7. Lovely Side Canyon —What Makes These Things?
What It Is
A canyon is caused by moving water eroding and carrying away underlying rock. This is not as peaceful and gentle as it might sound.
In fact, America’s national parks are not peaceful and gentle places. They were not built to be your personal spiritual retreats, nor are they theme parks designed by safety engineers and lawyers. They are wonders of nature, created by natural processes, many of which are going on right now. While you cluelessly admire the handiwork of forces you don’t understand, the processes that created the very thing you came to see might be getting ready to do some work on you. Some of these natural processes had very bad childhoods and can turn violent with little warning.
Contrary to the popular image, the Grand Canyon and its associated side canyons were not created by a steady, imperceptible process of erosion over millions of years. In fact, much of the work was done by huge flash floods, giant walls of fast-moving water carrying big sticks and rocks with which to do some serious, medieval-type ass kicking. It’s Mother Nature’s version of the drive-by, and it blasts the shit out of everything along the way.
Here’s the recipe: take a high plateau, and bake the ground hard for months at a time. Then send some moisture-laden monsoon winds up there, drop Biblical amounts of rain, and drain large areas of the plateau through a narrow slot canyon. You’re going to get a lot of water coming down that canyon very fast, and it’s going to pick up a lot of silt, sand, rocks, and other crude weapons. If you happen to be standing in its path, get ready to be swept off your feet. And not in any charming, date movie kind of way, either.
How It Kills You
A flash flood has the option of drowning you or beating you to death, and will settle for whichever one happens first.
But the kicker is this: that rainstorm can happen five, ten, or even 40 miles away from where you’re standing. You can be walking under lovely blue skies in scenic splendor and spiritual wonder, gazing up at intricately sculpted stone walls, feeling one with nature, and a storm cloud you can’t even see can reach out, pick you up, and toss you around like a rag doll. It won’t even take the time to say “no, I expect you to die,” much less explain its evil plans for world domination before it kills you. If this seems unfair, take comfort; it will not matter if you forgot to wear clean underwear or even if you wore those stupid boxers with the little sailboats on them. Assuming your body is actually found, it may well be stripped of clothing and battered beyond recognition. This is a violent event.
How Not To Die In This Horrible, Horrible Manner
Monsoon winds usually begin to blow up the Colorado Plateau, which extends to the north rim of Grand Canyon, around mid-July every year; it’s then that flash flood season begins. Your best bet is simply to be aware of weather patterns in the whole area, and avoid hiking narrow canyons from July to September during times of potentially rainy weather. And while an oncoming catastrophe will not verbalize its intentions, it may warn you with a primitive, incoherent yet expressive and passionate roar; it will sound sort of like Sylvester Stallone at the end of every movie he’s ever made, only with a lot more God. There may be other clues, such as a change in the wind and the smell of mud and minerals in the air. This might give you up to a whole minute to get to higher ground. But there will be no RSS feed, and your smartphone does not have a ringtone for this.
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