Grand Canyon
"Let's go read the Book of Time!" says Jack Farmer ASU Geologist.
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| Reading the Book of Time |
My entire neural net is responding to hyper stimulation. There is the immense, take your breath away, beauty that defines wonder and awe. Then your mind struggles for the language to attach to the view. Then of course, you can't help but begin to try to make sense of the landscape. Why the layers arranged as they did, the depth, the meanders and tributaries... The Celestron Cometron binoculars really came in handy for this field trip. Of course it's fun to look as far away and as deep as you can into the canyon, looking for the ant-like dots of hikers, but the real magic was being able to study the different layers. I was able to compare textures and fracture lines as if I were looking at a hand specimen with a loupe.
The Grand Canyon was a photo op if there ever was one. Kristin Fitzpatric remarked every time I stopped to take yet another photo, "You know, there's no such thing as a bad view." I was compelled to photograph the same scene several times because the light and mood kept changing as the Earth turned. Different features would become more or less prominent as the shadow and highlights shifted. Each layer, page, of the rock story spread as far as one could see. Canyon walls, cut grain by grain by the river over millions of years.
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| Zen Gigapan |
It was possible to take it all in emotionally or cognitively. I gave it a valiant effort though! There is no language to effectively communicate the emotional response. At least non that I know. My photographs capture some sense of it. As does Dave Lavery's gigapan image from above the Bright Angel trail at the South Rim. (Don't tell NASA HQ, but he risked his life for the Martians to capture the image.)
As with all field trips, the time came to rendezvous with the rest of the Martians (as we had been dubbed by niw), board our spacecraft (motor coach) and head to our next field site.
...to be continued in Day 2.2
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