That Sinking Feeling

That Sinking Feeling

    There's a certain feeling of safety when one walks upon a surface as solid and as ancient as the rocks of where we were hiking in Sedona, Arizona.  Our first time here, we felt as home in this area as when we would visit the southern part of our own state, Utah.  The geologic similarities were striking, the layers of sandstone and clays that camouflaged the millions of years they took to form as well as the eroded surfaces that looked so impenetrable now beaten back by the isolated winds and rains that arrived well before us humans.  But we would soon discover (as we did in Arches National Park), that what may appear to be something solid may often prove to be a false comfort.  Within a short distance on our trail we encountered a sinkhole, the acidic rain coupling with the runoff water underground to create a weight too difficult to support...the surface we were now walking upon.  One sees this in other parts of the world, the news covering such anomalies when a car or a home gets "swallowed" by a sinkhole in a city.  But out here, the towering cliffs and walls surrounding us had only to peer down and picture their fate   Quite likely, they would succumb not only to forces from above, but to forces from below as well.

  Sinkholes are usually aided and created by the right type of rock resting below as exemplified by this explanation from the U.S. Geological Service: Sinkholes are common where the rock below the land surface is limestone, carbonate rock, salt beds, or rocks that can naturally be dissolved by groundwater circulating through them.  As the rock dissolves, spaces and caverns develop underground.  Sinkholes are dramatic because the land usually stays intact for a while until the underground spaces just get too big.  If there is not enough support for the land above the spaces then a sudden collapse of the land surface can occur...The most damage from sinkholes tends to occur in Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania.  Looking at the map graph below, we were standing over sinkhole country.

Map graph from USGS

    We were certainly not alone here, nor were we the first to be in this area.  This area was pocketed with caves and pseudo-caves, collapsing pillars of rock being eroded to create an arch or a hollowed section in a cliff wall.  Some of these had indeed been used as homes for ancient Native Americans, their cities and ways of living now left to the bits of pottery and the ruins that archeologists could discover and work to piece together.  How large were these communities and for many of the scientists and historians the question became, what had happened to many of them?  Some, such as the Anasazi, simply vanished, their known and rather large populations simply gone without much of a trace.  Was it water or a lack thereof, or a conquering tribe or an introduced disease?  Whatever it was, why was there so little record or evidence of their hsitory or their reason for leaving?

    One had only to wonder if perhaps these "ancients" simply had a better understanding of the earth's forces and the way the earth worked.  For even as my wife and I stared at the distant pillars and towers in the distance, the layers upon geologic layers piled atop one another were still millions of years old.  Besides us and the recent plant life, there was little here that could be measured in the tens or even hundreds of years.  And the sinkhole was no exception, the tertiary lava flow decorating the tops of the cliff walls were no younger than 8 million years old, the limestone beneath it (just one layer down) jumping back to 180 million years in age. 


   The wind and water would continue unabated, blowing and carving through whatever path they could, innocently watching the rock walls come and go as easily as did the ocean before it.  And as we walked along parts of the path, my stick would tap a section of rock and return a hollow, echo-y sound.  Underneath our feet were likely future sinkholes to come.  Indeed, the earlier sinkhole we had viewed (the first photo above) increased in size by 40% when another adjoining area collapsed...in 1989.  Time offered no assurances.  And the further we walked, the more we realized that we might be walking in one giant sinkhole, for perhaps the entire area might have been as tall as the rocks around us.  Perhaps the high caves we saw in the distance were once just steps away from level ground at some point.  This scenario was unlikely but who was to say?  Did the ancients watch cities vanish before them?  Was the area we were so in awe with merely a haunting area that had buried its past?  Truth be told, there was little here, not mosquitoes or even bees, the only forest residents we witnessed being the occasional fly or the stray sparrow the sum total of which we could count on a single hand.  Was it the altitude or our loud walking and talking or a basic fear of humans or just the time of year we were here?  Or was it something more?  There was life here for sure, the cacti and juniper trees still blooming and producing both flowers and berries.  And as if to reassure us, there was the occasional bit of dung on the trail...bear dung.  Something was out here, perhaps not in grand numbers or at least not in the large numbers that might have been here before...but it was here.  Lives earlier had left, and life was continuing on without them...and somehow, we were hiking and finding an odd beauty in it all.  Perhaps we too would disappear as mysteriously as they did and centuries or millenia hence, others would be viewing an entirely new landscape and wondering where the cliffs were that their own archeologists had found evidence of.  And maybe, just maybe, someone might come to realize that we may have simply just sunk out of sight.   

Presumed bear scat filled with undigested juniper berries