The Great Unconformity

For quite some time, I've been wanting to visit this geological wonder, the Great Unconformity. It's only eleven or so miles from our house, yet we hadn't ventured out there yet, until today. I was very excited. I've been studying the Frenchman Mountain Great Unconformity website . I loved reading about how the community, the BLM, the Boy Scouts, and Stephen Rowland, Professor of Geology at UNLV worked so hard to make this highly interesting place an inviting one to visit and learn from.

What my husband and I found there was, to say the least, disheartening. I know the website told of problems of beer bottles and graffiti, but I wasn't ready for what we saw. People (should I really call them that?) have completely destroyed thousands of dollars and many precious hours worth of hard work. What's up with that? There are exclusive neighborhoods nearby, yet this seems to be a place to park, build campfires and drink. You would think that the police would be able to check this place out once in a while. There's so much trash and graffiti that it's unreal!

Please click on my flickr page or the flickr box in the right column of this page to see today's pictures. They are in the "Friends, Trips, Etc." set of photos. Also today we went up the road a little to Rainbow Gardens and took the Lava Butte trail behind Frenchman Mountain. It was a wild ride at times, but it was gorgeous! There are photos from that as well on flickr.

The area itself, all in all, is still beautiful. It's amazing to actually walk on Precambrian granite and schist that formed deep within the earth's crust 1.7 billion years ago.