rissy stories

Wednesday, 5/4/16, Day 3: Missouri, Kansas, Colorado

Hello again! Today I’m going over Day 3 of my Utah trip. This entry is going to be more informative than active because we had to make up a lot of driving time this day. Therefore, we didn’t do much outside of the van, but I did absorb A LOT of information that I’m dying to share!

My day started at 5:30 AM when Rocky knocked on the Barbie room’s door, waking up Casey and I. Unfortunately we didn’t actually ask what time we needed to wake up the night beforehand because everyone was so tired and we were busy settling into the room with a thousand Barbie dolls, so I had no alarms set. Therefore, everyone else had a head start and we were the last ones in the house that morning.

We groggily packed up our things when Casey began to complain about not feeling well. She had been pretty sick throughout the majority of the weekend prior to the trip, but after getting used to the antibiotic she was given, it got worse. Her mouth and throat were hurting to the point where she couldn’t close her mouth and she couldn’t eat anything. She ended up deciding that it was time to alert Rocky.

So, after we packed up our things, we got into the van with the rest of the guys and the majority of us fell asleep for a while. Casey decided to wait and talk to Rocky at the first rest stop, and after they were finished discussing about how they were going to take care of it, Rocky handed me a postcard with everyone’s names on it – wishing me a happy birthday (that was the day prior to this one):

This made my morning. 🙂

Once we reached Topeka Kansas (which wasn’t too far from Rocky’s mom’s house), Casey and Rocky decided to stop at an Urgent Care. While they waited inside, the guys and I got together to discuss our meal plan for the rest of the week. Whoever was on duty that specific day that we were planning meals got to pick what our dinner would be (because our breakfasts and lunches were always the same for everyone). We made a list so that Rocky would know what we needed to buy at the grocery store.

Then we all hopped back into the van and drove around the town that we were in to find a restroom that everyone could use. After a few hours, Casey was seen, and a diagnosis & prescription was given. Afterwards, we drove to Walmart to pick up the medicine. Casey and I went in while everyone else stayed in the van & truck. However, once we walked over to the pharmacy, they told us that it would take about 30-40 minutes before the medicine would be ready.

So, we sent a snapchat to Gene and told him that it was a half hour wait (because we didn’t know any of the guy’s numbers offhand, and Rocky wasn’t answering her phone). Casey and I walked around and shopped for a bit in the meantime, and Rocky & Colby eventually came in and grocery shopped as well. However, once the medicine was ready, we all began to head out again. Casey thankfully began feeling better very quickly.

We stopped occasionally for lunch and rest room breaks, but for the most part, we drove straight through Kansas. We didn’t need to stop anywhere for a geology lesson because it’s a very long and flat state – not exactly interesting to a geologist. And it was a beautiful sunny day, so there weren’t even threats of a tornado or something to keep us interested (I know it’s a cliché, but some of us were actually hoping that we would see one). I slept for some of that trip, and I didn’t take any pictures. It was mostly flat, green land with farms and MANY wind turbines, you aren’t really missing much.

This picture off of the Internet should suffice if you still can’t picture it very well:

However, you’re probably wondering what I did with the majority of that time if I wasn’t sleeping or taking pictures. Well, I was listening to music and entertaining the English major in me instead of the geology minor for once on this trip. I was reading the notebook that Rocky put together for us (that we were supposed to be doing all along), and I was also reading Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn (the author of Gone Girl, if you don’t know who I’m referring to).

xxx

Now, excuse me while I go into a little detour:

Obviously this came out 7 years ago and most everyone I know has already read it, but I just recently became interested in Gillian Flynn. I read Gone Girl for a Literature to Film course two semesters ago and I loved it (but who didn’t, really?). So, I was very excited to read this book, and I got very into it on this day specifically. I actually began and finished it on this trip. I won’t give a full review for it on here or any extreme spoilers, but in short: it’s a mystery novel. The main character is Libby Day – a dark, bitter, unhappy, sarcastic, funny, and overall complicated 35-year-old woman who began the novel with very little money. Basically, my kind of character.

Supposedly, her brother Ben murdered her mother and two older sisters when she was 7-years old. Over the course of many years, people donated money for her, but that was ultimately coming to an end now that she was an adult and there were new unfortunate children to donate for. However, Libby didn’t want to get a job like a normal person, so she decided to take up an offer to appear for a weird group of individuals who all wanted to prove Ben innocent and break him out of prison.

Libby’s main goal throughout the book is to receive money from these people as a source of income (which she did), but this also sparked her to dig deeper into her family’s death to find out the truth. Therefore, the majority of this novel is her hitting dead end after dead end until she finally strikes gold towards the end of the novel. However, she also gets herself into a lot of trouble as well as danger along the way.

I was never really into mystery books before I read Gone Girl, and this one in particular kept me very entertained during my down time on this Utah trip. I’m currently reading Sharp Objects (another Flynn novel), and I would recommend that everyone who hasn’t read a novel by Gillian Flynn to go do so immediately, you would not regret it!

Now, back to geology.

xxx

While I wasn’t reading Dark Places, I was writing down what I was reading in the notes, mostly because I wanted Rocky to know that I had read it, but writing it down helped me remember it later.

For example, here is some more information that I wrote down this day about the geology of the areas that we visited and drove across: (Taken almost directly from my notes).

