Postcard Friendship Friday: Bryce Canyon

Today is Postcard Friendship Friday, hosted by Beth at the Best Hearts are Crunchy.

I don't have an Earth Day postcard, but here is a postcard of one of the most amazing parks in the American West (Arches is up there for me too!) Oh heck, they are all amazing. This postcard is actually a new design following the design of the old WPA posters. The artists are Doug Leen and Brian Maebius. I like the receding cliffs and the changes in color, and the artfully placed pine trees.

My previous post describes this series.

Bryce Canyon, according the National Park Service, is a small national park in southwestern Utah. Named after the Mormon Pioneer Ebenezer Bryce, Bryce Canyon became a national park in 1928. The rock type here is actually limestone, not sandstone as I originally thought. The spires of rock seen in Bryce are called hoodoos and are formed by weathering and erosion.

Viridian

PFF: Zion National Park

The back of this card says:"Works Progress Administration (WPA) circa 1939, Artist Unknown. Between 1935 and 1943 the WPA's Federal Art Project printed over two million posters in 35,000 different designs to stir the public's imagination for education, theater, health, safety, and travel. Due to their fragile nature only two thousand posters have survived. The National Park image shown here is also available in the original poster format from many National Park bookstores."

Published by Ranger Doug Enterprises. (1-888-972-7678) Seattle, WA.

I purchased this card and a number of others in this series at the bookstore at the main ranger station in Zion National Park. It was two years ago, and I just found the postcards tucked inside a book of Utah geology. I'll be featuring these cards over the next few weeks. I just love the graphics and the colors.

Someone participating in PFF showed a postcard from Hawaii National Park from Ranger Doug in their previous post. If it's you, please speak up!

It was a beautiful sunny day to walk around Zion, two Aprils ago. But boy it got cold at night - we woke up to snow flurries covering our tents!

Postcard friendship Friday is hosted by Beth at the Best Hearts are Crunchy.

viridian

Geology of Nevada: Postcard Friendship Friday

I have already blogged about my Geology of Utah postcard (on July 3!), so it's time to move on to Nevada. Utah is to the east, Idaho to the north, California to the West. the large areas of orange to the north of Nevada are fairly young volcanic rocks that extend into Idaho. there are some orange blotches to the south too. Note the pink, purple and blue bands oriented north-south, with pale yellow in between. This is the Basin and range part of the North American continent.

[The following information is from a remote sensing tutorial published by NASA.]


Major C.E. Dutton, an early explorer of the American West, described these mountains as they appeared on a map as resembling "an army of caterpillars crawling northward out of Mexico".

Hmm, I see what he's saying. Below is a color - coded relief map (relief: the ups and downs of the landscape) of NV.

The mountains are uplifted parts of older continental crust. This area was being pulled apart, slowly, and the pieces in-between sank lower. The valleys are filled with a lot of sediment that has eroded from the ranges and partially filled them up. This is what the area looks like from the air.
[End quoting]
Some of these peaks are significant. Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park is about 13,000 ft (4000 m) tall. What little rain or snow there is falls on these peaks and so the heights are green with pine trees, even white with snow. It is quite different from the dry, hot, desert valleys in between!

There is a wonderful part of the East Humboldt Range where erosion had sculpted the ridges in amazing ways, and the ridge is so thin that there is a hole right through it! This, of course, is called the Hole-in-the-Wall (or Lizzie's Window), near Hole-in-the-Wall Mountain. Please see this website for hiking in the area. The photos are amazing, but copyrighted, so I am not going to reproduce them here.

Las Vegas is way to the south of the state. Many areas in the middle of the state are very sparsely populated. With renewed gold mining in some areas in the north, population has grown somewhat.
Much more detail from about.com: http://geology.about.com/library/bl/maps/blnevadamap.htm
Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology: http://www.nbmg.unr.edu/

Viridian

Utah: Postcard Friendship Friday

This is an oversized postcard (8 inches by 6 inches) published by the Utah Geological Survey. I really like geology and pick these up when I can. When I send them through Postcrossing, the recipients just love them.

On the left is a geological map of Utah. Each color represents different rock that is exposed at the surface, or near the surface, just covered by soil. Without an explanation the colors mean very little so there is a key in the upper right. Here, different colors represent rocks of different ages. Yes, there is standard color scheme! Yellows are most recent rocks, or sediments recently deposited by rivers. Greens and aqua are Mesozoic rocks (time of the dinosaurs). Blue, gray-blue to brown colors are the older rocks (Paleozoic). Igneous rocks of what ever age get their own bright colors: reds, pinks, magenta. They really liven up a geologic map!

The lower right contains a cross section, as if you cut through the ground, took half away, and saw what was inside. Older rocks are on the bottom, younger on the top, as you might expect.The geology under Utah leads to amazing landscapes. Utah is the home of Bryce and Zion, also Arches National Park and many others. In the north are beautiful mountains and wonderful ski areas.

Happy Postcard Friendship Friday! Check out Marie's site for more.