Life in an Orogeny
The Legends of My Mountain Valley
Preface:
This work paints some of the geologic and cultural histories of the beautiful Kamas Valley, as initially told through the soul and eye of a deep-water well. One I spent countless hours planning and developing when I was the Mayor of Oakley City. Written originally to promote its water's purity and antiquity, this new story extends to a more protracted chronicle and audience. The shapes of all beauty sheltered in this place are found indirectly within the forces and natures of its living and passionate water resources.
The uncouth and wrenching red tower of well drilling equipment has demobilized from the site—and after a long month of thunderous boring, silence finally falls. Nearly two thousand feet deep, piercing many layers of the subterranean arch of the ancients. Now, all that remains is the lonely worn vestiges of dried, cracked mud, and shattered rock cuttings, lifted to the surface to observe its first flicker of light in hundreds of millions of years.
In the center of the drilling pad, hewn out of the side of Seymore Canyon, rests a large vertical pipe (also painted red), growing out of the ground, about four feet in height. This stub is where the massive torturous drill planted its heave of a sharpened stinger deep into the timeworn—unforgiving earth.
While I sit atop this contraption, water pours from a port on its side, splaying across flats, then down a canyon below. Splitting into long trembling fingers of cold, it empties the life force of its deep onto dry, scorching rocks and sagebrush. Like a yawning wound or syringe in the earth, it bleeds out its history, piece by piece, while nourishing the futures and legends of our long-drawn-out mountain valley.
By tapping into the chills of earth's deep teeming aquifers, we discovered an often-forgotten story of its hard-fought route in darker times as well as its legacy capped by us all. And as so often revealed—the brutality of earth's formation eventually relents in the peacefulness of its purified waters. Far beneath me, flowing upwards through thousands of feet of rock and rusting well casing, I contemplate upon its chronicle against a looming mountain that props up the sky. Peering down currents in the darkening borehole, I sense that every drop of water carries in its clasps the relics and artifacts of some past. A legend filled with many cold springs—too brutal to know or even understand. I purposely cogitate upon these hidden spirits—their essences leaching from their stony homes, which feed into our expansive but still palliative valley below.
In this lucid daydream—I journey in her timely and watery bowels, voyaging far back, about one and a half billion years ago, to the valley's infancy and the tall eastern guardian—the gritty and proven peaks of the Uinta's. A massif born, or more appropriately, recycled from its indefinite progenitors.
The Uinta Mountains, while indefatigable—are born again from the shattered remnants of other ancients, a massive and forgotten range known as the Red Creek Mountains. Fragments still stand—scattered in pockets on its isolated eastern flanks, laying about and disembodied, near the Flaming Gorge Canyon of the mighty Green River. The pickings of these leftovers now compose some of Utah's oldest rocks.
Such a primordial and massive edifice, respirating, perspiring and wearing for a billion years or so on its own. Yet its spin was methodically and slowly eroded—carried away to a naked and more profound nothingness, to patiently await its slow and quiet transformation.
Upon that setting, the Uinta Mountains we see today took shape in earth's antediluvian past. First, within the warm wombs of a newly created trench, more significant in size than the Grand Canyon (nearly 160 miles long by 50 miles wide), it was an abyss—of extraordinary power and capacity. Then—over the next billion years or so, this rift, known as the "Uinta Trough," gradually filled—burdening itself with the shallow water sediments and soups of ancient seas and a stranger life.
As it charged, the heaviness sank this goliath glob of sand to depths of over 25 thousand feet. The teeming primordial goo condensed, compacted, and cemented as it mustered its strength. Strangulated by the expelled heats from deep molten magmas feverishly floating their shifting continental plates—these sandstone concretions underwent an immense metamorphosis, solidifying into case-hardened quartzites and slates. The entirety of the Uinta rock formation slowly took shape. This was known as the Pre-Cambrian period.
Fifty million years ago, the Pacific Ocean tectonic plate powerfully yet methodically rammed itself into the North American plate, and this geological event became recognized as the "Laramide Orogeny." Like heaping bedsheets of earth, the long and dormant monolith of Uinta rock was deliberately thrust up from its grave in the stills of its primeval folding's. Other mountains in the area—like the Wasatch range then followed. And since its early infancy, it became one of only two mountain ranges on the North American Continent to carve itself into a unique but stately east-west alignment.
Continuing onward for many ages, this continual upheaval and collision of plates formed numerous other thrust faults, which surrounded this new and infantile Uinta range. Trapping organic matter was folded and smothered beneath the heaving slides and the shifting of sediments. Then, finally, everything began to congeal gently yet willfully, materializing the north and south Uinta slopes in coal fields and deeper oil and gas reservoirs.
