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Annals of the Former World #3
Rising from the Plains
This is about high-country geology and a Rocky Mountain regional geologist. I raise that semaphore here at the start so no one will feel misled by an opening passage in which a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist steps down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West.
So begins John McPhee's Rising from the Plains. If you like to read about geology, you will find good reading here. If, on the other hand, you are not much engaged by the spatial complexities of the science, you could miss a richness of human history that has its place among the strata described. Sometimes it is said of geologists that they reflect in their professional styles the sort of country in which they grew up. Nowhere could that be more true than in the life of a geologist born in the center of Wyoming and raised on an isolated ranch. This is the story of that ranch, soon after the turn of the century, and of the geologist who grew up there, at home with the composition of the high country in the way that someone growing up in a coastal harbor would be at home with the vagaries of the sea. While Rising from the Plains is a portrayal of extraordinary people, it is also a history of the landscape around them, where, with remarkable rapidity, mountains came up out of the flat terrain. Gradually, the mountains were buried, until only the higher peaks remained above a vast plain. Recently, they have been exhumed, and they stand now as the Rockies.
Rising from the Plains is John McPhee's third book on geology and geologists. Following Basin and Range and In Suspect Terrain, it continues to present a cross section of North America along the fortieth parallel—a series gathering under the overall title Annals of the Former World.
Description from the first-edition dust jacket (1986).
So begins John McPhee's Rising from the Plains. If you like to read about geology, you will find good reading here. If, on the other hand, you are not much engaged by the spatial complexities of the science, you could miss a richness of human history that has its place among the strata described. Sometimes it is said of geologists that they reflect in their professional styles the sort of country in which they grew up. Nowhere could that be more true than in the life of a geologist born in the center of Wyoming and raised on an isolated ranch. This is the story of that ranch, soon after the turn of the century, and of the geologist who grew up there, at home with the composition of the high country in the way that someone growing up in a coastal harbor would be at home with the vagaries of the sea. While Rising from the Plains is a portrayal of extraordinary people, it is also a history of the landscape around them, where, with remarkable rapidity, mountains came up out of the flat terrain. Gradually, the mountains were buried, until only the higher peaks remained above a vast plain. Recently, they have been exhumed, and they stand now as the Rockies.
Rising from the Plains is John McPhee's third book on geology and geologists. Following Basin and Range and In Suspect Terrain, it continues to present a cross section of North America along the fortieth parallel—a series gathering under the overall title Annals of the Former World.
Description from the first-edition dust jacket (1986).
208 pages, Paperback
First published November 17, 1986
99 people are currently reading
1774 people want to read
About the author
John McPhee
130 books1,820 followersJohn Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 196 reviews
April 14, 2024
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.
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.
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.
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.
March 26, 2022
If you’re lucky, you’ve had the chance to get to know somebody truly inspirational, someone who just seems to belong to a different category of humanity than us normal folk. This book has three such people: A geologist named David Love; a frontier wife named Ethel Waxman; and of course the author himself, John McPhee. Arguably, the book is primarily about geology, but that’s a very limited interpretation. For many years, this was my favorite book, and re-reading it twenty years later, I realize I was right: This is marvelous.
McPhee has made a career of writing about interesting, highly-accomplished people. What sets this book apart is love – he really seems to love the people he’s profiling. (While this is blatantly obvious in the text, be assured I’m not making this up – he stated as much in an interview.) What can be more pleasurable than reading a brilliant writer writing about people he loves and admires?
McPhee got his hands on the unpublished diaries of a young woman who made a life for herself in the emerging state of Wyoming in the early 1900’s, and it’s riveting reading. Miss Waxman is an impressive example of humanity – top of her class at Wellesley, an excellent horsewoman, she became a schoolteacher – the only schoolteacher, in fact – in Fremont County, Wyoming in 1905. (Fremont County is about the size of New Hampshire, and she had only a dozen students, some of whom had a three-hour commute by horse.) Women were so scarce in the region that a stranger found a glove she’d dropped on the prairie twenty miles from her ranchhouse, but quickly figured out who the owner must be and returned it. David Love was a down-to-earth guy (literally -- he slept outdoors about 1/4 of his life, given the nature of his work.) He also knew more about Rocky Mountain earth science than anybody living back then, probably, and is a good explainer.
