If you haven't traveled around America with McPhee yet, you have a wonderful year ahead of you! He is so good it will even work virtually in the age of the pandemic.

You have to be really passionate about the geography of Wyoming, and also love anecdotes about 19th century frontier life in Wyoming to truly enjoy this. You also need to have at least a basic understanding of geological fundamentals or be prepared to look up a lot of terminology along the way.

The book is basically a "travels with Charlie" travelogue where "Charlie" is not a canine companion, but David Love, an old school salt of the earth cowboy geologist who leads our narrator around to miscellaneous geologically interesting areas of Wyoming and expounds at length about the geology of the area. It is interspersed with random anecdotes and tales of the frontier days off Love's frontier settler ancestors.

It is not poorly written, but the dual subjects are so narrow as to make this a strange book with a seemingly infinitesimally small overlap on the Venn Diagram of the dual subjects.

Love is a fairly interesting subject himself but not enough to be the focal point

"This is about high-country geology and a Rocky Mountain regional geologist." And what a story it is. I am brand-new to an interest in geology (one webinar on western geology hooked me), and even I could comprehend what the author was describing in terms of geological processes and timeframes.

I wish I were in Wyoming reading this book, and every day I could go out and drive around and see some of what he was describing. His writing is that good, that I want to immerse myself in the setting he is describing.

I also loved the early life of David Love that was woven into the book, both the isolation and the camaraderie. And an interest in geology was almost a foregone conclusion, all those days and hours outdoors what else to look at and think about. And the ranch was visited by many oilmen and men from the U.S.G.S.

His mom was quite a woman, educated and practical and handy with a needle for sewing cloth or sewing up humans. The excerpts from her diary gave such depth to her and her life. His dad was quite a savvy guy as well, and had today's value of $5m in livestock by the time he married in 1910. Clever as well, buying up moribund towns (after stagecoach route ended) and moving their buildings and contents to create his ranch! But then the floods and the blizzards came and they lost nearly everything, but persevered and finally recovered.

This book was recommended by the webinar lecturer and I'm so pleased that I read it.

3.5 *

This 1986 book caught my eye in a visitor center in Grand Teton NP, because “rising from the plains” is exactly what those mountains looked like to me, and McPhee’s writing is almost always worth reading. It is about the author’s travels over Wyoming with geologist David Love, and what he saw and learned about Wyoming’s geology and Love’s family history. Wonderful sections are drawn from the journals of Love’s mother Ethel Waxham, who came to Wyoming as a young Wellesley graduate in 1905, to teach school. Some of the geologic details were hard for me to absorb; I wished I could have been looking at the actual features, as McPhee was. Love apparently worked extensively in the Grand Tetons, but only a small part of the book deals with that region (pp. 119 ff.). I enjoy, and have learned from, McPhee’s blending of historical narrative, travelogue, and scientific content. He also, more than most authors, uses words I had to look up: “incunabular” (p. 44), “rutilant” (p. 57), “chatoyant” (p. 67), and more. A lot to appreciate, in only 200 pages. (Plus a lovely reproduction of an Albert Bierstadt painting on the cover.)

Every. Single. Place. McPhee. Writes. About. I. Want. To. Visit.

Wyoming is suddenly everything I want to do on my next road trip. I wonder how many people have visited Jackson Hole based on his rock talk. Count me in.

Geology has gotten me through a tumultuous end to 2020 and rotten start to 2021.

Book #3 is as wonderful as the rest of the series.

14 seconds after I finished this I started listening to #4, Assembling California.

A great read. Never was much interested in geology, but after this book, I started to view highway drives differently. I had been to Wyoming before and noticed the vast differences in the surfaces but never gave it much thought. Also appreciated the excerpts from the journal kept by Love's mother who came to the state in 1906. How brave was that!! A girl from Wellesley College going to teach on a ranch in central Wyoming took guts.

I read this as we travelled up from Scottsdale through Flagstaff, by the Grand Canyon (we did stop to gawk), through Monument Valley and the Valley of the Gods, over the pass at Butte as it snowed (roads to Yellowstone were closed because of snow), and I finished it today as we drove around the edges of the Black Hills (Theodore Roosevelt National Park). A perfect read for a rather glorious car trip.

“In short, he had put the petals back on the flower. And it was some flower. The Teton landscape contained not only the most complete geologic history in North America but also the most complex. (“One reason I’ve put in a part of my life here is that we have so much coming together. I don’t want to waste my time. I can make more of a contribution by concentrating here than on any other place.”) 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.