Massive faulting also provided the seedlings, like a mysterious catalyst within voids of fractured rocks—for the fluids of precious and strategic metals, heated by deep magmatic workings, to begin their gradual upward movements. This would become slowly deposited and absorbed into the cooler—parent host rocks above. Such extraordinary condensations created a massively verbose birthing nursery—for the future's veins of a spreading wealth in precious metals.
Nowhere was this more prevalent than in the north and south aligned Wasatch Mountain range to the west. Here they sloped and collided into this east-west bulge, resulting in an intricate structure at their confluence and creating one of America's most magnificent silver and gold mining camps. In a future Park City—many a prospector would silently and covertly lay papered claim to any morsel of this filthy lucre they could extricate from the deepest grasps of the jealous earth.
Five million years ago—the last ice age began to make its final moves upon this surreptitious Uinta range. Erosions by glaciers tore apart the steep citadels and massifs and gouged out irregular valleys. These newly honed watchmen—formed by glaciers, ripping concurrently at all sides, stood afar off like impermeable sentinels, guarding the plays of the main range and its hidden treasures buried securely within.
Like monster steel and wedging crowbars, the freezing and thawing water repeatedly pried apart the stress fractures of rock. Then, peeling its outer layers, it slowly and purposely heaped its rugged dying debris and left rounded the many haystack mountains, giving a unique character to the eroded and present geography of this beautiful, matchless creation.
Reservoirs of ancient waters now fell victim to the trappings of younger carbon-sequestering limestone foundations. Abutting and encircling this Uinta range, like rings of a tree, they contour in ordered displays of their various ages, where they store up their final sustenance of liquified gems.
Water toiled onward to dissolve the weaker parts of these edifices, forming caverns and tendrils of natural pipes. It filled the depths of karst and countless fissures—buried thousands of feet below the surface. Pools that remain cold, pure, protected, ancient, and quiescent—secreted—in a long-dormant reserve to this very day.
Lastly, on our geological scales, just ten thousand years ago, our ice age began to gradually recede. Choked off and dying glaciers left piles of stone and alluvium in sublimations of their wakes. Such glacial moraines formed basins for newer emerging lakes and life, providing the riparian wetlands to brood, nurture, and carefully cultivate and mature the habitats of an ever-evolving consciousness. So again—life dug a deep foothold in the hardening pasts to thrive onward today.
Nourished by water and sun, seedlings retook hold—grasslands and forests—were reborn again. Fertile soils spread, as fashioned from continued erosions in winds and waters and the breakdowns of organic debris. Four thousand years ago, the Uinta's finally began to resemble what we overlook with our tiny cameras and breathe in today.
The nestling Kamas valley also begins its final polish. As the eroded cobble, alluvium, and nutrient-rich soils spread, carried by deluges and torrents of waters from the Uinta's arch, they deposit in smooth and valuable layers. Westward flowing rivers filter into the ground and soak into shallow and spongy organic bogs. The valley becomes our current prairie of emerald fertility which spreads in another realm of nourishing glory.
With a geological scale so immense—man perceives these treasures for only a recent microsecond and, most often—just harshly. After the bear, the elk, the fish, the moose, and the beaver flourished—we entered our place within the mountain's narrow ecosystem, a latecomer and short-timer—to use or abuse in ways which can shape a future or dissolve any hope.
The Indians used only what they needed to survive and toughen for a season. They left little trace, and their footprints now lie faded in the wilderness of time. Later the Spanish forged trails north to take and hide much of this new-found wealth, which those "ancient ones" once held sacred.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, mountain men and trappers gathered in rendezvous upon north-slope plains of the Uinta's. Here the lands were just, fertile, and green, and the wildlife and cool streams were most abundant. Fort Bridger became a much-needed oasis to the enduring struggles and pains of the west's new frontiersmen. The Mormon Trail carried its pioneer sojourners through this self-same area, and their hunger was now fed by an abundant highland of thankful provisions given upon a table of God's good grace.
Geologists with names like Powell, Hayden, and King, surveyed and christened these 13,000-foot peaks while purposefully omitting the many names of local politicians and dignitaries. Prospectors talked about ancient and sacred mines—forever lost within the shadowy hills and legends of dark mine shafts and tunnels. Myths and lies quickly forged around the glowing warmth of smoke-drenched campfires.
