Walking the Syncline Loop, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Dear readers, no urban decay this time, but a short description of a hike in an amazing geological terrain.

The Upheaval Dome is a circular geological feature in southern Utah in Canyonlands National Park. There are two major hypotheses for its formation. One is that the rock strata in this area is underlain by a salt dome. The salt is slowly rising because it is lower density than the overlying sand- and siltstones, therefore causing a circular uplift (i.e., the earth bulges upwards). The other hypothesis invokes an impact from a meteorite about 60 million years ago. Some of the strata near the center of the area are almost vertical, which is anomalous for this general area. At the end of the post are some paragraphs from the National Park service which provide more details. The aerial photograph above is from NASA (via the National Park Service). 

Even in person, it is difficult to appreciate the enormity of this terrain. The air was brilliantly clear in April, and from the overlook, we had few references that the other side of the dome was miles away.

One of the most interesting hiking trails in Canyonlands National Park is the 8.3-mile Syncline Loop Trail. It takes you from the Upheaval Dome parking lot around one side of the the outer rim (select south or north side), drops about 1300 ft into the canyon, and then ascends up to the other rim. My two friends and I walked it in a clockwise direction (if viewed from above).

The descent down to the Canyon Trail is steep, with ledges and some rope-protected sections.

Down in the canyon is a different world. Water trickles in the deeper parts of the stream beds (at least it did in April). Rather impressive lizards scurry around the rocks. The only sound is the wind blowing through the leaves of the Cottonwood trees.

The Crater Spur trail will take you into the bottom of the crater that you can see from the Overlook some 1,500 ft above. We did not take the spur and continued to the north rim.

I love the Cottonwood trees, with their ridged and creased bark. Some are surprisingly massive, indicating that their roots get enough water from the streams, even through the long hot summers. For us, the maximum temperature was only about 80° F., but summer can easily exceed 100°.

The desert flowers are spectacular, and the bees active.

Fred checking the terrain

This was one of the most rewarding day hikes I have done in a long time. The terrain is rough, but no worse than many trails in the Alps or Dolomites. Be careful and take plenty of water.

For your return to Moab, if you are adventurous, take the Shafer Trail downhill. The Shafer Trail road was originally built by uranium miners in the 1950s. It zig-zags precipitously down from the Island in the Sky plateau, eventually connecting to the Potash Road. I recommend you not try it uphill in a 2-wheel-drive car, or downhill in the rain. But on a dry day, downhill is fine in a normal car as long as you are cautious and avoid some of the ruts and higher rock outcrops. For the steepest sections, I left the manual transmission in 1st gear and let engine braking keep the speed under control. The brakes stayed cool. (If you only use automatic and do not know what gears do, or don't understand what I am talking about, this is not the place to learn.)

Photographs taken with a Nexus 4 telephone (sorry, no real camera this day). I thank my friends Fred and Ben for being such cheerful companions.

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The following information about the formation of the Upheaval Dome is from the National Park Service:

Canyonlands is a place of relative geologic order. Layers of sedimentary deposits systematically record chapters in the park's past. With some exceptions, these layers have not been altered, tilted or folded significantly in the millions of years since they were laid down by ancient seas, rivers or winds.

Upheaval Dome is quite a different story. In an area approximately three miles (5 km) across, rock layers are dramatically deformed. In the center, the rocks are pushed up into a circular structure called a dome, or an anticline. Surrounding this dome is a downwarp in the rock layers called a syncline. What caused these folds at Upheaval Dome? Geologists do not know for sure, but there are two main theories which are hotly debated.

Salt Dome Theory
A thick layer of salt, formed by the evaporation of ancient landlocked seas, underlies much of southeastern Utah and Canyonlands National Park. When under pressure from thousands of feet of overlying rock, the salt can flow plastically, like ice moving at the bottom of a glacier. In addition, salt is less dense than sandstone. As a result, over millions of years salt can flow up through rock layers as a "salt bubble", rising to the surface and creating salt domes that deform the surrounding rock.

When geologists first suggested that Upheaval Dome was the result of a salt dome, they believed the land form resulted from erosion of the rock layers above the dome itself. Recent research suggests that a salt bubble as well as the overlying rock have been entirely removed by erosion and the present surface of Upheaval Dome is the pinched off stem below the missing bubble. If true, Upheaval Dome would earn the distinction of being the most deeply eroded salt structure on earth.

