Much more enthralling than Basin and Range. I enjoyed the intertwining of Dr. Love's personal history and the geologic history of Wyoming. Throughout, I felt just as conflicted as Love does about the changing nature of our planet's resources and the changing face of Earth.

Unless you’re entire being is immersed in an obsession about geology, this is a tortuous book to read. If you can slog through it, you will glean a couple of amazing insights into plate tectonics and hot spots like Yellowstone. But to finish this slog, you must read about innumerable boring boulders and sedentary sediments. There are tangents in the book where he describes Wyoming Frontier life. These are beautifully written. Then the rocks get in the way. Like a landslide encountered on a beautiful drive. I️ will try one of his less rocky attempts.

You wouldn't imagine that a book principally about geology could be quite so captivating to the general reader.

Another nonfiction gem from author John McPhee (now 93 yrs old). about geological history, oil deposits, David Love and comparing questions of man’s use and dependence on oil in 1986 to now in 2023.

When it comes to creative non-fiction, there is none better than John McPhee. Read this when it first came out in the '80s as part of the Annals of the Former World. Thought it was worth a re-read in preparation for our upcoming drive through Wyoming. A wonderful mashup of pioneer Old West history, modern environmentalism, and above all, an insightful and very readable primer in the complex geology that shaped this part of the world.

When I read John McPhee’s writing, I am drawn in by his curiosity and his love for his subjects. Reading this book I fell in love with Wyoming, again; for geology, my major in college; and with Ethel Waxham, a highly educated young woman at the beginning of the 20th century, and her son the geologist. And then I found myself learning about hotspots, the Canadian Shield and seamounts off the eastern seaboard.
This book was first published in 1987 and is one of the books in the collection Annals of the Former World for which McPfee received a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
In these inflamed times, reading McPhee’s writing is soothing and inspiring. He is one of the greats who gave us creative nonfiction. His writing is full of gems that make me smile. One example, he describes the nightly news as “montage of disasters”.
Most of the book is about geology. Geology is a spatial, and I was frustrated by the lack of illustrations that would have enhanced and clarified his story. Sketches and photographs would have added so much to the story. It didn’t help that I read this book on my kindle. McPhee often referred to places that I couldn’t find on Google. Hence my relatively low rating for this book. Maybe somebody already has or will come out with an illustrated edition of his writing.
I think books like this would be great reading for geology majors in college.

Very informative & interesting. Written in a storyline format, not like a textbook.

“Had this been a May morning a hundred million years ago, in Cretaceous time, we would have been many fathoms underwater, in a broad arm of the sea, which covered the continental platform—reached across the North American craton, the Stable Interior Craton—from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean where vegetation flourished in coastal swamps. They would have been like the Florida Everglades, the peat fens of East Anglia, or borders of the Java Sea, which stand just as temporarily, reported to the future as coal. The Cretaceous is not far back in the history of the world. It’s in the last three per cent of time.”

“The spread of time at Rawlins, like the rock column in a great many places in Wyoming, was so impressively detailed that it seemed to suggest that Wyoming, in its one-thirty-seventh of the United States, contains a disproportionate percentage of American geology.”

“That the one was in fact directly on top of the other was a nomenclatural Tower of Babel that contained in its central paradox the narrative of the Rockies: the burial of the ranges, the subsequent uplifting of the entire region, the exhumation of the mountains. As if to emphasize all that, people had not only named this single mountain range as if it were two but also bestowed upon the highest summit of the Snowy Range the name Medicine Bow Peak. It was up there making its point, at twelve thousand thirteen feet.”

Imagine my disappointment that the author doesn’t swing south to the mountains I know so well but stays up in Wyoming which is an enigmatic place I know a little. I fell in love with geology in Utah, and ultimately that geology is a little more easy to digest since the Colorado Plateau is a like a little raft immune to the warping and obscuring mountain building of the Rockies, so it did take me a while to even read more about the Rockies, being super intimidated. But I know some of Wyoming, and I know the Gangplank. And I can tell you there is a moment when you transfer from I-25 to I-80 at Cheyenne and the way the road is built, you feel you are flying into the sky, the great western giant electric sky, and it is sacred harmonic experience.

McPhee continues with great imagery of snapshots of time, which I loved about this section; there was a lot about the history of the geologist’s family, which is a stunning portrait of frontier life, but what I know of Wyoming, what it became from that, I fear, colors my reading of it, and I just can’t embrace the warm and happy mythologizing he does. The first time I read it, I thought it was okay, but now, I just know too much. Wyoming, the least populous state, has a strangling conservative ethos that is not okay. Read about Matthew Shephard. It is still those times.

“ To the question “What lifted the Colorado Plateau, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountain platform?” the answer given by this theory is “The plumes of Raton and Yellowstone.”The Colorado Plateau lies between the two hot-spot tracks, and Morgan believes that their combined influence is what lifted it, setting up the hydraulic energy that has etched out the canyonlands.

