After traipsing around the US west on my recent road trip, and hitting inumerable uber-fabulous interpretive centers at the National and State Parks, I could not help but wonder, what the heck is all this junk I'm lookin' at?
More specifically, it was hard not to wonder why the formations in Arches, those fantastic red liquidy bridges that, before they've been arched by erosion, look like huge sliding screens, layer after layer out to the horizon, are what they are, and not what the formations in Badlands are, colorfully banded mounds, sometimes mesa topped and sporting prairie grass hairdos, sometimes jaggedy ridgelines, sometimes full of the rivulet patterns made by water cutting its way through rock that looks soft enough to take a chunk out with my bare hands. And that is a lot to wonder about.
I also had the good fortune to visit my friend Eco Gwen on the same journey; she is currently enrolled in Geology 101, and while she could not answer all of my questions after 2 weeks in the course, such as what really is the difference between a mineral and a rock, nor could I understand her answers, which had a lot to do with crystalline something or other and atomic structure.
I don't suspect I will become an expert amateur, or if I'll even be able to answer my own question above, that irritating run on sentence comparing Arches and Badlands formations, after I skim this book. But if it answers even 2 or 3 of the hundreds of observations I made out in the wide, wide, world, which so far it has, then indeed, this is a good read.