Impact Crater Theory
When meteorites collide with the earth, they leave impact craters like the well-known one in Arizona. Some geologists estimate that roughly 60 million years ago, a meteorite with a diameter of approximately one-third of a mile hit at what is now the Upheaval Dome. The impact created a large explosion, sending dust and debris high into the atmosphere. The impact initially created an unstable crater that partially collapsed. As the area around Upheaval Dome reached an equilibrium, the rocks underground heaved upward to fill the void left by the impact. Erosion since the impact has washed away any meteorite debris, and now provides a glimpse into the interior of the impact crater, exposing rock layers once buried thousands of feet underground.

Upheaval Dome Today
Whatever the origin of Upheaval Dome, it is the result of erosion of a structural dome. Rock layers now at the surface within the dome were once buried at least a mile underground and are not visible anywhere else in the nearby area. While some call this feature a crater, it is not a crater in the traditional sense of the word, but simply another example of the erosion which created Canyonlands National Park.

Tom's Farm, Clifton, Virginia

Many years ago, Tom and his family lived in an old farmhouse on Clifton Road, in Clifton, Virginia. The house dates from the late-1800s, but had many additions and renovations.

When Tom moved to Clifton in the 1970s, the countryside was still rural and pastoral. But, by the mid-1980s, the Washington megalopolis urban sprawl was beginning to overtake Clifton, and the rolling hills were bulldozed to build cheesy McMansions and condominiums. Sadly, you will not see many pastures there now. The lower photograph shows two beauties checking each other out.

The house was covered with both aluminum siding and asphalt siding. The asphalt was similar  to roof shingles and was durable and low maintenance because it did not need painting.

Tom had a number of barns and sheds on the property. They were interesting to explore, but some were so overgrown, it was hard to get inside.

There was a lot of old farm equipment on the property, although the land had not been used for agriculture in decades. It was an interesting place. Tom passed away some years ago, and I have not been back to Clifton since then.

All photographs (except the lady with the curious horse) were taken with a Rolleiflex 3.5E twin-lens reflex camera with a Schneider 75mm Xenotar lens using Kodak Panatomic-X film. I developed the film in Agfa Rodinal 1:50. I scanned the negatives but decided they looked a bit cold. Many years ago, I printed the frames optically (meaning with  an enlarger) on Zone VI paper and toned with selenium. The genuine prints fit the mood best; there was something magical when a negative was printed on a traditional high-silver-content printing paper. The toned frames above are scans of the paper prints (scanned on a Umax scanner using SilverFast Ai software).

I sold the Rolleiflex years ago, which was dumb. So, as of April 2016, I have purchased another Rolleiflex 3.5E via eBay. Some Vicksburg, Mississippi, examples with this new Rolleiflex are here.

The Volkswagen Disposal Yard of Moab, Utah

Dear Readers, I found another Volkswagen disposal (junk) yard. This one is in Moab, Utah, off Spanish Valley Drive. The official address is Tom Tom Foreign Car Parts and Service at 1809 E. Mill Creek Drive, Moab, UT. An energetic Tom Arnold ran an active recycling business for Volkswagen collectors, but he passed away some time ago, and now his collection of 200 or 300 bodies sits in his lot. Tom considered this his man cave, according to a 2009 article in Moab Happenings. A lady I met in Moab knew his son and secured permission for me to walk around and take photographs (small towns are great because usually someone knows the right person to contact about almost anything).

TomTom's VW Museum, watch cat on patrol

Needless to say, there is a lot of inventory here - buses, Beetles of various ages, Karmann Ghias, and Squarebacks.

I was concerned, was there a watch dog? No, even better: there were watch cats. These two were on perpetual rodent control and cuddle duty.

This was the Volkswagen Type 3, known as the Squareback in the US market. These were handy little station wagons with much more interior room than the Beetle. I had a 1965 model in college. When camping, I could sleep in the back at an angle or straight front and back with the hatch open. You can't do that in most of the absurd modern crossover/SUV play trucklets that the suburban "adventure" set drives to the mall. With the rear engine over the drive wheels, that Squareback could go up muddy logging roads or snowy passes in the Cascades.

There are at least a hundred Beetles in Tom's lot. I did not see any older split rear window models, but some may have been present somewhere. At least here in Utah, rust is not a problem.

This is a 1949 Type 1 split-window model, from Wikipedia Commons (public domain). These are collectors' items now.

The Karmann Ghia was based on the mechanical underpinning of the Type 1. These were nice little sports cars.

Tom had organized his inventory neatly. Volkswagens had such a long production life, you could fit parts from various years into a car you were restoring. The Type I (Beetle) was in production from 1945 to 2003. According to Wikipedia, "With 21,529,464 produced, the Beetle is the longest-running and most-manufactured car of a single platform ever made."