That the two hot spots, at any rate, are progressively lifting the country is a point reinforced by a remarkable observation: a line drawn between them is the Continental Divide.”

Back to the geology, The Rockies are mountains that are not on a plate boundary, making them mysterious and almost an exception to plate tectonics. They are instead, mountains made and then buried in their own eroded debris. Higher than high, they eroded and buried themselves, so they are being revealed now, exhumed. Everywhere I go now I envision a Maroon Bell under the hill, just waiting to be revealed.

“On the east flank of the Laramie Range is a piece of ground that somehow escaped exhumation. Actually contiguous with Miocene remains that extend far into Nebraska, it is the only place between Mexico and Canada where the surface that covered the mountains still reaches up to a summit.

Yet this one piece of the Great Plains—extremely narrow but still intact—extends like a finger and, as ever, touches the mountain core: the pink deroofed Precambrian granite, the top of the range. At this place, as nowhere else, you can step off the Great Plains directly onto a Rocky Mountain summit. It is known to geologists as the gangplank.

The mean temperature is 38 degrees. Conditions are about the same in this part of Wyoming as at the Arctic Circle.”

And. The. Wind.

“There was almost no soil in that part of the range - just twelve miles' breadth of rough pink rock. "As you go from Chicago west, soil diminishes in thickness and fertility, and when you get to the gangplank and up here on top of the Laramie Range there is virtually none," Love said. "It's had ten million years to develop, and there's none. Why? Wind - that's why. The wind blows away everything smaller than gravel."

Standing in that wind was like standing in river rapids. It was a wind embellished with gusts, but, over all, it was primordially steady: a consistent southwest wind, which had been blowing that way not just through human history but in every age since the creation of the mountains - a record written clearly in wind - scored rock. Trees were widely scattered up there and, where they existed, appeared to be rooted in the rock itself. Their crowns looked like umbrellas that had been turned inside out and were streaming off the trunks downwind. "Wind erosion has tremendous significance in this part of the Rocky Mountain region," Love said, "Even down in Laramie, the trees are tilted. Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain. When the land was surveyed, the surveyors couldn't keep their tripods steady. They had to work by night or near sunrise. People went insane because of the wind."

On I-80, wind will capsize tractor-trailers. When snow falls on Wyoming, its travels are only beginning. Snow snows again, from the ground up, moves along the surface in ground blizzards that can blind whole counties.

Love said he thought the role of the wind had been much greater than hitherto suspected in the Exhumation of the Rockies. Water, of course, was the obvious agent for the digging and removal of the basin fill, as a look at the Mississippi Delta would tend to confirm.
Streams only account for about half the material that was taken up and out of here. Since it is not all in the delta, where did it go? So much has been taken away that it’s got to be explained in some other manner. I think the wind took it. My personal feeling is that a lot of it blew eastward to the Atlantic. Possibly some went to Hudson Bay but in one dust storm several years ago a great deal of debris from Kansas and Nebraska and Colorado went into the Atlantic—a storm that lasted only a couple of days.”

And so, as we plunged down Telephone Canyon, the interstate was tilting less than the rock of the roadcuts, and the red sandstone yielded gradually, interstitially, to the younger limestones, until the sandstone was gone altogether and we were moving through the floor of an ocean. It was full of crinoids, brachiopods, and algal buttons, which had lived near the equator in a place like the Bismarck Archipelago or an arm of the Celebes Sea.”

My other resonant memory is of travelling I-80 from San Francisco to Philly on a cross country trip; we drove and drove across Wyoming waiting for the Rockies to appear and waiting and waiting. I had planned the route, I knew the map showed a flattish area so I assumed they would be in the distance a bit, but I thought we would know them. We got to Cheyenne near dark and realized it was over, and felt a little stupid. Who knew it would only take me about 10 more years to know that area when my brother and his family lived in Laramie? It is a time spanning, time travel moment when I still go there for some holidays with his inlaws.

How did this piece of land escape the Exhumation of the Rockies, yes the official title of the mountain event, less an mountain building (orogeny) than a revealing (epeirogeny)? I am still not sure, so have to imagine the experts aren’t either. During the Exhumation, something like 50, 000 cubic miles was excavated and deposited here and there. Fifty thousand cubic miles. The internet gave me this comparison: One cubic mile is 147,197,952,000 cubic feet. If, on average, one human being takes up a space 2 feet by 2 feet by 6 feet it means we occupy 24 cubic feet per person. So divide 147,197,952,000 by 24 and you get 6,133,248,000, which means that in the year 2000 when the world population reached 6 billion we'd all have fit in a cubic mile, with room left over for another 133 million folks. The population now has reached over 6.7 billion so today there'd be a little overflow. Or think of Lake Superior at 2,900 cubic miles in volume.

