base, Todilto Limestone, very thin Summerville Formation, Bluff and Zuni Sandstones, then Morrison Formation and Cretaceous Dakota Sandstone on the higher points.

In 1979, not quite four months after the Three Mile Island nuclear incident, an earthen dam burst at a uranium mine northeast of here and flooded the Rio Puerco with 93 million gallons of slurry, including 1100 tons of hazardous solids, which flowed 115 miles downstream.  In the cleanup, which took a couple of years while Gallupians joked about glowing in the dark, the company removed 360,000 cubic yards of sediment from the riverbed.  The major impact was on Navajo sheep herders, who could no longer water their stock at the river.  Even now, many still don’t.  Although it was alleged that radioactive waters were seeping into Gallup’s aquifers, monitoring has never detected any significant radioactivity in the well waters.

Just east of Exit 33 road cuts are in the banded Perea Sandstone, a unit within the Chinle Formation.  It was about here that a Chacoan great Kiva was excavated and later covered by the highway.

Exit 36.  Iyanbito means “buffalo spring” in Navajo.  The buffaloes were imported to be featured in the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial early in the twentieth century and were pastured here.  There is a Navajo community at Iyanbito.

The Pilot Travel Center at Exit 39 was once the Giant Travel Center, the only one owned by Giant Industries, Inc.   It became unprofitable due to competition from the casino complexes on I-40, so Giant Industries sold it to the Pilot chain in 2003.  Pilot owns travel centers in 37 states.

Milepost 43.  The road passes through outcrops of light-colored Sonsela Sandstone, a unit within the Triassic Chinle Formation.  In the red cliffs on the north, the Entrada Sandstone sits on top of the Chinle.  The Chinle mudstones are easily eroded, but may be seen in the colorful mounds or small hills at the base of the cliffs.

Exit 44.  Coolidge.  Small place, lots of history!  Billy Crane, who served with Kit Carson, settled at a place called Bacon Springs to supply hay and beef to Fort Wingate.  When the railroad came through they called the place Cranes Station, but in 1882 it was renamed Coolidge to honor the president of the railroad [not the US president, who was only ten years old at that time.]   The village became a hangout for drifters and had some turbulent times early on, but settled down in the twentieth century.  After railroad business shifted to Gallup, Coolidge dwindled away.  The more recent Coolidge was established in 1926 when another Coolidge, with the first name of Dane, built a trading post near the highway.  The settlement was bulldozed in 1930, after undergoing additional name changes: from Dewey, to Guam, to Perea.

Exit 48.  Cross the Continental Divide at 7268 feet in elevation.  The town here is much reduced.  It used to feature bars, dance halls, and the tourist shops found everywhere on US 66.  Now only a couple of the latter are still in business.

Exit 53.  Thoreau may have been named for the American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, or maybe for a bookkeeper that worked for the Mitchell Brothers, who founded the town.  In any case, the local pronunciation of the name sounds like threw.  Threw is the past tense of throw, and, compared to its earlier history, the town seems to be mostly in the past tense. The first name given the place was “Chaves” for a family who had a store here when the railroad arrived in 1881.  Then the Mitchell brothers arrived in 1892 and laid out a town named “Mitchell.”   The brothers from Michigan hoped to set up a lumbering empire by logging the Zuni Mountains.  Their operation only lasted about six months. The Hyde Exploration Expedition moved in about 1896, using warehouses to store Native American crafts to be shipped by train to markets across the US.  This was during the time that Richard Wetherill was working for the Hyde brothers at Chaco Canyon.  The Hydes changed the name of the town in 1899 to the one it has now.  Since the Mitchells, and their bookkeeper, were long gone, it seems probable that Henry David Thoreau was the inspiration.

Milepost 60.  Mt. Taylor and Haystack Mountain, where Paddy Martinez discovered uranium ore in 1950 and started the local mining boom, appear in the view ahead.

Exit 63.  Prewitt was named after two brothers who started a trading post here about 1916.  What’s left of Prewitt still sits astride old Route 66.  Prewitt used to have a downtown, but most of the old buildings are gone.

CASAMERO RUINS

Take the Prewitt Exit [63] off I-40.  Drive 0.4 miles east on old Route 66 and turn north on County 19.  This road is paved to Casamero.  Continue about four miles to the small parking spot on the left.  Some personal memorials are on a side road just across the highway.