–Central Lowlands = Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri

–Paleozoic (era) Rocks = Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri

–Mesozoic (era) Rocks = Central Kansas

–Ancestral Rockies = uplifted along NW – SE trending faults during the Pennsylvanian (this uplift is also called Colorado orogeny)

–Cordilleran orogeny = Mesozoic Era = western North America became a convergent boundary (a convergent boundary can be best described as two tectonic plates colliding and causing an uplift of land) and Faralion plate was subducted beneath it (subduction = when two tectonic plates collide and one plate dives underneath the other).

-this produced a series of orogenies in the early Jurassic

–Laramide orogeny = less igneous (rocks resulting from cooling and solidification of magma) activity and faulting was much steeper, producing very large fault bounded uplifts in the Pre-Cambrian basement rocks with younger sedimentary rocks (rocks that result from deposition and cementation) folded into broad anticlines across the top (arch-like shape, it’s a fold – the strata slopes down from the top).

–Colorado Mineral Belt = the Colorado Front Range is cut by numerous faults and fracture zones that developed during uplift.

-dense faulting that crosses the range in an east-west belt between Denver and Dillon = mining spot

–Mineralization = hydrothermally deposited sulfide veins containing a variety of minerals including gold, silver, galena, sphalerite, pyrite, chalcopyrite, ankerite, etc.

–The Colorado Plateau – Miocene and Pliocene (ages) = the whole region was uplifted about 5,000 ft. into a broad irregular dome. Down cutting by rivers and streams formed deep canyons and sediments covered the mountains were removed, exposing mountains and Tertiary (age) sediment.

–Pleistocene Glaciation = Glaciers developed in the Colorado Mountains several times during the Wisconsin Glaciation.

-erosion chiseled the peaks into cirques, horns, and arêtes and widened the canyons.

–Geology of Utah = San Rafael Swell is an anticline. I-70 cuts right through it, and it consists of sedimentary rocks

–Ferron, Utah = dinosaurs!

(The rest of the notes I took this day have to do with places that we eventually visit on this trip, but we didn’t this day. So I’m going to save those notes for later).

While I was taking these notes and reading for fun, we eventually reached Colorado! Here is a picture of a cool dinosaur that we saw at a gas station:

After we stopped at the gas station, we got back on the road. We were all very awake at this point and ready to see something interesting – anything interesting, really. And honestly, the very first interesting thing that we found was a small patch of snow on the ground in the beginning of May. So, naturally, the truck drove onto the shoulder and the van followed it off the road. Colby and Randy got out of the truck first and walked over to the patch of snow. Coleman parked the van and asked, “What is this, a snowball fight?” Colby and Randy reached into the pile of snow and came up with a handful. Coleman nodded, opened the door, and said: “Oh, it’s on.”

Casey snapchatted the fight while I took pictures, but then we put our phones away to join in for a bit. It was fun up until someone threw a dead bird that was also in the snow pile at another person (I won’t name names…mostly because I don’t exactly remember who it was). But that’s when everyone decided to laugh at the very juvenile thing we just did, get back into the vehicles, and continue driving.

However, little did we know at the time that we were about to see something much more interesting (if you’ve never been out west like the majority of us hadn’t). As we were driving to our campsite, the Rocky Mountains finally came into view as we drove into Colorado Springs, and to say that they were amazing to see would be an understatement:

All I’ve ever seen is the Appalachian Mountains, which is full of trees and hills, not so much extremely tall, prominent, and sharp like the Rockies are. So this was a very different and interesting site to see. We were also in really high spirits, so we were blasting music in the van with the windows down as we drove.

Once we actually arrived in Colorado Springs, we got out of the vehicles and decided to roam around a place called “The Garden of the Gods.” I have many pictures, but unfortunately, I don’t have many notes on the geology aspect and their formation. All I remember is that they were deposited by the Ancestral Rockies in the late Pennsylvanian Fountain Formation. They were really tall, really vertical, and really red rocks.

Once we had our fill of the garden of rocks, we hopped back into the van&truck because it was getting pretty dark and cold outside. No one really felt like making dinner that night, so we drove to an Arby’s. However, this was not our original destination: we didn’t really have one. We drove around for a bit to try and find something that everyone could agree on, but we ended up driving for a long time before we finally gave up and landed on Arby’s.

After we ate, we drove to our campsite at the Lake Pueblo Reservoir. It was a maze to try and figure out where to set up camp, and at this point, everyone was getting extremely frustrated, tired, and sick of driving around. Therefore, we finally picked a spot and decided to set up camp… but then this annoying couple walked up to us. They were camped right next to us and they were wearing helmets with flashlights attached. We were automatically saying to ourselves: Dear God, please don’t tell us to move. We’d rather sleep on the cold, hard ground than continue driving.

Low and behold, the man told us verbatim:

“Hey, yeah, could you move a little farther down the road, away from us? We’ve had this spot all to ourselves, and we were really enjoying our alone time. Thanks.”

…and we were all saying: “Um…this is a campsite? Is this a campsite? Yeah, this is a campsite. If you wanted alone time, why drive out to a campsite where other people are allowed to set up camp next to each other?” It’s not like we were going to be making a whole lot of noise, we just wanted a place to sleep.

However, we moved further down the road and found another spot anyways. It really wasn’t that big of a deal, but at 11:00 PM, everything became a big deal. Casey, Jesse, Brent, and I decided to sleep in the van instead of trying to set up camp in pitch black. Once everyone was settled in, we all instantly fell asleep. We found it to be much warmer in there (go figure), so Casey and I did this a few more times during the trip.

Anyways, that’s all I have for you today! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and I will hopefully be posting Day 4 sometime in the next few days or next week. Until then, catch you later!