Wind

[I originally wrote this in November 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing.]

Wind and water together sculpt the land. The effects of water are to be seen everywhere land appears more level than normal. Wind preys on the spaces between bunch grasses and shrubs where soils can dry.

Saturday the Rock Queen and I went driving west from Albuquerque in search of agate, oblivious to the winds that had developed in the city after the rain had moved through there in the morning. Let it not be said that a rock hound can be deterred by mere weather.

We first noticed a completely bare hill on the south side of I-40 where the dust was rolling a few inches above the surface like water running over a flat stone. We dismissed it as the work of man, for that hill had not a sprig of vegetation.

As we continued west, the winds grew stronger. The land alternated between fields of bunch grass, exposed layers of sediment, mesas and fragments of dark lava. The sky was only occasionally blue. Even in places where vegetation exists, a fog of dust crept a few feet above the surface, moving in, out and around high points.

We stopped to look for rocks near some odd formation that was near valleys that fed a lowland in a pattern of receding herringbones. On the leeward side where no wind could reach us, the surface of sand was frozen in inch-high waves from some previous wind. Whatever vegetation that had existed there had not survived the drought.

I’ve lived through sand storms in Abilene, Texas, where the dirt was so dense, you had to close your eyes to protect them. Grains got into you teeth. The paint on the car was blasted.

But those storms didn’t have the animate form the winds did yesterday outside Albuquerque. They were simply sheets of dirt moving through, often dense enough to turn the sun silvery at noon. They had none of the sinuous form of tunnels and layers that glided around the mesas and outcrops.

The desolation the universe can create was on full display, but jasper littered the ground.

Note: Pictures are dark because I didn’t set light openings correctly on the camera, not because the sand blocked out the sun like it would have in Abilene.