Casamero is a Chacoan outlier [about 50 miles south of Chaco Canyon], and there are two Chacoan roads nearby, although you won’t notice them from ground level.  These ruins are not spectacular like the great houses at Chaco or Mesa Verde, but the setting is interesting.  The cliffs behind it are composed of Entrada Sandstone capped by Todilto Limestone.  The Todilto is a freshwater deposit laid down in an extensive lake during the arid Jurassic period.  Since the limestone separates into fairly flat pieces, the Anasazi used it as a building stone here.

Although these ruins are not very impressive, archaeologists gained a lot of knowledge when they were excavated in the late ’60s and early ’70s.  Later, the ruins were stabilized, and the BLM posted informational signs for visitors.  The great house at Casamero was occupied from 1000 until 1125 CE.  An unexcavated great kiva lies about 200 feet southeast of the great house.  It looks like a small stock tank, and an old fence line runs through it.  Casamero’s great kiva, with a diameter of 70 feet, was larger than Casa Rinconada at Chaco Canyon.  The great house was rather small, about 22 ground floor rooms, but the size of the great kiva reflects a larger population in the area.  Surveys have identified 140 small archaeological sites ranging from Basketmaker to Navajo in the immediate vicinity.  The valley of the Rio Puerco was one of the first areas that Chaco expanded into during the 1000s CE.  Other sites are known along the Rio Puerco valley west of here all the way into Arizona.  The great kiva at Casamero may have served as a local ceremonial center, although there were also great kivas at Chacoan outliers near Coolidge and Ft. Wingate.

Casamero’s setting is interesting.  From the great house you have a clear view of the surroundings.  The Entrada Sandstone behind the pueblo displays two members separated by a white band.  The lower one contains more silt and is somewhat softer than the upper one.  Large alcoves in the sandstone cliff offer visual interest.  You may notice that this site is near the end of the red cliffs; east of here the Entrada is broken up by faulting, which has dropped the block of land where Grants sits, so the Entrada is buried there.

If you have the time and inclination, take the dirt road toward the north; it is an interesting drive and eventually ends in Crownpoint.

By Larry Larason

Most of you reading this have probably never heard of the Indonesian volcano named Tambora.  On the other hand, I’ll bet that all of you know some version of the tale of Victor Frankenstein and the monster that he created.  What do the two have in common?  Read on and I’ll explain.

Tambora’s huge caldera, shown in this NASA photo, is 6 kilometers in diameter and 1,100 meters deep.

The Republic of Indonesia is an archipelago of 13,000 islands, many of the smaller ones uninhabited.  The largest islands are Java and Sumatra.  The most famous may be Bali. This island arc is the product of plate tectonics, having formed where the Indo-Australian Plate is pushing against and being subducted beneath the Eurasian Plate.  The active geology here causes many earthquakes [and tsunamis] as well as a great deal of volcanic activity. The explosion in 1883 of Krakatau is probably the best known of the Indonesian eruptions.  Mt. Merapi on Java in 2010 and Mt. Lokon on Sulawesi in 2011 are among the most recent of Indonesia’s 130 active volcanoes to erupt.

Tambora is located on the island of Sumbawa, east of Java.  After sitting dormant for several centuries, it awakened in 1812 with minor eruptions, which continued until the big one in April of 1815.  This eruption, actually a series of eruptions over several days, is the greatest in recorded history.  The ejecta is estimated to have been 160 cubic kilometers, which rose to a height of 43 kilometers.  Compare this to the better known eruption of Krakatau in 1883 with 21 cubic kilometers of ejecta that rose to 36 kilometers.

Tambora’s eruption was horrendous.  It began on April 10 and continued until April 17.  Pyroclastic flows raced down the slopes of the mountain to the sea and raised tsunamis of up to five meters.  Ash in the air blotted out the sun for several days and falling debris became so heavy that roofs collapsed and irrigation canals became clogged and useless.  The ash contained vast amounts of chlorine, fluorine, and sulfur.  It was so was acidic that it poisoned rice fields, not just on Sumbawa, but also on the nearby islands of Lombok and Bali.
Estimates of deaths caused by Tambora vary widely.  Probably the best estimate is that on Sumbawa about 10,000 people died during the eruption and another 38,000 from starvation and disease that followed.  Across the region Tambora’s eruption is blamed for 71,000 deaths.  This was the effect near the eruption, but soon there would be world wide consequences.

