Strata-Graphy
(Excerpt from the introduction)
Rocks, shale, mud, sand, and dust; badlands, buttes, mesas, cliffs, canyons, gullies, and washes; vast landscapes of gray, yellow, orange, or red stone; patterned crusts of soil and sediment crumbling under my feet; the weight of coal loaded onto the bed of a pick-up truck or placed into a fireplace and the black coal dust remaining under the fingernails: many of the memories from my childhood in central Utah foreground an intimate experience of the materiality of the earth. Looking back at those years growing up in proximity to the state’s famous national parks and monuments, I can see a personal affinity with the inorganic realm of rocks beginning decades ago. Unknown to myself at that time, this apparent rural idle during youth was also an education and immersion in geologic deep time.
Deep time: the term metaphorically aligns going back into the far geologic past with going vertically down through the layers of strata. Coined by John McPhee in his book Basin and Range, the term is built upon the “law of superposition,” first formulated by Nicolaus Steno in the 17th century and further refined and promoted by William Smith in the following one, which states that as one descends the strata are orderly arranged in a sequence from youngest to oldest. Framed thus, the earliest geologic time is cast into the impenetrable depths of the earth, only to be viewed at tourist visits to the Grand Canyon or on roadcuts glimpsed while speeding by on the freeway.
The San Rafael Swell near where I grew up in central Utah, however, subverts, or rather rotates, this figure. Formed 50 million years ago during the Laramide compression, the Swell is a massive anticline, basically a vast kidney-shaped dome 75 miles long and 35 miles wide that has pushed its oldest strata up to the surface. Greg Gordon describes the Swell’s unusual topology in the following manner: “Take a stack of magazines, allow each magazine to represent a geologic formation and gently squeeze the stack from the sides….It will bow upward, and if you take a knife and cut through your stack it will alleviate the pressure, but along that knife cut the bottom magazines will slide up toward the top and be sticking out.” So as one enters the Swell from either the west or east, the further one goes toward the middle the older the strata that are revealed. When one reaches the relative center of the Swell, the deep past is displayed on the surface of the present.
Cross-section of the San Rafael Swell showing how the older strata are exposed in the middle.
Taken from Tom Chidsey, “Geology of the San Rafael Swell.”
In our “geologically illiterate” culture, geology is lamentably not a major element in the American primary school system. This was especially true during my childhood in Mormon Utah, where stories of Creation and the subsequent and relatively short drama of mankind completely substituted for any education about the scientific exploration of eras prior to the existence of humanity. In addition, the San Rafael Swell has always lacked the prestige and the informational signage of one of Utah’s “Mighty Five” national parks that might encourage a more discerning eye for its geology. So to my uninformed young self, like for many other locals of Emery County, the San Rafael Swell was just the “desert,” a series of variations on uninhabitable emptiness. During the drives around or through the Swell, which seemed interminably long to a child, the landscape, despite its variety, was monotonous in what I perceived as its rocky sameness, not worthy of the slightest break from reading my stack of comic books in the back seat.
Fortunately, the Swell benefits from a geological legibility that makes it easy to read its rocks and appreciate its exceptional stratigraphic arrangement, if one desires to. Moving latitudinally across the Swell, one encounters the same progression of strata, which also vary enough in color, texture, and form to be distinct from each other and recognizable to even a non-geologist’s eyes: entering the Swell from the west, there is Blue Gate Shale, Ferron Sandstone, Tununk Shale, Cedar Mountain Formation, Morrison Formation, Summerville Formation, Curtis Formation, Entrada Sandstone, Carmel Formation, Navajo Sandstone, Kayenta Formation, Wingate Sandstone, Chinle Formation, Moenkopi Formation, and, in some remoter stretches and canyons, Kaibab Formation and White Rim Sandstone. The order is then reversed as one passes the center and crosses back down on the east side of the Swell.
Even without the geological names, the flow of colors from gray to purple to red to green to orange to yellow and so on quickly becomes a familiar pattern. From some of the higher points in the Swell, deep time is horizontally stretched out as a lithic rainbow in front of one’s gaze as the horizon is a series of bands that shift in color as the strata succeed each other. Whether one is speeding down I-70 through the heart of the Swell at 80 miles an hour, kicking up dust on the Green River Cutoff Road through the northern Swell, wandering down shorter segments such as on the Moore Cutoff Road, or exploring one of the many rough roads that cover the southern half, the Swell’s rocks predictably follow this sequence as one moves back and forth across geologic time. When spending any significant time on the labyrinth of dirt roads that are the primary way to access most of the Swell, even the least geologically inclined are forced to reckon with this geological order as the changes in the color of the road also sometimes signify dramatic changes in driving conditions, especially during and after rainstorms, due to the different characteristics of the rocks and sediments from each stratum that compose or cover the road. Today, a quicker lesson on the names of the Swell’s strata can be obtained by driving from Castle Dale to the well-maintained road down Buckhorn Wash, where the county has taken steps towards capitalizing on the local geology with road signs labeling when one enters each stratum.
A wide range of strata and their colors on display while looking west towards Hondu Country in the southern Swell.
Despite its rich geologic offerings, or perhaps because of them, practically no one lives in the Swell today. Indigenous peoples were present in the area as early as 13,000 years ago. Archaeologists have managed to piece together a rough understanding of the sequence of pre-historic peoples who inhabited the Swell or its edges. From the first Paleo-Indians to the Archaic and then Fremont peoples, these cultures formed millennia- or century-long relationships with the land. Though the remains of indigenous dwellings and physical culture are rare in the Swell, rock art is so abundant one starts to expect to discover it wherever one wanders. The sheer number of petroglyphs and pictographs, from the famous roadside ones such as at Buckhorn Wash to obscure ones requiring miles of hiking and searching alongside cliffs, gives the contemporary visitor a strong impression of the length of human presence in the Swell that, while not quite deep time, is in imposing in its depth.
