Post 21: Montana Musings F
Glory to Jesus Christ, y'all!
On a writing tear…let's see how long it lasts! 😇
As with the last post, no homework with this one 👏: simply observe, absorb, and ponder. AND…don't forget y'all's God-given common sense and observational powers! Enjoy!
The following series of shots is from our late May Southwest Airlines flight from Bozeman, Montana to Denver, Colorado. No comments from me until after you've looked at them for a bit. No rush.
For those of y'all, unlike myself, who've grown up and continue to dwell in climates where snow is an infrequent or absent feature: snow, when it piles up, compacts from evaporation and recondensation of its ice crystal points into a mass of more closely packed, thus denser, particles.
That pile of particles with time congeals into solid ice with a few air bubbles.
Ice, though it floats on water, is HEAVY. If it's on a slope, it'll start moving downhill like tar.
Because snow initially lands on the very irregular surfaces of soil and rock, when it does its congealing thing, it'll interlock with that soil or rock surface. (If anyone can find a mirror smooth natural surface — obsidian doesn't count! -- I'll eat my hat, with hot sauce! Ice would even stick to mirror smooth anyway.)
A nice big pile of ice on a slope, therefore, will rip off the underlying rock or soil as it moves downhill, like a poorly placed sticky bandage does a scab when removed.
When the process is continuous, as is the case at high-altitude locations, the underlying terrain acquires a jagged appearance.
Thus, the astounding terrain of the Eastern Rockies featured above is the result!
Because downhill-oozing ice droops in the middle bc it has some give, its gouges on the mountainsides are rounded. The remnant land amid the gouges (aka “cirques”) are the peaks (aka “horns”). (For those that wanna impress their friends over filet mignon, the sharp ridges connecting the horns are called “arêtes.” Oui! Oui! C'est vrai!)
(BTW, running water, as in liquid, carves out v-shaped valleys bc water doesn't droop broadly like solid ice, but usually compacts into a narrow stream, unless it's sheet runoff, in which case the slightest irregularity can cause a mini-v-valley to begin forming anyway.)
Thus, the Rocky Mountains, though still snow-covered in late May, show the effects of a much greater and prolonged past piling on of ice that carved that highland landscape: the post-Flood Ice Age. It started very soon after the receding Floodwaters washed off a lot of the initial, not quite hardened, buckled sediment into the vast sediment apron we call the Great Plains. That apron begins roughly at the Eastern foot of the Rockies. Two of the last three photos above show its general start near and under Denver, while the remaining one shows the view across it to the Rockies from Concourse C at Denver International Airport. (Right by the gate where we caught our final leg to Cincy, in fact!)
(Denver International Airport. Concourse C is the closest, with the control tower. We landed at the Left (East) end, and took off at the Right (West) end, the one with the awesome view. Quite the trudge! (Airport pic from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport, with credit for the specific pic to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Murphpics.))
Now, the erosion of the late flood strata is evident in the very wavy-looking pale grayish strata pictured below (far right, middle of edge), with a close-up cropped from the original for better viewing. Their wavy glory is not the result of buckling in this locale — they're still horizontal — but of the receding Floodwaters scouring out the broad valley that they face, plus late to post-Flood streams forming little valleys that make the ground surface of the mountain slope undulating. Ice gouging is visible further upslope. Note that they are not under the Floodwaters-caused sediment apron: that's further East; the pic is looking roughly West.
The advantage of late-Spring snow cover in the process of melting off is that differential melting reveals sediment layers and stream valleys that would not be evident under the deep snow of Winter nor in Summer’s bare ground. (Incidentally, a couple of weeks after our late-May departure, it snowed in the mountains around Butte, but hey, it was only June!)
I invite y'all to ponder the above and similar landscapes through the Great Flood paradigm: things make a lot more sense. The might of God in causing the Great Flood cataclysm, done out of love for the many souls who perished rather than otherwise being damned, as well as His bringing the good of awe-inspiring beauty out of that horrific, nay, VERY horrific, event shows His deep love for us, both the ante-Diluvian victims and us who are now all Noah's descendents, the other lines having been extinguished by the Deluge.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, lead us to all wisdom in these matters!