The Old Testaments

Images from a long summer on the rocks

I remember two things about my first visit to the Grand Canyon. The first is we all got in trouble. By “we” I mean the four oldest of the Connor children who were deemed old enough to know better than to go over the barrier along the rim. The second is the layers in the rocks, all the way to the bottom, thousands of feet below.

The idea that the Colorado River carved its way to the impossibly deep bottom was clear enough, yet still hard to imagine. That had taken 6 million years. What wasn’t so clear then is that the youngest of the rocks the river had cut through—the limestone/marble of the Kaibab Formation—are more than 250 million years old. That’s about 3.5 million human lifetimes. There’s no need to run the math for the deepest rocks in the chasm, the 1.7+ billion year old gneiss, schists and granites that make up the Vishnu Formation. At that trench of time, we are so deeply into the unfathomable that the mind twists and spins.

I can’t well explain the comfort I receive being in the presence of very old rocks. It’s just better—here—that I not try, that I just let the rocks speak for themselves in the photographs. Most of the images are from travels in the summer and fall of 2021, often with some of my favorite people, children and dear friends who allow me to just climb and wander up and down range from time to time, to visit with the earth and the rocks, and the ever-changing light. tjc

Some of the rocks shoved up to the top of the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming are nearly 3 billion years old. These soaring basement rocks include the Archean pink granite in this photo, exposed and artfully weathered by the nearly relentless wind at 9,000 feet.
The Painted Hills unit of the John Day Fossil beds in north central Oregon expose a volcanic world that is roughly twice as old and quite a bit more colorful than the black/brown basalt lava that covers so much of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon. The vistas include hillsides of fossilized soils–paleosols–that accrued over millions of years in successive lake beds dating back 33 million years.
Skirting the Bighorns and extending into Colorado and Montana is the vividly red Chugwater formation. An enormous, stratified pile of silt and sandstone it dates back to the Triassic period (245 to 208 million years ago)–basically to the dawn of the dinosaurs. The cliffs in this photo are only a few miles from the “Hole-in-the Wall” hideout of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, near Barnum, WY.

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