The cave hike was exciting. When the ranger told us that it was possible to go on a 5-6 hour crawling-with-flashlights tour of the cave, my nostrils were flaring... I would so love to do this. OMG crawling around in caves. I love it! Even if it's grueling and cold and wet and you come out of it very bruised.
I love to know all the names of things. I know this is rimstone and it is ... well it's out of marble in solution right? so... well... crap. I don't know what it is. calcite? gypsum?
It was unbelievably beautiful especially watching the ripples of water intersecting from the ceiling drips... in the perfectly clear pool. Bizarre to be in a crowd of people who were all staring directly at the tour guide and his flashlight as he talked about preserving valuable cave ecosystems and invertebrates and leaving the park how you found it and native american burial sites and so on... while the water was going drip drip drip... I kept trying to have my little aesthetic moments... which are separate from "picture-taking aesthetic moments" and require a little bit of time and spacing-out.
It was so amazing!
I love caves... wet or dry ones, live or dead. Live ones are best though. I love geology because it's a way of seeing a very long story. Roadcuts and caves give you that story in stunning ways... So, I love to see straight into that millions-of-years-long narrative.
Here in this cave staring at the delicate rimstone that looks like brains, I am inside a coral reef in a shallow tropical sea and all the little polyps are frothy in the sun. then they all die and turn into limestone and get fucking buried somehow and huge magma thingies bubble up from below and cool very slowly over a bazillion years and become granite batholiths and this chunk of coral reefy limestone is baked slowly into marble by the heat of the cooling magma. And it all gets uplifted into the Sierras over another bazillion years as the pacific plate crams itself under the north american plate and the subduction zone goes all crazy. So now our coral reef is like 6000 feet above sea level, covered in granite and snow. Glaciers cover everything and then melt and the meltwater goes nuts and different creeks form and run through the cave. We're so ephemeral.
I love geology even if my knowledge of it is fuzzy.
I love to know all the names of things. I know this is rimstone and it is ... well it's out of marble in solution right? so... well... crap. I don't know what it is. calcite? gypsum?
It was unbelievably beautiful especially watching the ripples of water intersecting from the ceiling drips... in the perfectly clear pool. Bizarre to be in a crowd of people who were all staring directly at the tour guide and his flashlight as he talked about preserving valuable cave ecosystems and invertebrates and leaving the park how you found it and native american burial sites and so on... while the water was going drip drip drip... I kept trying to have my little aesthetic moments... which are separate from "picture-taking aesthetic moments" and require a little bit of time and spacing-out.
It was so amazing!
I love caves... wet or dry ones, live or dead. Live ones are best though. I love geology because it's a way of seeing a very long story. Roadcuts and caves give you that story in stunning ways... So, I love to see straight into that millions-of-years-long narrative.
Here in this cave staring at the delicate rimstone that looks like brains, I am inside a coral reef in a shallow tropical sea and all the little polyps are frothy in the sun. then they all die and turn into limestone and get fucking buried somehow and huge magma thingies bubble up from below and cool very slowly over a bazillion years and become granite batholiths and this chunk of coral reefy limestone is baked slowly into marble by the heat of the cooling magma. And it all gets uplifted into the Sierras over another bazillion years as the pacific plate crams itself under the north american plate and the subduction zone goes all crazy. So now our coral reef is like 6000 feet above sea level, covered in granite and snow. Glaciers cover everything and then melt and the meltwater goes nuts and different creeks form and run through the cave. We're so ephemeral.
I love geology even if my knowledge of it is fuzzy.
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