So many “romantic” books are all about the period leading up to a marriage…Having now been married myself for twenty-six years, having raised a family, I think romance in the decades after the wedding has been given short shrift in literature. But the story told here is full of romantic touches, in the broader sense of the term. Here’s Ethel writing about an outing with her two sons, after harvesting wild hay:
Of course, there’s a great deal about geology here as well. The book is set almost entirely in Wyoming, which has long been my bolt-hole when I grow tired of civilization. If you’re at all interested in Mother Earth, there’s something of interest in every corner of the state, and this book provides a thorough and illuminating overview. It just so happens that Wyoming is a perfect place to study just about every geologic process known, and Grand Teton National Park contains the most complete and complex geologic record of any place in North America. At the time this book was written, the exact process by which the Rocky Mountains arose was still a substantial mystery, an odd puzzle among the world’s mountain ranges. Maybe geologists have figured it out since then, but unless we come up with another science writer of McPhee’s caliber to explain it, I don't wanna hear it.
McPhee has made a career of writing about interesting, highly-accomplished people. What sets this book apart is love – he really seems to love the people he’s profiling. (While this is blatantly obvious in the text, be assured I’m not making this up – he stated as much in an interview.) What can be more pleasurable than reading a brilliant writer writing about people he loves and admires?
McPhee got his hands on the unpublished diaries of a young woman who made a life for herself in the emerging state of Wyoming in the early 1900’s, and it’s riveting reading. Miss Waxman is an impressive example of humanity – top of her class at Wellesley, an excellent horsewoman, she became a schoolteacher – the only schoolteacher, in fact – in Fremont County, Wyoming in 1905. (Fremont County is about the size of New Hampshire, and she had only a dozen students, some of whom had a three-hour commute by horse.) Women were so scarce in the region that a stranger found a glove she’d dropped on the prairie twenty miles from her ranchhouse, but quickly figured out who the owner must be and returned it. David Love was a down-to-earth guy (literally -- he slept outdoors about 1/4 of his life, given the nature of his work.) He also knew more about Rocky Mountain earth science than anybody living back then, probably, and is a good explainer.
So many “romantic” books are all about the period leading up to a marriage…Having now been married myself for twenty-six years, having raised a family, I think romance in the decades after the wedding has been given short shrift in literature. But the story told here is full of romantic touches, in the broader sense of the term. Here’s Ethel writing about an outing with her two sons, after harvesting wild hay:
My husband liked to have me ride with them for the last load. Sometimes I held the reins and cried, “Whoa, Dan!” while the men pitched up the hay. Then while the wagon swayed slowly back over the uneven road, I lay nestled deeply between my sons in the fragrant hay. The billowy white clouds moving across the wide blue sky were close, so close, it seemed there was nothing else in the universe but clouds and hay.Of course, not every day on the ranch was this calm. Working with large animals always carries the potential for danger:
“The bull broke into the high granary," wrote Waxman. "Our only, and small, supply of horse and chicken feed was there. Foolishly, I went in after him and drove him down the steps…” The bull actually charged her in the granary and came close to crushing her against the back wall. She confused it, sweeping its eyes with a broom. It probably would have killed her, though, had it not stepped on a weak plank, which snapped. The animal panicked and turned for the door. (In decades to follow, her husband never fixed the plank.)Spending time with the characters in this book is quite simply a joy. Even better that they aren’t fictional, and there are people alive today who remember these folks and call them"grandma" and “grandpa”.
Of course, there’s a great deal about geology here as well. The book is set almost entirely in Wyoming, which has long been my bolt-hole when I grow tired of civilization. If you’re at all interested in Mother Earth, there’s something of interest in every corner of the state, and this book provides a thorough and illuminating overview. It just so happens that Wyoming is a perfect place to study just about every geologic process known, and Grand Teton National Park contains the most complete and complex geologic record of any place in North America. At the time this book was written, the exact process by which the Rocky Mountains arose was still a substantial mystery, an odd puzzle among the world’s mountain ranges. Maybe geologists have figured it out since then, but unless we come up with another science writer of McPhee’s caliber to explain it, I don't wanna hear it.
November 4, 2018
In Rising from the Plains, John McPhee takes us on an exciting and fascinating road trip throughout Wyoming with geologist David Love. The first half of the book is a beautiful blend of Wyoming geology, and the history of Love’s family as they move into the Wind River Basin region in the early twentieth century. The second half of the book continues with geology of the Rocky Mountain region, but also includes a high-level look at the United States and how it affected western geology.
I enjoyed McPhee’s descriptive writing style. He has a way of transporting you back in time millions of years with his vivid descriptions of flora and fauna. In the beginning of the book is a map of Wyoming showing the different geological areas and a chart outlining the different eras. I’m a sucker for a good map, and I found the chart extremely helpful. My only complaint was the lack of paragraph breaks. Sometimes entire pages were one long paragraph, and for me this made reading a bit of work. I know this is petty, but it was enough of a distraction for me that I felt I needed to mention it.
