Yesterday's posting involved thinking about the propensity for certain granite to accommodate being shaped at right angles. I began to notice throughout that same day many more cube-like and rectangle chunks of all different sizes in the vertical formations laying around the countryside. The mountains are green this time of year making the grey rocks appear quite prominent and abundant.
There is so much of this tending-to-squarish upright rock dotting the distant hills along the steep slopes of the canyon, that after a while I began to imagine it wasn't random stone at all but a vast settlement of narrow stone dwellings and hewn standing stones. The rocks off in the distance gave the impression of some ancient civilization of rustic masons, scattered across the hill sides all dwelling in narrow stone huts they had made. They had built everywhere on the hillside with the rocks that were right at their doorstep, and thus changed the look of the entire landscape from a vista giving an impression of randomness to an ordered array of squared structures.
The video above is a short clip of the long trip back at the end of a day in the mountains. There was over 40 minutes of the trip which involved traveling a narrow crazy winding river road. A lot of the canyon was even steeper than this.
Apparently the Kern River Canyon was created primarily as a result of tectonic forces, and not as might have been expected, by the erosional force of the river. The view off to my right hand side was amazing to behold, if only for the sheer volume of beautiful stones we saw along the way. I feel an even greater affinity with this material jutting out of the hills, I have discovered it is not just agreeable looking but also an accommodatingly shapable stone. As we drove back I appreciated this myriad of stone material perched far above us, from having hugged and moved and shaped smaller specimens of it all day higher up the canyon.
