Like New Orleans, I’m so far behind I’m ahead. To illustrate just how waylaid I am, here is a picture taken on September 12th. This means I have not downloaded pictures from the camera or uploaded them to Flickr on time in over two weeks. Over two weeks! The shame.
That’s The Lone Sysadmin standing on the Devil’s Golf Course salt field in Death Valley, the lowest elevation in North America. Between the Sierras and west of central Utah and central New Mexico, America slowly frays apart forming new real estate in a series of moutains and valleys, also known as the Basin and Range. Water often pools in these hot valleys, but only long enough to evaporate leaving behind sheet after sheet of halite, gypsum and other salts. I imagine that the Golf Course is what parts of the Gulf of Mexico looked like when first opening up, before the deposition of sediments from the Mississippi and other rivers. The present is the key to the past.
The past is also the key to the present. Happy debate-watching tonight.
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Don’t feel too bad, I haven’t sorted my Death Valley photos yet, either.
Good seeing you guys last weekend! Sorry I didn’t make it out on Sunday, but I think it was best, since I got past my cold in record time. Now I just have weird chest pains…
I love that park! So vast, stark and strangely beautiful, like exploring another planet.
Not to brag or anything, but I just got back from South France :) looking at very cool outcrops (deepwater turbidites in confined basins)…if I knew geologist got to go on field trips like this every year I might have majored in something else. I’ll send you some pictures of the rocks.
http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.224069