If you love geology and western history, I would highly recommend this book!
I enjoyed McPhee’s descriptive writing style. He has a way of transporting you back in time millions of years with his vivid descriptions of flora and fauna. In the beginning of the book is a map of Wyoming showing the different geological areas and a chart outlining the different eras. I’m a sucker for a good map, and I found the chart extremely helpful. My only complaint was the lack of paragraph breaks. Sometimes entire pages were one long paragraph, and for me this made reading a bit of work. I know this is petty, but it was enough of a distraction for me that I felt I needed to mention it.
If you love geology and western history, I would highly recommend this book!
July 25, 2025
― “There was a saying among homesteaders in Wyoming: ‘If summer falls on a weekend, let’s have a picnic.’”
― John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
Author John McPhee’s work Rising from the Plains almost defies categorization. While it clearly fits into the broad category of non-fiction, McPhee combines biography and geology to create a fascinating portrait of how the land on which America sits was formed. Rising from the Plains is part of his five-book series on geology and geologists in McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Annals of the Former World. McPhee is the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
When this book showed up on my Goodreads feed, I became interested because of my fascination with Wyoming and its majestic natural beauty. I have been fortunate to spend 17 amazing days on two separate trips exploring the state. While Wyoming is known as the home of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, the state also features rolling plains and charming towns. My wife and I absolutely loved Jackson Hole. Starting at 6,311 feet of elevation, the landscape of Jackson Hole is rich with wildlife and pristine lakes. Soaring over Jackson Hole, the towering peaks of the Teton Range rise as high as 7,000 feet above the valley floor, offering majestic alpine vistas. Our hikes into the Tetons took us to altitudes above 9,000 feet, where we occasionally encountered as much as three feet of snow on the ground in mid-June.
― “Wyoming, in its one-thirty-seventh of the United States, contains a disproportionate percentage of American geology.”
― John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
The central figure of the book is David Love, field geologist and specialist in Rocky Mountain geology who worked for the United States Geological Survey. McPhee first introduces the reader to David’s mother, Ethel Waxham. Waxham graduated from Wellesley College, where she studied classical literature, Greek, French, German and Latin, earning one of Wellesley’s first Phi Beta Kappa keys. She came to Wyoming as a single woman in 1905 to teach at a country school. She met a rancher named John Love; they were married in 1910. In addition to her chores around their isolated ranch, she taught her children. Clearly, she taught them well. Her son David would earn a bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wyoming and his Ph.D. in geology from Yale University.
The reader not only learns about the geology of Wyoming, they learn about the pioneers of the West. These bold, independent and curious spirits traveled to the west of North America with the aspiration to settle and develop the unexplored territories. What sets McPhee’s work apart from other works of nonfiction is his prose. He is a master of the mode variously referred to as creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, or narrative journalism. McPhee demonstrates that, even when handling complex material, good prose need never be ordinary. His portrait of Love and his family is written with affection.
― “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 in 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.”
― John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
Somehow, the author enables the unsuspecting reader to become interested in the earth sciences. To get his material for the book, the author traveled around Wyoming in David Love’s Ford Bronco, stopping now and then to sleep under the stars. We learn that, in every corner of every mountain range and basin in Wyoming, there is a fascinating geological story recorded in the rocks. The reader discovers the important role that geology plays in mineral-rich Wyoming’s economy. McPhee takes the reader all the way back into the Paleozoic era and Precambrian time.
Later in the book, he writes a fascinating account about some of the enigmas in geology. Why are there volcanoes where there are no breaks in the earth’s mantle? How did the western US, which had been a seabed at one time, become elevated?
― “What could explain Bermuda—a mountainous summit seventeen thousand six hundred and fifty-nine feet above the Hatteras Abyssal Plain? What created the Marshall Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Line Islands, the Tuamotu Archipelago—where corals veneer the peaks of twenty-thousand-foot mountains that tend to run in chains? Like Yellowstone, like Bermuda, like Hawaii, like Mt. Cameroon, they lie great distances from the nearest intersection of plates.”
― John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
In 1999, the American Geological Institute awarded David Love its first Legendary Geoscientist Award, which recognizes a geoscientist who has produced scientific achievements and service to the earth sciences that have lasting, historic value. Rising from the Plains is a fascinating account of Love’s work and the geology of Wyoming. Now that I am aware of the author, I will be sure to read more of McPhee’s works.