At the time of the first Spanish explorations of the region in the late 18th century, Ute Indians were the primary tribe in this part of Utah. Although “the San Rafael [Swell] had no permanent settlements” when these Europeans first arrived, the Ute Indians likely knew it well from passing through in seasonal migrations or other travels. This nomadic culture might not have conformed to colonial ideas that equate possession of land with permanent inhabitation, but the Utes surely had strong connection to and knowledge of places such as the Swell that they may only have periodically visited. Unfortunately, the eventual coercion of the Ute tribe onto a reservation in northeastern Utah in the late 1800s did much to repress or disrupt this indigenous intimacy with and relation to the land of the Swell. This is not to say it has completely disappeared, and decisions about land use and conservation in the Swell have much to gain from greater inclusion of the Utes and other regional tribes in these processes.
Nonetheless, this colonial removal and erasure of indigenous culture also certainly enabled later visitors to view the Swell as an empty place freely available for their own personal use and exploitation. Cattle ranchers, miners, bootleggers, and even outlaws all have appropriated the Swell for their own purposes over the past two centuries. Books and guides on the Swell take great pleasure in recounting entertaining stories about the adventures of the eccentric western characters who came to occupy or pass through the Swell during this period. These wild and often not verified tales range from cattleman Sid Swasey’s death-defying jump by horse over a 14-foot wide but over 70-feet deep section of Black Box Canyon to Butch Cassidy and his gang using the canyons of the Swell and nearby Robbers Roost to escape from pursuing lawmen after their daring robberies. The boom/bust cycles of the different mining industries, from coal to uranium, also created fantastic stories of individuals who were lured in by dreams of striking it rich from the Swell’s geologic resources but often just as quickly expelled by the harsh land and/or economic realities. Cattle are still free to roam certain sections of the Swell, staring down the 4x4s that drive by, but their human caretakers these days dwell comfortably outside the Swell. So picturesque tales and fields of cow patties aside, it is the collapsing wood cabins, the wrecks of broken-down cars, and the ruins of mining sites that are today the most conspicuous physical reminders of the unorthodox desires that dragged this curious collection of people out into the Swell.
Moccasin petroglyphs etched onto the top of Ferron Sandstone.
There are obvious reasons for the lack of continuous human habitation in the Swell. From its mazes of canyons, mesas, and buttes to its infertile soils and lack of water, the Swell poses nothing but difficulties for navigation and inhabitation. In addition to these practical issues, I would add there is something about the inhumanity of the rock-filled landscape that would seem to ward off even dreaming of permanently settling there. The earliest geologist visitors to the Swell certainly did not hold back in sensationalized descriptions of this world of barren stone. John Wesley Powell passed closely by and briefly visited the Swell on his 2nd trip down the Green River in 1871. Powell described the Colorado Plateau as “a whole land of naked rock.” He also would state it is “a land of desolation, dedicated forever to the geologist and the artist, where civilization can find no resting place.” Shortly after, Powell’s geologist colleague Clarence Dutton offered this even harsher description directly of the San Rafael Swell: “It is a picture of desolation and decay; of a land dead and rotten, with dissolution apparent all over its face.” Later Mormon arrivals shared a similarly dismal view of the region, as one historian writes, “These Utah canyon lands were where Manifest Destiny ran aground, thwarted by angular topography and irredeemable soils. Even the Mormon colonizers who managed to establish villages around its rim considered the region a wasteland, a place that did nothing more than stitch the world together.” So for much of history since the colonization and settling of the West, the Swell has been viewed as an obstacle to pass through as quickly as possible. Today, the 108-miles of I-70 that runs through the Swell from Green River to Salina remain the longest stretch of U.S. interstate highway without services, reinforcing this notion that this is land merely to rush past on the way to locations more sympathetic to human existence.
I grew up in Orangeville, Utah, part of Castle Valley, a narrow north-south strip of very small towns on or near the Highway 10 that runs along the west end of the San Rafael Swell. Whereas the Highway 6 southeast from Price towards Moab can get quite busy with traffic heading from the urban Salt Lake City region to the outdoor and recreational areas of southern Utah, the two-lane Highway 10 remains a relatively quiet road that passes south from Price through the towns of Huntington, Castle Dale, Ferron, and Emery until it connects and ends with the I-70. A tiny handful of markets and humble restaurants dot what really could be considered these villages of Castle Valley, but there is little that would justify any outsider making a detour to them, despite the efforts by the officials of Emery County, which contains both Castle Valley and the San Rafael Swell, to encourage tourism to bring in more income to the county.
With the Wasatch Plateau towering thousands of feet higher on the west, the inhospitable flats and canyons of the San Rafael Swell on the east, Salt Lake City over two hours to the north, and half a state of rocky emptiness to the south, Castle Valley is arguably one of the more geographically isolated places in the country. Growing up surrounded by a land that was empty of humans and mostly impassable, especially in the winter months when the snow-covered Wasatch Plateau becomes hazardous to traverse, I certainly felt like I was living in the proverbial middle of nowhere. From a young age, my siblings and I became acutely aware of our remoteness and began hatching plans to make our escapes to anyplace that felt like somewhere, which for all of us meant attending colleges, none of which, fortunately, could be found near home.