Heavy rain in Europe during June 1815 led to Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.  Some historians have credited this to Tambora, but geologists doubt that the weather effects would have spread that fast.  However, all agree that the extremes of weather for the three years following the eruption were due to ash and sulfur put into the atmosphere by the volcano.  Sulfur reflects sunlight back into space, cooling the earth.  When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, we experienced cooling for about three years.  Tambora expelled so much sulfur that 1816 became known as “the year without a summer.”  Cold weather disastrously shortened the growing season and crops failed across Europe.  People starved.  But, no one connected a volcano in a remote part of the world with the famine they experienced, even when snow tinted brown by volcanic ash fell in Hungary and elsewhere.

North America fared better than Europe, but only barely.  In the U.S. it was dry, unlike Europe, but severe frosts occurred into June and even August.  Animal fodder was scarce, and many livestock died over the next winter.  The prices of agricultural products rose to a level they would not see again until 1972.

Steel engraving in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published by Colburn and Bentley, London 1831.

In 1816 Mary Godwin, nineteen years old, was in Geneva, Switzerland with her soon-to-be husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.  Another poet, Lord Byron, and some friends were there as well.  Both Shelley and Byron were political radicals. Although Shelley had donated to “social justice” causes, he retained enough of his inherited fortune to live well.  Otherwise, you might consider this group as sort of a hippie commune.  These young people on holiday liked to hike, boat on the lake, and otherwise enjoy nature.  Summer that year was miserable.  Mary wrote, “The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around the blazing wood fire and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts which happened to fall into our hands.”  On one of those nights Lord Byron proposed that each of the party write a ghost story.  At least part of them tried, but Mary was the only one who finished hers.  With her husband’s encouragement she expanded it into a novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which was published in 1818.

I confess I read the novel for the first time in preparation for writing this piece.  What struck me was the moral ambiguity in the story; sometimes we root for Victor Frankenstein, sometimes for the monster.  Victor reminds me of a teenager who gets his girlfriend pregnant, but then takes no responsibility for his offspring.  Victor creates his artificial human and then abandons him.  The innocent creature wanders around eating berries and roots, educates himself in language by observing humans, all the while craving companionship and love.  But due to his size and hideous face, the monster is too frightening for anyone to befriend.

Victor’s creation is never named in the novel, which leads to some confusion – today the monster himself is often called Frankenstein.  But then, if Victor is his “father,” the surname may be appropriate.  It’s only after the monster discovers his creator and begins to take revenge that he becomes truly frightening.

So, a cataclysmic volcanic eruption on one side of the world created death and suffering over much of the rest, but one result was an enduring cultural icon – Victor Frankenstein’s monster – and a cautionary tale about hubris.

By Larry Larason

On June 30 the Plateau Sciences Society will hold a McGaffey Centennial Celebration at the McKinley County Wildlife Federation Building, just east of McGaffey Lake, from 11 am to 5 pm.  To get there drive east on I-40 to Exit 33 and turn south on NM 400.

Entrance to Cibola National Forest on Hwy 400.

This is a short drive, in part on a winding road, so rather than putting a lot of information in the road log, per se, I’m starting with background information.

The Zuni Mountains probably stood high during most of the Proterozoic, but erosion leveled them by the Pennsylvanian Period [323-290 million years ago].  An inland sea covered part of the Southwest during that time, and thin beds of limestone were laid down where the mountains are located now.  This limestone was eroded away except at the eastern end of the mountains.

In the Permian Period [290-248 million years ago] erosional outflow from the Ancestral Rocky Mountains deposited thick layers of red mudstone and sandstone across the region.  The sea advanced again.  The Zuni area was near the northern shore, and limestone deposited in the sea mixed in places with beach sand and silt.

Deposition continued through most of the Mesozoic Era – Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods.  On this drive you won’t see any rocks from the latter two periods, but those from the Triassic [248-206 million years ago] are significant.  The early Triassic was a time of erosion with no rock deposited.  During the middle Triassic western North America was mostly level and covered by sand and mud flats.  This is the origin of the usually bright-red Moenkopi Formation.  About 10 million years after Moenkopi deposition ended, the Chinle Formation was laid down by rivers flowing out of Oklahoma and Texas.  Sediments also came from volcanic mountains to the south and west as the rivers meandered their way to the Pacific Ocean.  Because of the mountains along what was then the west coast, the waters flowed northwest to reach the sea.

