The Eastern Sedimentary Block Of Mount Elden

Heart Trail

This post was originally published on rockychrysler.com in June 2015.

The following was written and submitted by me "in partial completion of the requirements" for a Geology For Teachers course I took at Northern Arizona University in the summer of 2004, during what is probably best characterized as the second-phase (of four, I think) of my 20+ year-long post-baccalaureate academic career at NAU.

The paper is about some of the really interesting non-volcanic, sedimentary geology found on the eastern end of Mount Elden that's conveniently bisected by the Heart Trail*.

After I completed this paper, I uploaded it to Wikipedia where it became the initial kernel for the site's Mount Elden topic.  I'm pleased to report, much of my original content is still intact to this day.

The descriptions and photographs below are based on observations that I made along the original Heart Trail in the summer of 2004. 

* Beginning in 2019, the entire trail was rebuilt at a new, less-severe grade and on a lengthier and more sustainable alignment.  Despite these changes, all the geologic features referenced below can still be observed at the general elevations indicated below, however the approximated distances between features may vary given the changes to the trail.

 

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An Overview of the Geology of the Eastern Sedimentary Block of Mount Elden

A paper submitted in partial completion of the requirements for 
GLG 599

Middleton

30 September 2004

Ode to a lesser peak

This article was originally published in Mountain Gazette magazine #166 - Spring 2010

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“He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock that shadows a dry, thirsty land."

Fanny Crosby, 1890 

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I watch the rocks.

From my desk at work, all day long, year-round, for 14 years I’ve watched the rocks of Mount Elden, one of Flagstaff’s lesser landforms, out the windows of my classroom.

Little has changed.

Again today, as it always has since I’ve known it, this mountain compels me: Come.

Three seasons of the year, for the better part of the past two decades now, I’ve ridden its trails home each day, a few miles of amazing boulder-covered, dacitic, woodsy singletrack with inspiring, evocative names like: Spring, Tree, Fat Man’s and Forces of Nature.

Along the way, I’ve sat near small trickling springs and watched birds, butterflies and bees drink and fight and fly away home. I’ve watched huge, complicated rain-borne waterfalls form and dissipate, both in the short span of minutes. I’ve taken refuge beneath overhanging rocks, huddled in narrow pockets while riotous storms roiled and lightning flashed close by.

Climbing aimlessly among its cracks and crags, I’ve found mysterious ancient glyphs and dark caches strewn with thick smoky potsherd.

Once, I saw a lion with her kit.

Let's ride bikes for re-creation!

 "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Henry David Thoreau

"I thought of that while riding my bicycle."
Albert Einstein
commenting on the origins of the theory of relativity
(and also me, commenting on the origins of this blog post)

I have a good heart, for which I am ever grateful.

I mean that, of course, quite literally. 

But also metaphorically.

After months and months of effective and uplifting professional therapy, thousands of sincerely self-reflective written words (Thanks, cannabis!), scores of interesting conversations with many also-divorced men and women, the earnest support of my good friends and loving family, aaaand a few undeniably clarifying microdoses of psilocybin, I'm beginning to feel like I'm drawing nearer to being able to view myself, at the very least, as someone somewhat partially-restored, re-created in fact, a newly viable human being (albeit perpetually of the work-in-progress variety now), less consumed by sadness, regret, and self-loathing than I have been for some time.

Let's also add hundreds of bike rides alone in the woods to that list. In fact, let's put them somewhere near the top.  

Because every single one of the bike rides that I've been on in the last 20 months has helped my healing immensely. 

An unironical inverse ordering of sundry broken things

My father always said, "If it's a problem that can be fixed with money, it's not really a problem." 

He was, for much of his life, a person of some means, however, so this was a fairly simple thing for him to be able to say. Nonetheless, I get it.  There are problems in this life that cannot be fixed, no matter how much money you have.  Real, heartbreaking, chronic, sometimes fatal problems.  I understand this difference all too well.