The view west from Orangeville towards the Wasatch Plateau.
The town of Orangeville itself did little to combat this feeling of isolation and vacantness. Orangeville has a population that has historically hovered around 1,000 people over the last century. Living there in the 1980s, I was all too sensitive to the fact it lacked a single restaurant, coffee shop, movie theater, or store except for the local food and gas market. For better or worse, commercial activity did not seem to exist in the town, especially for a child. Beyond school performances such as square dancing at Orangeville’s Cottonwood Elementary School, which I attended, the town’s entire public life revolved around events at the local Mormon chapel, perhaps the only non-educational building of note in the town (the population being so low, the county’s two junior highs and single high school are distributed around other towns up to 15 miles away). Even when these gatherings were secular, such as Boy Scout troop meetings, the location as well as the inevitable prayers and role of religion made them less than welcoming for someone raised as a part of the very small non-Mormon community in the region. Isolation from the religious center of this very religious community ultimately compounded my feelings of geographical isolation from the rest of humanity.
Thankfully, during those years I had two infinite resources to fall back on for company and support. The safety of the rural location meant that even from a young age I could freely wander not just the town but the open space around it by myself or in the company of a friend or sibling. Whether walking up Cottonwood Creek when it was low, hopping the fence in my backyard to explore the nearby fields, or biking into the badlands that seemed to crowd around the town, I was able to immerse myself in the inhuman landscape. Just as important, Orangeville has a small library attached to the corner of the elementary school’s land. So when not venturing towards the edges of the Swell, I was busy reading and dreaming about living in the distant and, to my mind, more exciting places and communities described in the books I checked out in large quantities. One unforeseen consequence of this almost forced commitment to reading was a lifelong passion for literature that stems from this experience of it as being the primary source of experiences of being elsewhere. My eventual obtaining of a PhD. in English Literature and becoming an English professor no doubt also owe their origin to this period of desert exile.
On the Utah Geological Survey map that covers Orangeville, much of the area of the town and its immediate vicinity is labeled as alluvial and surficial deposits, unconsolidated and uncemented material that is generally too recent and potentially fleeting to have a strong geological periodization. Like these Quaternary deposits on which they dwell, the current humans in the region feel like geologic latecomers who have been transported here from elsewhere and whose continued presence is tenuous. Mormons were certainly hesitant to move to Castle Valley, and it was only in 1877 that Brigham Young, partially motivated by the need to consolidate Mormon power in the state against the influx of non-Mormons, ordered a group of followers to settle the area. Hard work and cooperation, reliance on seasonal flows of the creeks that flow down from the Wasatch Plateau, and many irrigation and reservoir projects have allowed for some agriculture to succeed, producing a thin expanse of farming (though mostly just of hay) around the towns that provides a green contrast to the neighboring geology for a few months each year. But the soil, formed from salty ancient sea beds, quickly becomes alkaline and unusable when irrigated. In the summer months when the temperature nears 100 degrees, it is always surprising to see white patches in the fields around the towns that look like snow but in reality are alkaline soils where little grows. As time passes, the future of agriculture and the government subsidies propping it up are in increasingly doubt across Emery County. Coal mining and power generation, the other major local economic industry, has a future equally in doubt as the mines and coal power plants close down and the world moves towards greener energy sources.
Unlike much of the rest of Utah’s towns, where it feels like suburban housing tracts and busy roads have rapidly covered every open space, Emery County’s population has remained stagnant over the last 40 years, so that, besides a few new houses, the towns of Castle Valley feel stuck outside of time. In the 1940s, the small Castle Valley towns of Victor and Desert Lake succumbed to economic conditions and disappeared, leaving not even the usual ghost town ruins. Perhaps I am overly influenced by memories of the dust and dirt that constantly entered into my childhood home and had to be endlessly swept out, but it is easy for me to imagine that today, with even a slight economic decline, the nearby dirt and shale would similarly work to reclaim the Highway 10’s towns.
The view east from Orangeville towards the San Rafael Swell.
No matter how tenuous or temporary their presence has been, humans since colonization and settlement have had a very significant, and generally not positive, imprint on the landscape from these small towns like Orangeville out to the deepest reaches of the Swell. This impact has been nowhere as highlighted as during the difficult fight over the conservation of the San Rafael Swell. Though long proposed as a possible national park, the San Rafael Swell has only very recently been granted the different, and far lesser, status of being a “Recreation Area” that contains a number of “Wilderness Study Areas.” I will discuss this conservation battle and these terms in greater depth in Chapter 5. For now, I would highlight that one of the most common arguments made against designating the Swell a national park or monument was the conspicuous evidence of this already existing human intrusion across the land. There are the traces of mining and cattle raising mentioned already, with the network of roads that were built to accompany them. Yet it is the explosion of the off-highway vehicle (OHV) in the past few decades that has created roads and left human marks in places that even recently would have been too remote and untouched by significant activity to be deeply changed. Despite new efforts to limit OHVs to designated trails and even to reduce the number of those trails, much of the Swell is covered by tracks of vehicles that wander wherever their drivers wish, ignoring harm to animals and soils as well as to the appearance of the land. Backcountry signs about speed limits and sticking to official trails are sometimes so full of bullet holes as to be illegible, violently illustrating locals’ resentment towards any attempt at conservation that might limit their feelings of motorized freedom. Throw in mounds of broken beer bottles and empty bullet cartridges that often are left behind by this crowd, and one can find a viciously scarred landscape rather than pristine wilderness.