“These mountain ranges were coming up out of the craton—heartland of the continent, the Stable Interior Craton. It was as if mountains had appeared in Ohio, inboard of the Appalachian thrust sheets, like a family of hogs waking up beneath a large blanket. An authentic enigma on a grand scale, this was one of the oddest occurrences in the tectonic history of the world.”

“During those thirty million years after things went blah, the Rockies were quietly buried ever deeper in their own debris—and, not so peacefully, in materials oozing overland or falling from the sky.Volcanic sands, from Yellowstone and from elsewhere to the west, were spread by the wind, and in places formed giant dunes. Two thousand feet of sand accumulated in central Wyoming.
Nineteen thousand—the thickest Miocene deposit in America—went into the sinking Jackson Hole. From the Wind River Mountains southward to Colorado and eastward to Nebraska, the plain was unbroken except for the tops of the highest peaks.”

One of the other mysteries of the region are the rivers and their mystery may account for the way the mountains were revealed and why my heart has found it place here.

“The oldest river in the United States is called the New River. It has existed (in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia) for a little more than one and a half per cent of the history of the world.
The Colorado River, which has only recently appeared on earth, has excavated the Grand Canyon in very little time. From its beginning, human beings could have watched the Grand Canyon being made.”

“The streams lay in patterns that had no relationship to the Eocene topography buried far below. Some of them, rushing along through what is now the Wyoming sky, happened to cross the crests of buried ranges. If a river happened to be lying above a spur of a buried range, it would cut down through the spur, and seem, eventually—without logic, with considerable magic—to flow into a mountain range, change its mind, and come back out another way. “Eventually,” of course, is now.

In fact, there is no obvious relationship between most of the major rivers in Wyoming and the landscapes they traverse. While rivers elsewhere, running in their dendritic patterns like the veins in a leaf, shape in harmony the landscapes they dominate, almost all the rivers of the Rockies seem to argue with nature as well as with common sense.”

Other quotes:

The classic plays—Teton, Beartooth, Wind River—were not out here on the street, but meanwhile these roadcuts were like posters, advertising the dramatic events, suggesting their narratives, fabrics, and structures.

A geologist who grew up in Wyoming could not ignore economic geology, could not ignore vertebrate paleontology, could not ignore the narrative details in any chapter of time (every period in the history of the world was represented in Wyoming). After more than half a century with the story assembling in his mind, he can roll it like a Roman scroll. From the Precambrian beginnings, he can watch the landscape change, see it move, grow, collapse, and shuffle itself in an intricate, imbricate manner, not in spatial chaos but by cause and effect through time. He can see it in motion now, in several ways responsively moving in the present—its appearance indebted to the paradox that while the region generally appears to have been rising the valley has collapsed.


The foreland ranges, as the mountains east of the overthrust are called (the Wind Rivers, Uintas, Bighorns, Medicine Bows, Laramie Range, and so forth), came into the world with their own odd syncopation, albeit the general chronology went from west to east and the Laramie Range was among the last to rise. In what Love has called “some of the greatest localized vertical displacement known anywhere in the world,” the Wind Rivers rose sixty thousand feet with respect to the rock around them, the Uintas fifty thousand, others as much.

The excavation had exposed the broken, upturned ends of Pennsylvanian sandstones, dipping steeply eastward and leaning on the mountains. They rested there like lumber stood against a barn. These red sandstones lean against the Laramie Range on both sides. By themselves, they tell the story of the Laramide Orogeny, for they are a part of what was deroofed. They are a part of the Paleozoic package that once rested flat on the deep Precambrian granite. They are thought by some to have been Pennsylvanian beach sands.

“McPhee rides shotgun across Wyoming in a four-wheel-drive Bronco while the geologist David Love steers, lectures, and reminisces....This instructive account of the geologic West and the frontier West is a delight.” ―Evan S. Connell, The New York Times Book Review

Being a student of geology, I was totally interested in McPhee's descriptions of the formation of the land and the influence of the local geology of the Plains. I have studied California geology, but hadn't moved east of Nevada, so I found his knowledge very helpful. I enjoyed the story on the introduction of the idea of Plate Tectonics in 1967 by W. Jason Morgan at a Geophysical Conference. Now to read another McPhee book and see if begin to understand what he is talking about without a geology dictionary on my lap!

A wonderful blend of science and storytelling, about the amazing and diverse geography of Wyoming. A slightly stronger knowledge of geology basics would have aided my understanding, but I enjoyed it anyway.

This talented author paints a vivid picture of Wyomings culture, geology, topography and culture as well as the story of the State's degradation by those in pursuit of its coal, oil, uranium and natural gas assets. This book is one of McPhee's best.

Excellent