Splitting the wall of the Tetons is a diabase dike a hundred and fifty feet wide, running like a dark streak of warpaint straight up the face of the mountains. Diabase: a brother of gabbro, a distant relative of granite. Four miles below the surface of the earth, the space occupied by this now solid dike was once a fissure through which the dark rock flowed upward as magma. At the same point in the narrative—1.3 billion years before the present, in the age of the Precambrian called Helikian time—marine beaches are not far to the west, and beyond them is a modest continental shelf. There is no Oregon, no Washington, not much Idaho—instead, blue ocean over ocean crust. Down toward the beaches flow sluggish rivers across a featureless plain. Folded and faulted schists and gneisses are bevelled under the plain, preserving in their deformation compressive crustal movements that have long since driven skyward uncounted ranges that have worn away. The Helikian beaches in their turn disappear, in burial becoming sandstone, which in the heat and pressure of more folding mountains is altered to quartzite. The mountains dissolve, and still another quiet plain vanishes below waves. The water advances into this piece of the world that will one day form as Jackson Hole. It lies close to the latitude of Holocene Sri Lanka—or Malaya, or Panama—and is moving toward the equator. The water is warm but not always quiet or clear. Blue-green algae build mounds in the shallows. There is a drop in sea level. Polygonal mud cracks become ceramic in the tropical sun. The sea returns. The water is virtually transparent, and the skeletons of billions of creatures form a pure blue-gray limestone. Like Debussy’s engulfed cathedral, the site comes up now and again into the light and air, but for the most part seas stay over it. Sands accumulate—broad, deep sands—but they preserve almost no fossil record, so not even David Love will ever say with certainty whether they are underwater or out in the air. (What he cannot say with certainty he will readily say without certainty, provided the difference is clear. He prefers not to be, as he likes to put it, “a man walking with one foot on each side of a fence.” He thinks that some of those sands were terrestrial dunes and coastlines, reddened as oxides in the air.) Jackson Hole is close to the equator, and phosphates form in the shallow evaporating sea. Tidal flats appear—wide red flats, thickened by slow rivers coming from an uplift far to the east. In the muds are small tracks and tiny bones of dinosaurs. Rapidly—and possibly as a result of the breaking up of the earth’s only continent—the region travels north, moving about a thousand miles in thirty million years. Big dunes form upon the flats: dry, windblown dunes—a Sahara in salmon and red, at the precise latitudes of the modern Sahara. The red sands in turn are covered by the Sundance Sea. Coming from the north, it not only buries the big dunes under mud and sand but covers them with galaxies of clams. When the water drops, floodplains emerge, and flooding rivers band the country—pink, purple, red, and green. Dinosaurs wander this chromatic landscape—a dinosaur as large as a corgi, a dinosaur as large as a bear, a dinosaur larger than a Trailways bus. Seas return, filled with a viciousness of life. Black and gray sediments pour into them from stratovolcanoes off to the west. In these times, the piece of sea bottom which is the future site of Jackson Hole overshoots the latitude of modern Wyoming and continues north to a kind of apogee near modern Saskatoon.

The land arches. Deep miles of sediments lying over schists and granites rise and bend. The seas drain eastward. The dinosaurs fade. Mountains rise northwest, rooted firmly to their Precambrian cores. Braided rivers descend from them, lugging quartzite boulders, and spreading fields of gold-bearing gravel tens of miles wide. Other mountains—as rootless sheets of rock—appear in the west, sliding like floorboards, overlapping, stacking up, covering younger rock, colliding with the rooted mountains, while to the east more big ranges and huge downflexing basins appear in the random geometries of the Laramide Revolution.

For all that is going on around it, the amount of activity at the site of Jackson Hole is relatively low. Across the future valley runs a northwest-trending hump that might be the beginnings of a big range but is destined not to become one. Miles below, however, a great fault develops among the Precambrian granites, amphibolites, gneisses, and schists—and a crustal block moves upward at least two thousand feet, stopping, for the time being, far below the surface.