Of course, “wilderness” has always been a dubious or incoherent concept, more a myth of colonial consciousness that makes indigenous peoples invisible than anything based in reality. I have no wish to repeat those valid critiques here. As I have already noted, the ample evidence of rock art throughout the Swell should quickly deter fantasies about being a pioneer of untouched, wild lands. But though it may not be easy or even possible to completely escape the realm of human influence, especially in our modern world of weekend crowds of RVs towing ATVs far into the backcountry, moving east from Castle Valley towards the center of the Swell is to take leave from this current human-dominated world and increasingly immerse oneself in an inhuman world of stone formed far back in deep time. One passes through the Cretaceous, into the Jurassic, and finally encounters the towering buttes of the Triassic. A bit of wandering can even take one to the Permian. If one wishes to continue on to the eastern side of the Swell, the pattern is repeated in inverse until, after a dramatic drop through the jagged reef on its eastern edge, one again returns to the present Age of Man (and a paved road).
In what follows, I shall take such a journey from Castle Valley through the Swell, not literally, but intellectually by “dwelling” one at a time on some of the strata such a trip would pass through. Starting with the Swell’s youngest rocks and ending with the oldest, each chapter will focus on just one stratum and use it as the ground for a series of reflections on the environment, art, ethics, and other topics. I frame this approach as a form of strata-graphy. The International Commission on Stratigraphy officially defines a stratum as “A layer of rock characterized by particular lithologic properties and attributes that distinguish it from adjacent layers.” The commission defines the science study of such strata in this manner: “Stratigraphy, from Latin stratum + Greek graphia, is the description of all rock bodies forming the Earth’s crust and their organization into distinctive, useful, mappable units based on their inherent properties or attributes in order to establish their distribution and relationship in space and their succession in time, and to interpret geologic history.” This entire book would not have been possible without the extensive scientific knowledge produced by such stratigraphy. Nonetheless, isolating and emphasizing the suffix “graphy” in the name, the “strata-graphy” I undertake in this project gives more freedom to writing as a creative process that engages with but is not limited to the science of geology. In particular, the writing of rocks I offer explores how geology and geologic history are intertwined with humanity and human history in ways that invite, even require, a more interdisciplinary approach.
Before I further explain what this entails, it might be best to clarify what I am not doing. There are already a number of practical guidebooks for hiking, canyoneering, and driving in the Swell, most notably Michael Kelsey’s Hiking and Exploring Utah’s San Rafael Swell, Steve Allen’s Canyoneering the Norther San Rafael Swell, and Christian Probasco’s Backroads of Utah’s San Rafael Swell. Perhaps even more helpful are the personal websites of backcountry explorers who give detailed descriptions with photographs of specific drives and hikes through the Swell. I make no pretense to be as adventurous, knowledgeable, or risk-taking as the authors of those books and blogs, and, aside from my brief appendix with geology driving routes, in what follows I will offer few detailed itineraries that the reader might attempt to emulate.
With far more literary craft than I could ever muster, Utah’s nature writers such as Craig Childs or Ann Zwinger have beautifully and thoughtfully recounted narratives of trips through the redrock and canyon country of Utah, though rarely directly of the San Rafael Swell. I admire and have greatly benefited from such books, particularly their astute and often philosophical observations about the experience of hiking and the features of the natural landscape. That being said, there are distinct limitations, less for these two well-known examples than those who follow in their wake, to what has become a recognizable literary genre that can struggle to break free from repeating the same descriptions of backcountry mishaps and adventures and general cliches about awe for the environment and the wildlife encountered in it. While drawing from nature writing of this ilk, my writing will depart from this form of detailed accounts of concrete experiences in the countryside. For example, Greg Gordon’s excellent Landscape of Desire is perhaps the most important recent book on the San Rafael Swell and the work that Strata-Graphy most closely resembles. Gordon even titles his chapters after the strata that he passes through and describes on a backpacking trip that includes much of the Swell, on which he offers intelligent and informed observations. However, the work is entirely bound to its linear narrative of a single hiking trip and heavily focuses on his interactions with the undergraduate students who accompany him. As a result, the philosophical and aesthetic questions that the geology raises for Gordon are limited to small asides or digressions from the main backcountry adventure narrative or framed as mini-lectures that he offers to his students in the field.
Instead, here I wish to use each stratum as a schema for organizing increasingly deeper thinking and reflecting about the relations between humanity and geology, the organic and the inorganic, and history and deep time. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, “We think and reckon with stone, primordial invitation to extended cognition.” The diverse lithic material of the San Rafael Swell therefore provides an exceptional opportunity for “extended” thought through the process of writing. In each chapter, I observe one specific stratum in the different places it is exposed across the San Rafael Swell. I then takes these impressions I acquire during these rendezvous with the stones as the starting point for thinking about topics such as the materiality or aesthetics of the rocks, or to reflexively ponder humanity’s own position in deep time and on the planet. At the same time, each chapter also surveys the geological work on the formation and physical characteristics of that stratum. I take seriously the idea that any discussion of rocks must have such scientific work at its center, though it need not remain limited to or completely subservient to what the scientists have established. So in each chapter, the ideas, issues, and emotions unearthed by these personal and scientific encounters with each singular section of the earth will be the foundation for all the intellectual reflections that follow.
