Tag Archives: earth

The Storytellers

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Storytellers are very important to a culture that has no written language or any means whatsoever of recording their history or the information that has to be handed down from one generation to another. Which is why in every culture on earth, whether it be a human one like we live in, or a wet one like exists in the ocean or an animal one that lives on the land, or a much, much older one such as the one the earth and the stones and the trees have, has a storyteller. The information it takes to be a successful species has to be passed a long. That’s where storytellers come into play.

While walking by these two storytellers in the forest a few days ago I heard them explaining to this young sapling about the role she had to play as she grew up and took her rightful place in the forest. Everyone in Nature has their place and a job to do. The Earth of course stays firmly underfoot and it is the force that gives purpose to all the other things in life. The other elements such as the wind, sun, water, all have their parts to play but each individual has their responsibilities to perform as well.

And as in all cultures the young have questions about those things. They also have a lot of fear. Fear of the unknown. And a lot is unknown. The two storytellers above have been telling these stories for millennium. The one on the left with the long druid-like countenance is the most versed in the why of things, the broad overview of what our purpose is here. While the shorter, rounder one is an earth mother and she has all the practical facts of life that the younger ones need to know.

Procreation is always the single largest topic on the young ones minds and it is always the scariest to ask about. That’s why so many come to the storytellers to find out these things, you can’t ask your mother, you just can’t. How embarrassing would that be. And the other saplings are asking you about them so there’s no help there. No, the storytellers are the ones to come to.

I couldn’t hear much of the conversation as the storytellers speak in a very low voice, so low sometimes that we can’t hear it at all. The sound travels through the ground to the saplings roots like whale song through the ocean which is why there is a such a surprised look on her face. I did hear the words, gymnosperms, and male and female gametophytes and the release of large amounts of pollen, which is when the saplings branches flew up in embarrassment and her leaves flushed a pale shade of yellow.

It was at this point that I moved along as the conversation was getting to a very delicate stage and I did not want to add to the saplings awkward self-consciousness. I was just glad that the storytellers were there to help this generation of trees learn what they needed to know. Even in this day of information overload and unlimited knowledge storytellers are important.

 

We Don’t Do Nothing Nice And Easy

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There are lots of canyons where they are mainly long stretched-out holes in the ground with no tops that primarily serve as a big ditch. They occasionally have a small fizzly amount of water run through them and call themselves mighty. People fall off the edge and they call themselves dangerous. A little dirt falls off their edges and is slowly carried away and they call themselves deepest. When they have a small storm pass over they call themselves dramatic. To some who have never seen a real canyon this appears to be a source of wonderment. They call them canyons.

But there are canyons and there are canyons. This is the Grand Canyon. The Grandmother of all canyons. If the perfect storm were created out of the earth instead of water it would take hundreds of them to create this canyon. Maybe thousands. When something happens here it happens on a colossal scale. Storms are bigger, deeper, higher, stronger. They contain more rain, more lightning, more power. The river that flows through it is one of the most powerful on the planet. Enough earth flows through this canyon, carried along by the strength of its movement, to form a new country.

When all those events happen at the same time we usually call that Wednesday. Where other smaller canyons do their utmost to appear mighty there is no comparison. This is the Grand Canyon, the mightiest canyon in all the world. If you thought these smaller canyons had drama they are the smallest eyelash flick of this grand old dame. Some say sixteen year old girls are the epitome of drama. Take all the sixteen year old girls alive today and all that have ever lived and their combined drama wouldn’t leave an echo in this canyon.

When something happens here it changes the world we live in. Storms, floods, rapids, waterfalls, entire counties of earth falling into the Colorado river at a time. This is the daily life of the canyon. At the Grand Canyon, we don’t do nothing nice and easy.

Rumble In The Rockies

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Many of you are not clear on how things work here in the Rocky Mountains. Especially as it pertains to the changing of the seasons. You think it’s all just automatic. Some of it is but even so there’s science at work here. Big hairy important science. The kind they make television shows about. The most common misconception is that Winter and its attending snow and cold appear out of the North, invading us like the shock troops at the forefront of that cold weather blitzkrieg known as the Saskatchewan Screamer. Not so. We’ve been blaming our brothers to the North for our misery unnecessarily. Sorry, Canada. However that doesn’t let them completely off the hook. They deserve to be blamed for plenty else, Justin Bieber, to name just one thing, but not for Winter.

The real cause of Winter and this is substantiated if not like totally proven, with improbable theory, old husbands tales, Bigfoot followers, alien probing proponents, people who read those newspapers at the supermarket checkouts, Republicans, Democrats, movie producers, other people who should know better, and Eugene that guy who listens to talk radio 24 hrs. a day, is Snow Volcanoes. I will repeat that, Snow Volcanoes. I know, I know, a collective gasp of disbelief just went racing across the internet, but here is proof.

In the photo above you see the caldera of this awakening Snow Volcano as it spews cold misty clouds filled with moisture that will soon turn into snow. This is the beginning of many eruptions to come as we proceed into Winter.

