Postcards From The RV Road Trip

Canada Post 2017
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  9/20
  Despite entering the Canadian Rockies on a beautiful day, it was overcast on arrival at the famed Athabasca Glacier, constituent of the Columbia Ice Field. We are standing on rôche moutonnée (FR: sheepback), an ice-smoothed bedrock lump, low "upstream," high "downstream" with telltale scratches. Of course, the glacier is receding for the familiar reasons. Nevertheless, Athabasca and its left and right side helper glaciers impressed us.

  
  
  
Canada Post 2017
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  9/22
  At Alberta's Royal Tyrrell Museum we saw a magnificent fossil exhibit. Alberta is home to many dinosaur species and RTM's dino collection is truly the best. We loved the stories the fossils told: A fish within a fish. A mosasaur skull with a mosasaur tooth embedded in its cheek. What? Fight or kiss? A huge ichthyosaur, found unlike others sans teeth, implying it was a filter feeder like baleen whales. And the pterosaur with its last meal and the poop from its previous one.

  
  
  
United States Postal Service 2017
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  9/24
  Yes, this graffiti reads "Wm. Clark July 25th 1806". It's awesome because it's the only remaining physical evidence of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. On their return journey from the Pacific, Clark's party saw a sandstone rock formation by the Yellowstone River. Sacred to the Blackfeet, Clark never- theless named it Pompys Pillar, after Sacagawea's son, whom Clark called Pompy. It's now Pompeys Pillar, it's protected and it's a National Monument in MT.

  
  
  
United States Postal Service 2017
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  9/25
  On US 14 through Wyoming's Big Horn Range you pass these signs naming geologic formations. As you drive up, the layers come from deeper in the earth. Really! The mountain range tilted over so far the layers rise more steeply than the road. Starting in the Jurassic [145-200 mya], we passed signs for Pennsylvanian, Mississippian, Devonian, Ordovician and finally Cambrian on top at over 500 M years ago. Go up to go down!

  
  
  
United States Postal Service 2017
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  9/26
  Sorry for another paleo post, but the drama in this fossil is Shakespearean. A minnow swam near the surface of a lake. A pterosaur swooped low, skim- ming the water and grabbed it. As it swallowed, a large predator fish grabbed the low-flying pterosaur. Its wing caught in the predator's teeth. It tried to spit out this too-big prey. They all struggled to save themselves, sink- ing deeper into the lake to be covered with silt mid-battle. [Wyoming Dino- saur Center, Thermopolis.]

  
  
  
United States Postal Service 2017
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  10/1
  Our Back Road tour of the Rockies ends tomorrow; the odometer having clicked 5,000 miles, much with the top down. Skipping the breath-taking beauty and mind-numbing tedium, here are the key discoveries: stopped midst cattle drive in a tiny car sans top is intimidating, triceratops babies are born with flames, Palouse Falls is Washington's strangest, black bears and grizzlies once farmed. Back soon.

  
  
  

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