Although I come to this landscape and this book with my own set of general (and often abstract) concepts and concerns, I strictly limit myself to what can be thought and written starting from the concrete geological material at hand. I might term this an exercise in geo-philosophy. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud argues, “The calibration of Deep Time is one of the greatest, but least celebrated, intellectual achievements of humankind—a massive, intergenerational, global scientific project.” Yet this revolution in geology over the last two hundred years has not been adequately worked through in our culture. Bjornerud has therefore forcefully argued for intellectually adopting a position of “timefulness—a clear-eyed view of our place in Time, both the past that came long before us and the future that will elapse without us.” Going further, I would argue that the most fundamental philosophical questions about existence, ethics, and aesthetics need to be rethought from or re-grounded in the lessons to be learned from rocks through either encounters with them in the field or from the geologists’ reconstruction of their origins and histories. Or as Helen Gordon reminds us in Notes From Deep Time, “Without deep time we cannot begin to answer the questions ‘Why am I here?’, ‘Where have I come from?’ and ‘Where am I going?’”
View over the emptiness of the Last Chance Desert.
However, the Swell’s strata also have a layer of human history embedded in much of their geology. As a result, any attempt to think through this stone also often requires detours through the quite unusual or unexpected ways humans have been drawn into an interest in the Swell’s rocks. That is to say, the rocks have been either so physically impacted by human activities or so ensnared by the human imagination that digging into the historical stories is unavoidable and necessary for any understanding of the geology as it exists. As I will show, there is a kind of circular causality at work where the geology of the Swell has historically influenced human culture and activities there, which in turn have come historically to greatly influence that geology. Edward Geary’s A History of Emery County, Nancy Taniguchi’s Castle Valley, America, as well as other regional histories of mining and environmental struggles have been my key resources in working through this additional level of historical complexity.
Finally, I have taken a generous and wide definition of the borders of the San Rafael Swell, but I nonetheless limit myself to this area although it has been tempting to draw examples from the spectacular geology and strata elsewhere in Utah. The boundary between the San Rafael Swell and the northern additions of Capitol Reef Park, for example, can seem quite arbitrary. The San Rafael Desert between Canyonlands National Park and the Swell can seem so empty of any kind of landmark as to feel like a void between the two locales that might be ignored. Just a bit further east of Canyonlands, Arches National Park contains so many of the same features of the Swell in far more famous forms as to also encourage getting a bit sidetracked in focus. Arguably, the distinction and division between each of these parks and the Swell is the result more of the contingencies of human settlement and conservation politics than any real difference in the geology and land itself. Nonetheless, I remain committed to a “site-specific” focus, especially because of the precision and depth I believe it allows. Fortunately, the Swell’s strata differ from each other so greatly that traveling even short distances down the Swell’s roads can feel like visiting a series of different national parks on a whirlwind tour. And because so many of the Swell’s strata and its geological and geomorphic characteristics can be found throughout central-south Utah and especially in these national parks, I hope the reader will find this work useful for better witnessing, exploring, and reflecting on any of these places.
As others have noted, the vertical schema of deep time maps easily onto the psychoanalytic model of the psyche, with the geologist’s digging for ever lower strata paralleling the analyst’s attempts to bring the most unknown layers of the unconscious into the light of the conscious day. One might therefore say memoir is always a form of geology of the self. As it works its way through the Swell, Strata-Graphy no doubt participates in these cliches of the genre by excavating scenes from my past in hopes of finding keys to my present self. In particular, in Chapter 1 I will expand the idea that my “geophilia,” my love of and interest in the lithic, stems from my childhood amongst the rocks of central Utah. I hope to explore how this material affinity can lead to an illuminating intimacy between human and rock, organic and inorganic.
While there is always much to be discovered and learned about the formation and structure of one’s subjectivity, it also would be dubious to assert there is some essential foundation or bedrock to the self to be grasped and preserved. Fortunately, the horizontal stratigraphy of the Swell invites also a de-centering of the self, a wandering astray from personhood. Here I must admit that my family spent most of my childhood outside the borders of the Swell, both out of my parents’ personal preference for the lusher fishing lakes of the Wasatch Plateau and the lack of promotion and access to the Swell 40 years ago. Visiting the Swell today therefore provides me an opportunity to broaden my understanding of both the landscape and myself. As I write my way across the Swell’s layers, essential depths can be replaced with expanding vistas on the horizon and new potentials for entanglement with the other-than-human. Rather than a narcissistic propping up of selfhood, this is an opportunity for progressively deeper immersions into the non-living world of stone.
Dust rising from rockfalls from the 1988 earthquake in the San Rafael Swell. Looking south from the Cedar Mountain Viewpoint. Courtesy of Utah Geological Survey.
For example, one of the most dramatic memories of my childhood is the 5.3 earthquake in the San Rafael Swell that startled the citizens of Castle Valley in August of 1988. Though it caused no injuries and almost no physical damage to the towns, the quake and its aftershocks certainly made locals more sensitive to the dynamism of the geology of where they lived. However, this temporary awareness of the earth’s agency was soon brushed aside and life returned to its normal indifference to the Swell’s geology. As a result, the earthquake slipped back into what I would call the geological unconscious, the daily disregard for the inorganic realms misguidedly considered outside of human concern, which would only to be reawakened with the next tremors. Reading the original newspapers stories about the earthquake today, I can more objectively compare my hazy childhood impressions of it to the shaking I have experienced far too regularly living in Los Angeles for the last 20 years. More importantly, studying the geology of the Swell has given me a far greater understanding of the nature of faults and the larger geological forces behind such movements of the earth. Just as a slipping fault caused the 1988 earthquake, millions of years earlier slipping of a reverse fault created the uplift that caused the San Rafael Reef on the Swell’s east side. As Charles Lyell famously explained the principle of uniformitarianism in his Principles of Geology, the present is the key to the past. While I doubt I have any trauma to work through over the goldfish I lost when the 1988 earthquake overturned its aquarium, this ability to see the connections between recent events and those of deep time enlarges my childhood memory to incorporate scales of time and space far beyond those available to my young self.