Near the end of the Mesozoic, the Laramide Orogeny began lifting the Rocky Mountains and the Zunis to complete the environment we enjoy today.

Note: This is a dangerous road on which to do rock spotting while driving.  The road is winding, the surface is rough, and there is more traffic than you might expect.  If you want to look closely at the rocks, find a place to pull out on the margin.  The locations given by milepost numbers are only approximate.  While you drive watch for wild flowers; while I prepared this road log I saw native iris and wild flax in bloom.

Road Log

Milepost 1.  You are driving on soil derived from the Chinle Formation.  At the top of a rise before you start down, the road cuts are in the Sonsela Member of the Chinle Formation.  This light colored sandstone was probably deposited in a meandering river system.  At places, such as Six Mile Canyon, the Sonsela contains a tangled mix of freshwater bivalve shells.

Descending into the valley, on either side you see cliffs of Chinle, color banded in red, white, and gray, with boulders of Sonsela littering the slopes.

Milepost 2.  You are surrounded by Chinle Formation here.  Looking ahead you will see it in the forested slopes on the south side of the valley.  Enter Fort Wingate.

An historical marker is on the left in the Fort Wingate Veterans Memorial Park, where the road branches to go to the old fort, now off limits to visitors.

Milepost 3.  Leave Ft. Wingate.

Traveling up hill on a curve, you pass some mottled sandstone beds on the left.  These are the Zuni Mountains Formation and appear at the base of the Chinle.  At the top of the hill pull off to the left at the parking area for the Fort Wingate Centennial Monument.  The monument is in the shape of a horseshoe, honoring the cavalry soldiers who served here.  Unfortunately, graffitists have sprayed the monument.

Climb up the short hill, walking on all the broken glass, to see the monument.  You can also see a panorama of the red cliffs to the north across the valley of the Rio Puerco, including Pyramid Peak and Church Rock.  The Entrada Formation cliffs [Jurassic] are underlain by Chinle Formation [Triassic] and topped mostly by Jurassic age Morrison beds.   These rocks were deposited flat; now they dip gently away from the mountains.  As the mountains rose the rocks in the cliffs were pushed up to arch over the peaks, but erosion stripped them off.  There has been about 20,000 feet of erosion here, so as you ascend the mountains the rocks you see are older.

As you continue south you will see a lot of Chinle strata on display between the trees across the creek bed on the right.

Milepost 5.  Shortly you will pass the Cibola National Forest sign.  You are now traveling on a surface composed of Moenkopi formation.  It also shows up in road cuts ahead for a way.  The slabby rock in the road cut on the left is Moenkopi, but lighter colored than most.

Milepost 6.  The red, splintered outcrop in the road cuts is more Moenkopi.  The rock in the road cuts changes rather abruptly to San Andres Formation.  The San Andres here looks more like sandstone than limestone.  It probably incorporated a lot of beach sand, as this is near the edge of the marine incursion during the Permian Period.

Milepost 7.  Pass the Hilso Trailhead parking lot, which has restrooms.  Enter a large meadow dotted with ponderosa pines.

Milepost 8.  Quaking Aspen Campground.

Just before milepost 9, pass an intersection marked for Grants.

Milepost 10.  Approaching McGaffey.  A turnoff takes you to Oso Campground, which has many toilets.  Just ahead is the Strawberry Canyon Trailhead parking area.  The pavement ends and the road becomes McKinley County 50.

Milepost 11.  The buildings that once housed loggers are now vacation cabins and are all that is left of the village.  On the left notice steeply dipping hogback ridge of Permian strata that borders the lake.

McGaffey Lake

This spring McGaffey Lake is just a mud hole.  To go to the Centennial Celebration continue past the “lake” beyond a parking area along the north side of the road to an unpaved turnoff.  The building is the old McGaffey schoolhouse, which was moved to its present location and renovated.

This settlement was named for Amasa B. McGaffey, a trader in Thoreau, who became a railroad contractor and then a lumber baron.  He founded his namesake town in 1910.  Its population grew to 200 families with a school, Catholic Church, and community hall.  A power plant supplied electricity before one was built in Gallup.  McGaffey died in the first commercial airline crash in the U.S. on Mt. Taylor in 1929.