A Little Bit of Everything...
Trip Start
May 11, 2005
1
160
259
Trip End
Ongoing
Las Vegas,
Nevada,
United States
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Ben wanted me to do a travelpod to fill in the months that have gone by since moving to Vegas. The last entry saw Ben mourning the loss of his friend Edgar who was a really nice guy. Since then he was working 3 jobs and living on a couch in a twenty-something household. I have been getting acquainted with Vegas, a new job and new roommates who are both awesome! I won't go into a lot of detail about it all, but I have put up some photos of the past few months. Some of them would have seen them on Flickr already and some of you haven't.
Most of the photos are pretty self explanatory. There are a few of some parks we went to.
Red Rock Canyon is pretty close to me.
a) San Diego
For much of the past 600 million years the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area was the bottom of a deep ocean basin and the shells & skeletons that lay there were eventually compressed into limestone and similar carbonate rocks. Millions of years later the area was swampy before it turned into a desert.The most significant geologic feature of Red Rock Canyon is the Keystone Thrust Fault. The Keystone Thrust is part of a large system of thrust faults that extends north into Canada and began to develop approximately 65 million years ago. A thrust fault is a fracture in the earth's crust that is the result of compressional forces that drive one crustal plate over the top of another.
Death Valley is the hottest, driest, lowest national park, but it has species found nowhere else. The area that has Badwater Basin in it continues to drop below sea level despite millions of years of salt, silt and gravel washing into it. The mountains nearby force the moisture out of the clouds before they reach the valley and the basins trap heat.
Valley of Fire is a State park. The red sandstone formed from Sand dunes 150 million years ago. There was uplifting and faulting of the area followed by extensive erosion that created the landscape
a1) San Diego with ex Garmischers
. The people that used to live here were 'Basket Maker' people and then 'Anasazi Pueblo' farmers. As a result there is a lot of rock art left behind. It's Nevada's oldest and largest state park.The Hoover dam is a concrete, gravity-arch dam named after Herbert Hoover. It's on the Colorado river on the border of Arizona and Nevada. It took 4 years to build because construction was rushed along to create more jobs during the depression. The first workers arrived on the site in 1931. Many workers died from Carbon Monoxide poisoning in the tunnels building this now controversial dam. To divert the river's flow around the construction site, four diversion tunnels were driven through the canyon walls, two on the Nevada side and two on the Arizona side. These tunnels were 56 feet (17.07 m) in diameter. Their combined length was nearly 16,000 feet (4877 m, more than three miles). It is one of the greatest engineering works in history.
The rest of the photos are from visits to other places with Ben and good times with friends.
The lesson ends there children. I hope you enjoyed class today. If you have any questions please stay back after class. Especially you - you naughty boy...