But if you wanted some chassis parts, air cleaners, mufflers, etc., that may have been more of a challenge.

My other article about a VW disposal yard is from Raymond, Mississippi. I need to return to see if it has changed.

These are digital images from a Fuji X-E1 digital camera. One day I should return with film.

UPDATE OCT. 2019: Many of the Volkswagens are still there, but the yard looks cleaner and the brush has been trimmed. Click this link to see the 2019 photographs.

From the archives: New York City in 1942

I recently looked through some family boxes of photographs and found a steel Kodak film can with tightly rolled film. It was a short roll of nitrate film, possibly untouched since it was developed in 1942. It recorded one of my dad's trips to Washington and New York City.

This is one of the Elevated (El) Lines, somewhere in Lower Manhattan.

The monumental building with a statue on top is the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. Built between 1907 and 1914, it houses City of New York offices. It may have been the inspiration for the Stalin-era Seven Sisters office buildings in Moscow. Warsaw also has one of these somber buildings, "donated" by Marshal Stalin to the supposedly-grateful people of occupied Poland. The tall building on the right is the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse at 40 Centre Street. It was originally known as the Foley Square Courthouse but was renamed in 2001 to honor Mr. Marshall.

The elegant Art Deco Cities Service Building, now known as 70 Pine Street, is 67 stories or 952 feet tall. It was built in 1931-32 by the Cities Service Company (oil and gas).

George Washington presides over the monumental stairs at the US Treasury building. This is now the Federal Hall National Memorial at 26 Wall Street. General Washington took his first Oath of Office here, and the building at one time housed the Congress, Supreme Court, and executive offices of the United States government.

Trinity Church is at 75 Broadway and can be seen at the end of Wall Street. This is the third Trinity Church on the site. Construction began in 1839 and it was completed in 1846.

Slightly off the topic: this is Memorial Continental Hall, owned & operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution, in Washington, DC.

To the best of my knowledge, this roll of film dates to early 1942, but my dad's notes are incomplete. The camera was an American-made Perfex, from the Candid Camera Corporation of Chicago. It may have been equipped with a Wollensak lens. I scanned the Nitrate film frames with a Plustek 7600i 35mm film scanner using SilverFast Ai software. The negatives have scratches, but unfortunately the infrared iSRD function does not work with real black and white film. Consider that despite the flaws, there is still data on this film that can be extracted 64 years later. Will our digital files last that long? (Answer, dream away.)

This is a 1996 Kodachrome photograph of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse.  I was on the roof of an office building occupied by the State of New York's Department of State at 270 Broadway. This file came from a Kodak Photo CD, which was an early attempt to provide a convenient way to show photographs on a television set. A film laboratory developed the film and then scanned the frames onto a CD. The user could insert the CD into a small player, somewhat like a VCR player. The scans technically should have been excellent, but my experience was mixed. Some contractors did distinctly mediocre work. Now, it is difficult to find a software package to open the proprietary Kodak format and correctly decode the colors.

The Mississippi Delta 17: Country stores in Louise and Holly Bluff

After a long break, let us return to the Mississippi Delta, which is full of interesting little towns and remnants of an older era. Routes 149 and 16 take you through the southern Delta, past small towns, catfish ponds, and the Delta National Forest, ending in Rolling Fork (which will be the subject of a future article).

The town of Louise is pretty quiet but looks reasonably prosperous. There is a silo and an auto body shop on the main road.

South of Louise on Rte. 16, at the corner of Nixon Road, is a an old store. It was locked up, but the material (stuff) inside looked reasonably fresh, so maybe someone is using it as a storage building.

The Miller Mart Store at Tom Miller Road offers Budweiser.

Further south, another farm store at Bayland Road was closed. Notice the square front or facade.

Hwy 16 makes a right angle bend to the west as it enters Holly Bluff, with Sally's Ole Lake Gro at the bend. The Royal Crown Cola cooler was empty, so I suspect Sally has moved on.

Railroad Ave. crosses Rte 16, with this Hegman Farm, Inc., store at the corner.

Across the street was a traditional square brick store, unused now.

We will continue our tour of the Delta in future posts. Some of the photographs above were taken with Kodak BW400CN film in a Leica rangefinder camera  and 35mm f/2.0 Summicron lens (click the photos to enlarge and check if there is grain). The others were from a Fuji X-E1 digital camera with RAW files converted to monochrome using PhotoNinja software.