7 Days in the Pacific Northwest By Edmund Blackadder in Edmund Blackadder's Diary Wed Oct 07, 2015 at 09:18:39 PM EST Tags: (all tags)
	It's getting cold up here, and I'm thinking of heading to Arizona again for the winter. There's still some nice weather left though so I've been making my rounds, visiting some of my favorite spots. The Cascades, Teanaway river, Ellensburg, Swakane Terrane... Trying to fill up on trees and streams, and rain. Then when I go riding through the desert in a car with no name, it'll feel real good :)

ADVERTISEMENT Sponsor: rusty This space intentionally left blank ...because it's waiting for your ad. So why are you still reading this? Come on, get going. Read the story, and then get an ad. Alright stop it. I'm not going to say anything else. Now you're just being silly. STOP LOOKING AT ME! I'm done! comments (24) active | buy ad ADVERTISEMENT Epiphany about the Law of Noncontradiction: Saying A and not-A cannot coexist because you cannot hold a contradiction in your mind, seeing both (multiple) points of view simultaneously, says more about you than about contradiction. It's like saying hypercubes can't exist because you can't see one. Listening to my Dad's old 78s collection, transferred to CD. My Dad bought some real swingers. The Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra is simply unparalleled. In something like White Heat they start with the swing cranked up to eleven, and raise the bar from there. I play along on my recorder, out in the woods away from everyone. Dang it must have been something special to be in that band. It totally makes sense that Armstrong chose Trummy Young to play in the All-Stars. Trummy was part of that Lunceford swing, it was in his bones. He brought a lot of that very earthy, very high level swing to Louis's small bands in the 50s and 60s. Another track on the CD I was listening to was Ted Lewis, When my Baby Smiles At Me. The youtube link is to a different version, but the humor is the same. That's another great thing about my Dad's collection; he has versions of songs I can't find anywhere else. I want to upload them all. I like the Ted Lewis track because he's communicating with the trombone, which is laughing at him. "Aw gee, stop it I say" - he's understanding exactly the scorn the trombone is heaping on him. Those old jazz cats were masters, monsters. In the Swakane Terrane, the stream at a favorite camp site was dry. Drought! But down a bit, there was still a trickle. Other streams I've camped by before seem lower, but none were completely dry. Teanaway has some amazing colors in the rocks, upstream. I think it's either the North Fork, or maybe it's called Jungle Creek on a map, not sure. The streambed is dry, just like a wash; and the rocks are very bright and varicolored, like washes in Az. I found blue rocks, blue and white striped rocks, red and white striped rocks with very tiny bands. How could those form? Sedimentary? Magnetism? The mind boggles. Will this area look like southern Arizona, like the Sonoran Desert, under a few decades of drought? In the Swakane Terrane, I see jagged outcroppings, light rocks, streaks of white on a meter scale. In the Teanaway some tens of miles to the southwest, I see shale-like rocks, sandstones, blue, green, red, pink. Was it a seashore or shallow sea? How long ago? 70 million years? Billions of years? Imagine cliffs of blue and white striped rocks. My theory is that the region bounded by the Swakane Terrane and the Peshastin Pinnacles in the north and the Teanaway to the south was an ancient island or small continent that pushed up against the advancing North American plate. The Peshashtin pinnacles is where the pushing up resulted in vertical uplift, the plates pushed up against each other and both went up. Maybe? Why does the Swakane have such level, parallel, horizontal streaks of white in the cliffs? I've seen something like that but never as dramatic. In Sidewinder Pass in south-eastern California, I walked on streaks of white; it was as if the cliffs in the Swakane had been turned on their side. I read some geological paper that dated rocks in the Swakane to 70 million years ago, but within those rocks were zircon crystals that dated to 2 billion. But how many rocks do they date? From where? I'd like to date some of the rocks I think are old. The way I see it it would be really hard for the white streaks to have formed by sedimentation. You would have had immense flows of silicon. Intrusion? So the silicon was liquid and flowed into fissures in existing rock structures? But in such parallel lines for such long distances? And why only in some places and not others? Magnetic? Did some powerful magnetic or unknown force turn the rocks white-banded, as a side-effect, a shadow of a field so powerful it treated huge cliffs like iron filings? Also thought a lot about economics, but I'll leave that to another diary.

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White Heat When my Baby Smiles At Me Swakane Terrane Edmund Blackadder's Diary