Although starting with some of my personal experiences of growing up on the edge of the Swell that establish the depths of my material obsessions, the subsequent chapters then follow these material affinities as they flow into broader, more complex, and more abstract investigations about the relationship of humanity and geology. From the economics of coal extraction, to the aesthetics of stone, to the philosophical consequences of deep time and extinction, the later chapters drift further from personal recollections and the memoir genre and make steadily more wide ranging attempts to try to think through and with geology and rocks. So while admittedly starting with material about memories of my childhood hometown that might be almost banal in its familiarity from the autobiographical genre, this book aims to ultimately arrive at the extremes of inhumanity, imagining a communion with the inorganic at the limits of sense and human inhabitability.
Looking west from Mexican Mountain Road.
While committed to this kind of immanent excavating of concepts and ideas from the specific geological material of each stratum, a few overarching issues or topics are repeatedly elicited in what follows, so I might as well be up front about them. The first concerns the distinction between the organic and the inorganic. For the past 60 years, environmentalists have never stopped decrying the dysfunctional and damaging relationship to the world that is produced when humans view their environment as passive material for exploitation. In particular, the designation of the earth as mere inert, inorganic matter is environmentally dangerous as it has enabled industries to destructively extract from or pollute such areas without restraint. Taking an opposite approach, over the past century, philosophers and scientists have also intellectually confronted complex physical processes and forms of self-organization that seem to undermine any absolute opposition of the living and the nonliving. From viruses that lack metabolic processes to nanotechnology that can self-assemble, there is a growing number of examples that seem to disturb any clear distinction between the living and the nonliving. In both cases, there is therefore an acute awareness that the organic/inorganic dichotomy urgently needs to be deconstructed, reimagined, or even just abandoned entirely.
This argument has been made most forcefully and influentially by Jane Bennett through her concept of “vibrant matter.” Bennett argues:
“The aim here is to rattle the adamantine chain that has bound materiality to inert substance and that has placed the organic across a chasm from the inorganic. The aim is to articulate the elusive idea of a materiality that is itself heterogeneous, itself a differential of intensities, itself a life.”
Yet as this passage shows, this attempt to think the organic and the inorganic on a continuum risks reducing the latter to the former by thinking everything in terms of life or the human. Bennett is aware of this danger, seeing it as a useful but temporary first step with important ethical and political possibilities. By bringing the inorganic conceptually closer to the organic, she hopes we can obtain a deeper and more respectful understanding of the former. Influenced by Bennett and similar writers, and combined with a greater sensitivity to the contributions of indigenous thinkers, recent environmental writing has almost completely embraced this framework of treating inorganic matter like stones as alive and having agency. This extension of the characteristics and categories of the living to the nonliving has certainly enabled a burst of creative narratives on subjects that have been too long neglected. Nonetheless, there remains the risk that rather than allowing one to escape from the solipsistic bubble of humanity, the concept of vibrant matter merely expands that bubble by making all of reality a bit all-too-human. That is to say, it makes the inorganic too familiar and relatable, in effect wiping away the questions, difficulties, and distinctions that should instead be the starting point for thinking.
While I will not always escape these tendencies, especially when the Swell’s rocks encourage such an approach, I would instead overall like to try to reverse this line of thinking. By engaging with and writing on the rocks of the Swell that are so dramatically inhuman and unalive, I aim for connection with the geologic that, if anything, risks sublating the organic into the inorganic, or to think life in terms of the non-living. Rather than treating all of matter as living, I would like to investigate how geology can lead us to rethink our self-image of being alive. Neither reaffirming nor sweeping away the opposition between the organic and the inorganic, I will explore how each comes to subversively express or mimic the characteristics of the other while always maintaining a minimum difference that prevents the complete identification of the two.
The urgency of this topic that Bennet rightfully singles out is largely due to the mushrooming debate about the Anthropocene, a term meant to indicate that human beings are now a geological force on the planet. From nuclear waste that will not disappear for millions of years to accumulation of plastic in the ocean to alteration of carbon levels in the atmosphere, human beings are impacting the planet in ways that will be apparent in the geological record far into the future, even past the potential extinction of the species. The idea of the Anthropocene has spread from its geologist origins rapidly across almost all academic disciplines and widely into public discourse in the last few years, evolving so quickly and being debated so intensely as to almost have burned up its usefulness or at least much of the enthusiasm it initially generated. Even with the recent decision by The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) to reject officially naming our epoch the Anthropocene, the term is sure to live on and thrive. The numerous journals, conferences, and organizations using the name are unlikely to simply rebrand and rename themselves, and the massive amount of intellectual and creative work that has already used the concept has become an unavoidable cultural inheritance at this point. And many still hope that the geologists of the IUGC can be persuaded to reverse their decision.
No matter how one feels about the name or its accuracy, the Anthropocene label, or one’s preferred alternative, remains valuable for helping to force humans to be more aware of and rethink their relation to the geologic. If the geologic period may be named after humans, then perhaps humans need to start thinking on the scale of geologic periods. In particular, our multitude of contemporary environmental crises, most notably global warming, challenge people to innovatively broaden the horizon of their concerns past the human and to reconfigure their everyday practices and even academic disciplines into more sustainable, earth-grounded ones. Doing so requires reconstructing a sense of humanity’s place on the planet that is no longer one of domination and exploitation of nature and the earth but, as Donna Haraway argues, one of entanglement-with or becoming-with the non-human. In many of my chapters, my discussion of the stones of the Swell is therefore framed as an intervention in or contribution to these larger and timely debates circling around the Anthropocene and the general relationship of humanity and geology.
