It is good to be back in Colorado. Oh, I could show you pictures of beautiful Thai beaches where I spent my last couple of days in Thailand. Beware, the temperatures were over 100 degrees and the water temperature was like bathwater.
Those of you who are used to the cold and snow might appreciate a bit of a break. Those of you down below, enjoy your spring flowers and pollen showers. We still have some time to go up here.
My girlfriend’s son and nephews. First time her son has been in (or seen) salt water. He says he prefers being in a pool, though I tried to convince him it’s fun and challenging to play in waves. He doesn’t like the taste of the water, and I don’t know how much he might have swallowed.
Colorado may be experiencing variety of political challenges, as well as some fun non-political things, and I’ll leave you with one fun story before I turn it over to you. Next week, I promise a rundown of politics, but please, just one more week before I have to submerge myself in the political muck.
Castle Rock mystery solved!
I don’t know if you might have seen this back in February in the Colorado Springs Gazette, but it just came across my news feed and I enjoyed reading it.
As an associate of Longman’s, James Hagadorn, put it: “Mother Nature usually renders conglomerate into a pile of rubble.”
And yet there’s that castlelike landmark and regal relatives, very much intact across the Front Range.
Longman, Hagadorn and another Denver Museum of Nature and Science associate, Joan Burleson, recently published a study addressing a mystery as old as the 36 million-year-old Wall Mountain Tuff. That refers to the rock layer before Castle Rock Conglomerate that formed from mineral-rich, volcanic debris left by eruptions around the modern-day Sawatch Range.
Through the intense scrutiny of an Olympus Vanox microscope, researchers determined opal to be coating the conglomerate’s inner grains and pebbles. Around the opal, they noted encasings of crystalline chalcedony.
”Like a rind on an orange,” Longman called the layers in a news release — responsible for “cement(ing) these particles together to make the rock harder than most concrete.”
I’ve wondered why those formations exist, but I have always just presumed it was some hard rock like granite that had been surrounded by softer rock that eroded away. This study says otherwise. If you like geology or you just want something to talk about as you drive up or down I-25, this could be it.
Well, enjoy this article, please tell me what’s going on in your worlds, and I promise, next week will be politics. Until then, enjoy the sunset.
The floor is yours...