A Frozen Crooked River
Jim and I did a trip last weekend north of Monument Valley to an area around Mexican Hat, Utah. We drove the gravel BLM road around Valley of the Gods. This is what I call the poor man’s Monument Valley since it includes large monument rocks in fanciful shapes, but you can drive the road free and even camp in the shadow of the large rocks. Of course, you can’t camp at this time of year as there is no shade. Nothing grows taller than the scrubby blackbrush that pokes out of the red sand of the valley. There aren’t even any boulders to huddle under. There is a large drainage that runs through the valley with some trees in the drainage. The area has no water and it wouldn’t be very safe during the summer rainy season to park that close to a stream bed. Still it was an interesting place to visit.
We also drove to Goosenecks State Park. This is one of the best examples of an “entrenched meanderâ€. According to Jim, a river will meander, form S-shaped loops, in a river valley. What happened at the Goosenecks was that the land was uplifted, like the land at the Grand Canyon. As the land rose higher, the river cut down into the limestone and sandstone sediments and its crooked S-shape became frozen in place by the rocks that surrounded it. They call these frozen meanders “goosenecks†because the narrow sections where parts of the river get close separated only by a narrow strip of rock look like the narrow necks of geese.
We were surprised that the river was a deep chocolate red. When we had crossed the San Juan River at Mexican Hat at 6:30 the night before, the river had been a clear green. Now it was reddish. I wondered it something had turned it red below Mexican Hat or if the rains that had followed us from Arizona had washed sediment into the river causing it to change colors. On our way back to the North Rim, we crossed the river at Mexican Hat and it was a reddish brown as well.