In the 1860s, Park City was discovered and settled. Intertwined vaults of silver and gold, hidden for millennia of millennia, are now searched, exposed, and sacked by wily and ruthless treasure seekers. They changed a fertile farming vale and pioneer retreat into the sprawls of one of the largest mining camps in the country.
The transcontinental railroad spun its cold steel along a hack-tied path clinging to the Uinta's north-slope. Such a giving and majestic mountain range continued to bring in signs and notarized papers of modern commerce to Wyoming and Utah.
Back into the newly exposed time machine through drilling into the deeper frontiers, engineers discover the long and the lost—the oil and gas reserves—pools trapped in the over-thrust belt. Along with easily accessible coal, the mountains again fed the rough and tumbled economies, which further spun the energy needs of its constant pioneer growth and the ardent industrial jaws of western progress and the hunger of its machines.
Wyoming and the southern Uinta Basin rose from small outposts to boom towns overnight. Bolstered by the harvests of precious timber, found deep and dense within the western arch of the Uinta thickets, Kamas valley's prominence spread. Silver and oil fortunes also forged quickly. The devil's gentile diversity—arrives in mass and newly planted cities provide opportunity, liquor, and other comforts, for the tired and the opulent to spread and spend themselves upon.
All power, energy, and mammon aside, the most significant resource was yet to be fully developed and, much like the others, eventually exploited, WATER. Our thirst for it remains insatiable, and westward expansion would cease had it not provided the primary tinder and fuels of growth. So likewise, the quilted agricultural vales blanketing Kamas Valley—would also terminate without this ever-flowing life resource and a calmer peace.
Billions of dollars have been spent on this transparent but opaque necessity—relocating this water to very distant realms beyond the confinements of ridges and divides and boundaries. Yet, perched atop Bald Mountain pass, one can peer afar—over the engraved veins of many headwaters. Much of the West's most significant watersheds are born here, and in one spot—four major rivers drainages begin, and then—they politely part their ways to feed a horde of mouths and parched lawyers...
Three of those are exceptionally large and feed the Great Basin, the Bear, the Provo, and the Weber. And one is a branch which expands the Green—the Duchesne River. Drifting along in the eastern Uinta flanks are many more which serve the broader trunk of the Green. And finally—the grandest of all, the Colorado River, which gapes open its mouth to consume them all in one easy pilfering swallow.
Over millions of years ago, the Weber, the Provo, and the smaller Beaver Creek sculpted our little mountain valley. A dale formed within spirits of many other rivers of the past and present lends itself to our abode. And combined with those older fluent souls, much of the lifeblood of Utah and even the Californian dynasty expands its abundance onto the longing food tables of the United States. So much provision originates in this lonely yet often forgotten outpost or corner of a wildness we call—the Uinta!
Our presence in the present—appears to undoubtedly be but a mere comma or sliver in nature's timeline. Yet the natural resources of the Uinta's have fed our groaning appetites and built our demanding economies for times immeasurable. The immense influx of settlers, pushing onward and westward, stopped by to colonize upon the contours of our present heritage, mainly oblivious to the antiquities of the rocks, the waters, and the endless rivers of life which depend upon it.
Our mountain's natural history—became the spark of our diverse cultural history. We came to these mountains for wealth within, we stayed by these massifs because of beauty without, and we continue to return to them—often, to restore a portion of that life which now patiently sustains us.
Let this then become our vision—not unlike the ancients, to use only a small, yet an essential portion of its natural and encumbered generosity which has provided for so many other countless and hidden forms of life. Without clear foresight, we can quickly succumb to the rage of the machines and engines of progress that can wrestle away any peace that a river and its partners in the depths of green woods and the lay of ever verdant prairies affords.
We can conserve and use its water, food, soil, air and sky, stone and timber, wealth, energy, grandeur, and lasting peaceful shelter for our homes and our families. But we must also take pause and think… As we drink from the deep wells of this long rock of heritage, let us remember that the water of these Uinta's—while meandering through the endless meadows of time, was once carried upon the backs of the ancient ones. It is a precious resource that should be developed and used responsibly—with some quiet dignity and respect.
It is to taste the cold azure blues of the last great ice age. It is a source of antiquity, pre-dating mankind's industrial, nuclear, and technological wizardry—which at times left behind many of its strange and dirty artifacts, like an ugly imprint upon softer waters of our planet. It is a pure crystal relic—an ancient and forgotten remnant of an archaic, prehistoric, and wintry age—eons past which we profoundly enjoy today.
Drink it in, in small and contemplated sips. This water is Life—experience it and protect it—at least as well as the earth has experienced and protected it in the blanketed shrouds of ancient times and olden stones—for nearly 18,000 years…