New volcanoes rise to the north and east. Fissures spread open. Materials ranging from viscous lavas to flying ash obliterate the existing topography. Streams disintegrate these materials and rearrange them in layers a few miles away. So far, these scenes—each one of which is preserved in the rock of Jackson Hole—have advanced to a point that is 99.8 per cent of the way through the history of the earth, yet nothing is in sight that even vaguely resembles the Tetons. The Precambrian rock remains buried under younger sediments. At the surface is a country of undramatic hills. The movements that brought the Overthrust Belt to western Wyoming—and caused the more easterly ranges to leap up out of the ground—have all been compressional: crust driven against crust, folded, faulted, and otherwise deformed. Now the crust extends, the earth stretches, the land pulls apart—and one result is a north-south-trending normal fault, fifty miles long. On the two sides of this fault, blocks of country swing on distant hinges like a facing pair of trapdoors—one rising, one sagging. The rising side is the rock of the nascent Tetons, carrying upward on its back the stratified deposits of half a billion years. One after another, erosion shucks them off. Even more rapidly, the east side falls—into a growing void. Magma, in motion below, is continually being drawn toward volcanoes, vents, and fissures to the north. Just as magma moving under Idaho is causing land to collapse and form the Snake River Plain, magma drawn north from this place is increasing the vacuity of Jackson Hole. As the magma reaches Yellowstone, it rises to the surface, spreads out in all directions, and in a fiery cloud rolls down from Yellowstone to bury the north end of the Tetons, where it splits and flows along both sides. The descending valley floor breaks into blocks, like ice cubes in a bucket of water. Some of them stick up as buttes. A lake now fills the valley—shallow, forty miles long—and in it forms a limestone so white it looks like snow. There are white shales as well, and water-laid strata of white volcanic ash. As these sediments thicken to a depth approaching six thousand feet, the lake that rests upon them is always shallow, and full of freshwater clams and snails, and some beavers and aquatic mice. While the lake is accepting sediment, the bottom of its bottom is sinking at the same rate. With a loud terminal hissing, lavas flowing down from Yellowstone cool in the lake as obsidian. Fiery billows of sticky fog come down the valley as well. It cools as tuff. The big lake vanishes. In successive earthquakes, there is more valley faulting, damming the valley streams to form deep narrow lakes, which appear suddenly and as quickly go. Off the fast-rising block of mountains, erosion has by now removed fifteen thousand feet of layered sediments, and the Precambrian granites—with their attendant amphibolites, schists, and gneisses, and a vertical streak of diabase—are the highest rock below the sky. Bent upward against the flanks of the Precambrian are the broken-off strata of the Paleozoic era, and the broken-off strata of the Mesozoic era—serrated, ragged hogbacks, continually pushed aside. Perched on the granite at the skyline is a bit of Cambrian sandstone that the weather has yet to take away. On the opposite side of the Teton Fault, the same sandstone lies beneath the valley. The vertical distance between the two sides of this once contiguous formation is thirty thousand feet.

That brings the chronicle essentially to the present, but still the blockish mountains look more like hips than breasts. Now off the Absarokas, off the Wind Rivers, off the central Yellowstone Plateau—and, to a lesser extent, down the canyons of the Tetons—comes a thousand cubic miles of ice. A coalesced glacier more than half a mile thick enters and plows the valley. The west side of this glacier scrapes along the Tetons above the level of the modern timberline. Melting away, the glacier leaves a barren ground of boulders. More ice comes—a lesser but not insignificant volume—and a third episode, which is smaller still. The ice cuts headward up canyons into the mountains, making cirques. As rings of cirques further erode, they form the spires known as horns. The ice signs the valley with lakes, and as it shrinks back into the mountains human beings have come to watch it go. Long after it is gone, the valley floor, continuing to be unstable as magmas are drawn north from below, drops even more. Big spruce go down with it—trees with diameters of five feet—and are enveloped by the water of Jenny Lake. The mountains jump upward at the same time, many feet in a few seconds near the end of the fourteenth century, emphasizing the fact that they are active in our time. In 1925, seventy-five million tons of rock fall into the Gros Ventre River. In 1983, the year that the trees are discovered at the bottom of Jenny Lake, an earthquake halfway up the Richter scale rumbles through Jackson Hole.”

Notes: Simply astonishing. Not only a flawless example of narrative nonfiction, but a terrific western, too.

Amazing that geology can be so captivating. I didn’t realize that this was book #3 but I’m going to get the others and read this one again. So interesting.

Geology on site. Very technical and hard to wade through sometimes, but it certainly does seem to make a joke of global warming being caused exclusively by man. With all the millions of years of change and shifting caused by the earth itself, it's amazing that we're still here at all. It's also interesting, biographically, with the geologist and his family. I definitely enjoyed it.

I would have never expected to find a story featuring Wyoming settlers and geology remotely interesting. But trust John McPhee to change that.

And it’s actually hard to really pinpoint what this book is all about. Yes, there’s geology (and still relatively new for the time it was written plate tectonics theory) and geologists (David Love mostly) and the history of the geologist’s Wyoming settler family in Wind River Basin through the diaries of David Love’s mother Ethel Waxham Love (a combination of hardships and sheep human perseverance despite all odds, with an occasional tense snake dinner with local outlaws and fighting nature for survival), and starkly beautiful desolate landscapes (you know, that stuff that for the consternation of geologists covers all those awesome rocks). It’s a trip through Wyoming both in space and time as Love and McPhee cross Wyoming in an old Bronco along I-80, with Teton range being a young and beautiful geological upstart somewhere around there (Wyoming geography and me have a rocky relationship, pun intended and worked hard for), and it’s quite an experience.

n  n

And all this is mixed together in this book, making a total greater than the sum of its parts, creating a wonderful experience both mesmerizing and educational. I haven’t seen any of the places described here, but my mental landscapes are now so full of what I’ve built based on McPhee’s writing that I’m a little reluctant to look at actual photos now. You certainly don’t need to be a geologist or be able to find Wyoming on a map on the first try to enjoy it.

McPhee’s writing is just as fascinating to me as it was in Basin and Range. I’d read that guy narrating anything — and given his extensive collection of writings I think I’ll have plenty of chances to do so.

4 stars.