Simplified Geological Map of the San Rafael Swell. Taken from Chidsey.
To complete my researching and writing of the Swell’s strata required a methodology and tools that are quite different than those typically used in the humanities. While I stopped at practically all the official roadside viewpoints and completed many of the best hikes in the Swell, neither would have been adequate to survey the geology of the area. Since each chapter focuses on just one stratum, I needed to find that stratum wherever it was exposed on all four sides of the Swell to fully account for its diverse manifestations, which can vary greatly due to differences in the material composition at each location, the effects of geomorphology, and the overall causes and type of each exposure. In one of its foundational conservation documents, the Utah Wilderness Coalition praised the Swell by writing, “the oldest rock formations are exposed in the core of the Swell, surrounded by concentric rings of younger rocks which radiate outward like waves in a pond.” In reality, the rocks are exposed in a far less regular and reliable manner, with some areas being exposed for many miles or with great verticality, and other areas being relatively small or flat or completely buried under other strata or surficial deposits.
Geological maps have therefore been one of the central tools for every step in researching and writing this book, from initial trip planning, to use while in the field, to reference while writing afterwards. Due to the rocks’ value for both mining and tourism in the state, the Utah Geological Survey (UGS) arguably is the most user-friendly geological bureau in the country. For example, the UGS has produced an online Interactive Geological Map Portal, which, by combining data from all of the agency’s geological maps, allows the user to zoom in on any part of the state to see the geology, even allowing one to click on the colors to read the geological description of each stratum. Cell phone signal is not reliable throughout most of the Swell, so print copies of these maps were needed when out in the field. Fortunately, the UGS Map & Bookstore in Salt Lake City has a near complete collection of books on the Swell and Utah’s canyon country, and it also has a thorough collection of topographic and geological maps for the entire state. Throughout many a dusty mile down the back roads, the Huntington quadrangle and San Rafael Desert quadrangle geological maps I obtained from the store lay scattered across my passenger seat, my only companions (besides the rocks) for days at a time. Another copy of these maps was also posted on the wall above my writing desk as both a constant reference and inspiring image.
These maps show where each stratum is exposed, but they give little information about just how the exposure might appear. As a result, my preparations also involved spending far too much time scrolling through Google Earth one inch at a time on maximum magnification to gain insights on where the stratum might be of most interest. The poor quality or relative lack of roads in the Swell was a further complication. Bad road conditions such as mud, deep ruts, and washed-out sections meant it took repeated attempts to reach some locations, and some roads remained impossible to drive. Furthermore, even combining driving to the ends of roads (or where they are no longer passable) with long, often off-trail hiking (adhering to principles of Leave No Trace, of course) to locations I located on the geological maps, I faced the reality that much of the Swell remains so remote and rugged that its rock exposures cannot always be reached, at least not during certain seasons or without substantial risk. This seclusion was frustrating for my research, but I take comfort in the knowledge that much of the Swell’s remarkable geology that is evident on the geological maps will long remain untarnished by human beings, including myself.
Crop of UGS map showing the progression of strata from the Blue Gate Shale on the western edge of the Swell through the Carmel Formation on the eastern edge of the map.
I bring up these details not just to describe the difficulties of the process of planning and navigating but also because I believe that geological maps allow a unique relationship with the landscape, one worth elaborating on. It must first be acknowledged that these maps do have a tainted history. Geology’s historical entwinement with colonialism and extraction means that its surveys and the documents and maps they have produced have served or reinforced ideologies and practices that deserve criticism and resistance. Rather than neutral, objective representations of the land, geological maps have generally been historically oriented to serve government territorial claims and mining industries, with many negative consequences to not only the land but also people due to both aims. Kathryn Yusoff has even forcefully argued that entire the discipline of geology, from its methodologies to terminologies, has colonial and racist frameworks deeply embedded in it that require criticism and constant vigilance when used.
Despite their potentially dubious origins, functions, and ideologies, these geological maps nonetheless remain available for (mis)appropriation for aesthetic and intellectual purposes that run counter to or exceed their intent. On the most basic level, geological maps provide a more scientific gaze that allows one to better witness and appreciate the rocks in front of one. Especially for anyone who is not a professional geologist, they allow one to name and make distinctions between different strata of rocks, and often provide additional information about the characteristics and histories of those differentiated rocks. Although it would seem to undermine any more immediate experience of the land and potentially reinforces an objectifying vision that reduces rocks to inanimate matter, the use of these maps can therefore be a necessary entryway into what can become an expanded understanding and experience. In this sense, the geological maps expand on the appeal and scope of the Roadside Geology books and other series which for their readers transform the often nondescript landscapes around them into specific rocks with their own histories in deep time. In fact, as a result of working on this book, I find myself unable to travel anywhere these days without doing some research in such books or on geological maps to determine just what lithic material I will be encountering, even if it rarely is as breathtaking as that of the Swell. Just as I am a voracious reader of books, I have, with the help of the text of geological maps, become a voracious reader of rocks.