But wait, you say, isn’t a volcano just a rupture on the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as the Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface? Yes, yes, yes, it is but that’s a HOT volcano. We’re talking about COLD volcanoes. The ones you don’t know anything about, which is why we’re putting out this post. To inform you and bring you up to speed on the latest scientific stuff.

You all know about the freeze-thaw thing that happens, such as when you leave a bottle of beer out on the picnic table overnight when it’s really cold out and the next morning after you’re done heaving your lasagna into the porcelain cistern and you remember you left that beer outside and you rush out to drink it thinking it will make you feel better and you find that freeze-thaw thing has been at work. The frozen beer has been warmed by the sun and expanded, forcing its way out of the bottle, shattering it in the process, as the ice and cold try to escape from its confinement. Well that’s how a cold volcano works.

Underneath the mountain range is a pool of really cold material known as uhm, I’m not sure, but it’s cold, take my word for it. The caldera is bowl-shaped, just perfect for focusing the rays of the sun into its center where the super-energized sunshine, what is known in scientific circles as heat, makes it way down the chimney towards the pool of that super but unnamed cold stuff. As the summer progresses and it gets hotter, so does that concentrated heat that is racing down to meet the cold material. Nature, loving to blow crap up can hardly wait to see what happens as the pressure builds and builds until it is say, November 18th and then, back up, Loretta, it’s going to blow. The pent-up cold and snow seeing its opportunity to escape its confinement races up the chimney and sends a plume of snow and cold miles into the atmosphere. As it falls and lands on your house you are receiving the fulmination of the Snow Volcano. This continues until you are butt deep in fulminations.

That is the eruption, and it doesn’t just happen once. It happens over and over, all winter long until you just can’t… well you know, you’ve been through it before. This then is the beginning of winter and its cause isn’t Canada but Snow Volcanoes. Now you know why and how it happens and that makes dealing with it easier. If you have any questions or concerns about this process feel free to contact us using the concerned and confused email address provided on the site. Thanks and remember, Winter is just around the corner.

Racing Into The Darkness

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Every day, from time immemorial, the earth has slowly turned on its axis as it hurtles around the sun in its quest to use up its allotted time in this universe. As it completes its rotation, the terminator, that line that divides light from dark, moves across the face of our planet bringing day for some and night for others. This celestial clock can not be adjusted or reset and there is no force that we know of that can halt this race to darkness or stop the illumination of the first light of dawn.

Here at Monument Valley we see the last of this day’s battle as the earth continues its steady rotation into that good night. The colors of the buttes and the surrounding earth they rest on change from the deep dark red of bright sunlight into the muted colors of night. Soon they will appear to be black, just a silhouette seen under the light of the stars. But as it does every single day the night passes and the bright light of day will arrive restoring the colors to the land.

Every second of this unending process is precious and holds its own special magic. You may be partial to mid-day or early morning but this moment, the moment of change, as the colors intensifies then slowly fade to black, is one of the most special times to witness.

Giants In The Shallows

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Thousands and thousands of years ago before our ancestors were living in trees and checking each other for fleas the earth was a very different place. This was way before menthol cigarettes and GPS in your Chevy suburban. The earth was covered in a lot more water and what is high ground now was low ground then. We still had mountains and valleys but many of the valleys were filled with the wet part of the inland sea and were used as migratory routes for huge and very large creatures that moved around the earth as they completed their life cycle.

They were very much like our modern whales except larger, dwarfing and doubling the size of our 90′ Blue whales of today. They moved about, swimming slowly and majestically, using the narrow canyons to get from one large body of water to another. Had you been there you would have heard their voices echoing off the canyon walls as they sang songs ancient to them at that time.

They were using these watery highways for a very long time as can be seen occasionally by the shallow but smooth troughs made as their bellies slid across the then sandy bottoms of the valleys. Today we see these slick rocky depressions in the stream beds as a smooth surface that the water flowing over and through has made even smoother.

They traveled the same way they do today in pods of undetermined size, mothers and calves swimming ahead and gigantic males following behind to protect them from what ever danger there may have been for them. But the huge males couldn’t defend them from what Mother Nature intended for the world. There was an incredible climatic event that enfolded at a speed unimaginable to us now, where the earth suddenly and without warning changed and was thrust up in a gigantic upheaval raising these valleys and the surrounding valley walls to a height of over 8000′ or more, trapping the unlucky travelers making their way through.

The water drained away and as it did it turned these few pods into stone leaving their shapes behind to show us they were here. The water was slowly replaced by soil made up of eons of trees dying and falling, mixing with the decomposing stone, turning into the rich material that now supports the profusion of wild flowers nestled up against them. The very earth that surrounds and supports these leviathans of the shallows. Today millions of years later you can still see their rocky forms forever caught in an endless migration. Mothers with their calves by their sides, caught as they slowly breached the surface so the little one could breathe. The large males still mostly submerged with just their giant tail fins standing clear of the water, still traveling through time on that endless journey.

This particular pod had been traveling through a valley that we now call Lady Moon and can still be seen by any one with the imagination and desire to see ancient travelers. And if you are particularly fortunate and listen closely you may still hear their ancient songs as the wind catches them off the canyon walls and carries them past you on its way to nowhere.