Crystal Lakes [AAW02] — About a Walk

Fall is hiking season. Summer crowds and heat are gone. The trailhead parking area contained exactly one other vehicle when we arrived just before sunrise on a weekday morning. A short way up the trail the sunrise lit up Longs Peak and the last bit of golden Aspen leaves in upper Horseshoe Park.

Longs Peak from the trail to Crystal Lakes.

"Longs" in Longs Peak is really not a typo. It's not grammatically correct, but it's not a typo. It is named after Major Stephen Long so an apostrophe "s" is grammatically correct. However, it seems that mapmakers have a long standing agreement not to include apostrophes in geographic place names. A further digression:

“Since its inception in 1890, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has discouraged the use of the possessive form—the genitive apostrophe and the “s”. The possessive form using an “s” is allowed, but the apostrophe is almost always removed. The Board’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.

[...]

Myths attempting to explain the policy include the idea that the apostrophe looks too much like a rock in water when printed on a map, and is therefore a hazard, or that in the days of “stick–up type” for maps, the apostrophe would become lost and create confusion. The probable explanation is that the Board does not want to show possession for natural features...”

— http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/faqs.htm

So, the Major does not own the peak. It's merely named after him. And maps are ungrammatical.

The trail climbs up the lateral moraine along the side of the main valley then enters the hanging valley of Roaring River. There was a "high flow event" (flood) here a few decades ago due to an"extreme precipitation event" (rain storm) that breached a dam built to retain irrigation water before the park was established. The resulting alluvial fan caused by the scouring of the Roaring River valley is now the "Alluvial Fan" tourist attraction in the lower valley. The Park Service built a nice little road up and over the fan so you don't even have to get out of the car. Well, in fairness, the road existed first and was covered by the debris of the alluvial fan.

Early on among the boulders deposited on the moraine we catch up with a grouse walking up the trail keeping only a few feet ahead of us. She seemed to be in no hurry. She turned off the trail and posed on a boulder.

The trail finally leaves the trees just below Lawn Lake and up above Lawn Lake is The Saddle - a broad pass over the ridge providing access to several peaks in the area.

The trail skirts the north side of the lake then gently climbs up to the Crystal Lakes - Saddle trail junction.

Crystal Lakes and Saddle trail junction.

The recent snow has blown into depressions and settled in the leeward sides of boulders and krummholtz. The trail is easy to see - it is covered with snow while the rest of the tundra is red and brown of fall.

The snowy scene at Crystal Lakes might seem chilly, but we were enjoying a nice warming chinook so the mid-50s temperatures, mostly sunny skies and a slight breeze at our location made it a very comfortable day.

We enjoyed the view and a bit of lunch until forced to leave by schedules and responsibilities. So begins the long march out.

After the beauty of the tundra and rugged ridge lines, walking back through the trees can be a bit of a chore. The irony that walking downhill is harder than walking uphill, is never lost on me. And, although pretty in their own right, gray tree trunks don't favorably compare with alpine views. In this part of a walk my mind is either occupied with a specific topic or totally clear and open to the experience. Today it was occupied with the exhumation of the rockies. Or, as typically written "The Exhumation of the Rocky Mountains."

Until relatively recently, at least in geologic time, the present day rocky mountains, the ridge and valley topography did not exist. The rocks making up the peaks were covered by younger sedimentary rocks. The same sedimentary rocks that exist in the plains to the east. Most of this sedimentary cover, and significant amount of the metamorphic rock underlying it was removed by erosion during and following uplift associated with plate tectonics. Vertical uplift estimates range from around 5 to about 8 kilometers[1] over the Paleocene-Eocene time period (66-34 million years before present).

As the layer cake stack of rocks were uplifted, streams, rivers, wind, glaciers - and streams and rivers and wind flowing from glaciers - moved an immense volume of rock little bits at a time. The result of all that erosion, the erosional remnants, are the mountains, ridge lines and valleys. It is not that the mountains existed under the sedimentary cover prior to exhumation. Erosion formed them during exhumation. It's a hell of a thing to think about. Walking around in a spot that used to be covered in bedrock and is now littered with the bits and bobs left after a huge excavation and removal project completed over an immense span of time by natural physical processes operating at the surface of the earth.

The last and most visual bit of sculpting occurred during the Bull Lake (about 200,00 to 130,000 years before present) and Pinedale (about 30,000 to 10,000 years before present) glaciations or "Ice Ages". The cirque of Crystal Lakes, the swooping ridge line of The Saddle got their current forms during these glacial events. Until very recently, in deep time anyway, the landscape was very different. Landscapes seem permanent. They are only ephemeral.

Our everyday experience of landscapes, even over the long human-time that we have been walking around and living on the landscape, makes them seem relatively static. Near the end of Pinedale humans first walked in this area. The climate, animals and vegetation were different, but the general form of the landscape was as it is today. Solid evidence of Paleo-Indian habitation in the area extends back to at least 11,000 years before present. Next week's post will be about a walk in one of the most famous areas known to have been inhabited by Paleo-Indians at the end of Pinedale. It is just a few miles away.

[1] Fan, M., and B. Carrapa (2014), Late Cretaceous–early Eocene Laramide uplift, exhumation, and basin subsi-dence in Wyoming: Crustal responses to flat slab subduction, Tectonics, 33, doi:10.1002/2012TC003221.