The geological maps’ mediation of one’s experience of the landscape also is a key part of broadening our valuation of geology in whatever form or scale it offers. As I will discuss more in the following chapters, Utah has been exceptional in successfully drawing tourists to visit its geology. For much of the world, in fact, the state is entirely understood through the framework of what is best termed geo-tourism. However, these tourists are mostly all drawn to the same famous sites at the same famous national parks and monuments, with the crowding and destruction of wilderness such concentration almost always entails. The rise of social media and its influencers has compounded these issues by even more greatly condensing visitors into ever narrower locations that are deemed valuable for “content creation.” All of this is perhaps the inevitable, technologically-accelerated end game of our inheritance of romantic views of nature that define what scenes are beautiful or sublime enough to deserve recognition and reproduction.
In what follows, I, too, will make visits to some of the more famous geological spectacles of the Swell and nearby regions such as Goblin Valley and Factory Butte, as these are undeniably dramatic formations of specific strata I am discussing. But, through the use of geological maps, I have made a committed effort also to approach the Swell in a more egalitarian mode that sees potential interest in any strata locale, even those that lack any reputation, that may seem more minor, and that some might even find unremarkable. The geological maps did often surprise me by taking me to outcrops that were just as impressive as those with reputations, making it clear just how much amazing geology there is in the state that remains overlooked. In the best cases, these outcrops were so unique that they gave me unexpected new ideas and insights that never would have arisen elsewhere. Just as often, however, the outcrops were undistinguished at first glance, being unremarkable piles of rocks. Nonetheless, this apparent lack of traditional elements of interest provided a valuable challenge that, as will be seen in many of the following chapters, tested and even transformed the intellectual and aesthetic frameworks I brought to the task of understanding and appreciating the stones.
Rockhounds have long used geological maps in this manner to track down locations that would have little appeal to most but that promise the possibility of finding geological “riches.” Many of the best collecting sites for stones such as agates and jaspers are seemingly random hills or patches of land that have little or no visual distinction and that no one would ever visit otherwise. For example, one of the better-known jasper collecting sites near the Swell is by the Highway 24 south of Green River where it cuts across the San Rafael Desert, an empty stretch of land that only a flat tire would make anyone pause at but which the rockhounds have explored quite thoroughly. Like these rockhounds, I have tried to use geological maps and the scientific knowledge they condense and contain to steer me to places in the Swell that are often stunning but just as often require the construction of a different kind of vision or thinking to be appreciated. I hope that by the end of this project the reader, too, will feel so motivated to use geological maps to render the land around them universally intriguing and worthy of closer inspection and even respect.
Whereas those rockhounds have the acquisitive aim of finding beautiful or valuable rocks that can be carried home, I have resolutely limited myself to collecting only photographs of the wonderful rocks I have encountered in my geo-philosophical “survey” of the San Rafael Swell’s strata. Beyond just the immediate pleasure I hope these photographs provide for the reader, I have found the ample inclusion of images a necessary feature of this book for a few reasons. While geologists over the last two centuries have developed a dense and thorough vocabulary for the complete spectrum of geological phenomena, many of these geology terms will have little meaning or present no clear picture to the general reader. Pairing these words with a visual illustration, however, can better allow the reader to benefit from the scientific precision the former should convey. In addition, the strangeness of the Colorado Plateau that draws in so many visitors also makes a written description often inadequate to successfully illustrate such geologic singularities. Yes, there are buttes, mesas, canyons, arches, and the usual geological characters, but such words, no matter how refined with adjectives and figurative language, will always struggle to convey the wonder of the real things as they appear in Utah. Part of this issue is also representing the unique form of each of these features. In my chapters I will give an overview of the general features of each stratum, such as its color, texture, and typical forms. But as I discussed above, I also will explore the diversity of the stratum’s outcrops across the Swell, and those differences can be even harder to capture with words. All this is to just admit that it always remains difficult to write about rocks. One doesn’t need a complete philosophy of language to posit that our human-centered language and the complexity of the geological world make photographs invaluable supplements. The suffix “graphy” also can mean drawing or representing, so Strata-Graphy is not just a writing but an imaging of the Swell’s strata.
Yet even if I could find the words perfectly matched for the Swell, I would still wish to include photography. If may be briefly a bit naïve, I simply love the stones of the Swell and feel awe every time I am near them. Countless times I turned a corner on a road or a trail in the Swell and was simply overwhelmed by the geology I found on display. Feeling the stones under my feet while walking or in my hands while climbing up them, I often had a tactile intimacy with the material. The crunching sound of pebbles being stepped on, the whining wind that sometimes made walking miserable, the echoes of my voice when alone in the slot canyons, and the silence that was so easily attainable: the Swell’s stones also reliably provided aural accompaniment. I will write more in later chapters about what can be gained from such a phenomenological encounter with geology. For now, I would just admit I consider myself a geo-aesthete, someone particularly affected by a sensuous appreciation of the stones. While I may spend a great deal of time on scientific theories, historical tales, and philosophical ramblings, each chapter regularly returns to and concludes with my experience of being in the presence of the rocks themselves. Although there is no substitute for actual travel to the Swell, photographically representing at least the visual appearance of the strata allows the reader to better appreciate some of those sensations.
Cars driving down I-70 where it cuts through the strata of the San Rafael Reef.
I will briefly conclude with some wise words from Terry Tempest Williams, one of the most insightful writers about the landscape of Utah and who lives half the year an hour or so from the eastern side of the Swell. Using Utah’s geology as the foundation for ethical reflection, Williams in her book Erosion writes, “We are eroding and evolving, at once. Let this be my mantra to be repeated daily. What if beauty dwells in the margins of our undoing and remaking?” What follows in Strata-Graphy is such an attempt to remake my self-image and the image of humanity through a reckoning with the geologic and geomorphic processes that have made and are unmaking the San Rafael Swell and its surroundings.