I, unlike my father, am not a person of means.  To that end, I, personally, have found that the compounding effects of encountering many broken things in a short span of time can be challenging, despite the fact that many of those things are, indeed, fully reconcilable assuming you're willing/able to spend of the appropriate amount of money to purchase a solution.  

Which is to say, most but not all of my recent problems have been of this type, the kind that can be fixed with money.

Below is a list of a few of the recent challenges I've faced, described in inverse order of the impact the broken thing had on my emotional and/or financial well-being, from least to greatest...

The Settlement Of The Night Monster

[audio]

This post was originally written and published at rockchrysler.com in July 2013.

What follows is a true tale, or at least as true a tale as I am able to tell of it these days, so many years later, about a trip I took to the Galapagos Islands with my grandparents when I was 10 years old in 1977. It is a tale based, at least in terms of its sequence and style, on this poem which I wrote for Beckian Goldberg's ENG 200-something Introduction to Creative Writing poetry workshop as a sophomore at Arizona State University in 1987.

The photos below are also mine, taken by ten-year-old me with my prized Kodak Instamatic camera.

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"Yes, the night monster will settle there and will find herself a resting place."

Isaiah 34:14b

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Santa Fe Island, Galápagos
27 October 1977

It was a sharp knife, much sharper than most ten-year-old boys would tyically be allowed to possess.

And it was the right knife, too, its stainless three-inch-long blade and array of Swiss-army implements perfect for carrying confidently in one's front pocket all day long, especially on a grand, far-away excursion such as this.

The fish, lying on its side on the deck, a large trolling-hook pinned in its lower jaw, also gauged the sharpness of the boy's knife; its wide, unblinking eyes betrayed its awareness, as it gaped and gasped in desperate need of oxygen. It needed to die, wanted to now.

"Kill me," the fish told him.

Let's work at the local bicycle shop!

This post was originally workshopped on my Instagram and in the Fifty+ Years Old forum at mtbr.com.

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Old-man. Mouthbreather.

I never thought of myself as old. 

Until recently. 

The harsh reality of being me in this moment is that I’m at least 30, and in several cases 40 years older than everyone I work with at the bike shop (except for my good friend, Ken, who owns the place and has a couple years on me). Despite this constant reminder of my ever increasing age, it is, nonetheless, my privilege to toil alongside all of these amazing young people selling this thing (selling an experience, really) that we all passionately, even obsessively love. 

But this work, like all work, is hard work. "That's why they call it Work," my hard-working baby brother is fond of saying.  Retail at the sales-floor level, no matter what you're selling, is super tough and any amount of time spent working on the (concrete) floor during the summer season at Absolute Bikes Flagstaff is guaranteed to be a marathon endeavor. Not only is there a lot to know about each make and model of bike we sell, and an obtuse and thoroughly unintuitive point-of-sale system to master, there's also the simple fact that every customer who comes in through the front door brings with them a unique set of challenges due to their distinct personal peculiarities and predilictions.  

Just about a bike: Surly Moonlander

This is my Surly Moonlander. 

It is a first generation Moonlander, which Surly debuted in 2011, and discontinued in 2016.  This bike should not be confused in any way with Surly's new freaky-deaky ground-up redesigned 2025 Moonlander; they are two completely different bikes.

Actually, technically, this bike is not really mine.  It's a loaner from a good friend who moved away. He asked me, while I was helping him load the last of his family's stuff into their moving-truck, if I would be willing to keep it in my garage, on stand-by, for him to ride whenever he came back to town to visit.

Like I said, he's a good friend, so of course I agreed. Especially after he told me it would be fine with him if I rode it around whenever I cared to. 

In the years that it's been housed here at my place, of course, I have.  Many, many times.

Meantime, my friend, well, I'm happy to say he has been back to visit several times. 

Nonetheless, despite his repeated visits, he's ridden the bike just once... So...