― John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
Author John McPhee’s work Rising from the Plains almost defies categorization. While it clearly fits into the broad category of non-fiction, McPhee combines biography and geology to create a fascinating portrait of how the land on which America sits was formed. Rising from the Plains is part of his five-book series on geology and geologists in McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Annals of the Former World. McPhee is the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
When this book showed up on my Goodreads feed, I became interested because of my fascination with Wyoming and its majestic natural beauty. I have been fortunate to spend 17 amazing days on two separate trips exploring the state. While Wyoming is known as the home of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, the state also features rolling plains and charming towns. My wife and I absolutely loved Jackson Hole. Starting at 6,311 feet of elevation, the landscape of Jackson Hole is rich with wildlife and pristine lakes. Soaring over Jackson Hole, the towering peaks of the Teton Range rise as high as 7,000 feet above the valley floor, offering majestic alpine vistas. Our hikes into the Tetons took us to altitudes above 9,000 feet, where we occasionally encountered as much as three feet of snow on the ground in mid-June.
― “Wyoming, in its one-thirty-seventh of the United States, contains a disproportionate percentage of American geology.”
― John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
The central figure of the book is David Love, field geologist and specialist in Rocky Mountain geology who worked for the United States Geological Survey. McPhee first introduces the reader to David’s mother, Ethel Waxham. Waxham graduated from Wellesley College, where she studied classical literature, Greek, French, German and Latin, earning one of Wellesley’s first Phi Beta Kappa keys. She came to Wyoming as a single woman in 1905 to teach at a country school. She met a rancher named John Love; they were married in 1910. In addition to her chores around their isolated ranch, she taught her children. Clearly, she taught them well. Her son David would earn a bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wyoming and his Ph.D. in geology from Yale University.
The reader not only learns about the geology of Wyoming, they learn about the pioneers of the West. These bold, independent and curious spirits traveled to the west of North America with the aspiration to settle and develop the unexplored territories. What sets McPhee’s work apart from other works of nonfiction is his prose. He is a master of the mode variously referred to as creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, or narrative journalism. McPhee demonstrates that, even when handling complex material, good prose need never be ordinary. His portrait of Love and his family is written with affection.
― “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 in 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.”
― John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
Somehow, the author enables the unsuspecting reader to become interested in the earth sciences. To get his material for the book, the author traveled around Wyoming in David Love’s Ford Bronco, stopping now and then to sleep under the stars. We learn that, in every corner of every mountain range and basin in Wyoming, there is a fascinating geological story recorded in the rocks. The reader discovers the important role that geology plays in mineral-rich Wyoming’s economy. McPhee takes the reader all the way back into the Paleozoic era and Precambrian time.
Later in the book, he writes a fascinating account about some of the enigmas in geology. Why are there volcanoes where there are no breaks in the earth’s mantle? How did the western US, which had been a seabed at one time, become elevated?
― “What could explain Bermuda—a mountainous summit seventeen thousand six hundred and fifty-nine feet above the Hatteras Abyssal Plain? What created the Marshall Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Line Islands, the Tuamotu Archipelago—where corals veneer the peaks of twenty-thousand-foot mountains that tend to run in chains? Like Yellowstone, like Bermuda, like Hawaii, like Mt. Cameroon, they lie great distances from the nearest intersection of plates.”
― John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
In 1999, the American Geological Institute awarded David Love its first Legendary Geoscientist Award, which recognizes a geoscientist who has produced scientific achievements and service to the earth sciences that have lasting, historic value. Rising from the Plains is a fascinating account of Love’s work and the geology of Wyoming. Now that I am aware of the author, I will be sure to read more of McPhee’s works.
April 27, 2016
''Most maps are patched together from various papers and reports. Dave has looked at all the rock. It's all in one mind. Most geologic maps are maps of time, not rocks."
-- Malcolm McKenna, quoted in John McPhee's Rising from the Plains
I am nearly finished with the individual portions of Annals of the Former World (Basin and Range ☑, In Suspect Terrain ☑, Assembling California ☑). All I have left is to read the section 'Crossing the Craton' (a forty-page addition to his 40th parallel/I-80 project that filled in the blank in the map and allowed the publishers of 'Annals of the Former World' some additional McPhee text not found in the four main books/sections previously published to incentivize McPhee's fans to fork out the addtional $35 in 1998 to get the whole brilliant McPhee mess).
I read these books a little out of order over a little over the last year. I started off well with 'Basin & Range', 'In Suspect Terrain', but then jumped to 'Assembling California' since a couple of weeks ago I was going to be driving through California and figured it would be nice to have some geology of the geography I was going to be driving through next to me.
While I was a little disappointed with 'Assembling California', I loved 'Rising from the Plains'. I don't know if it was a return to my roots (Wyoming and Snake River and Mormon Country), or the fact that this book seemed just to excite McPhee more. You could tell he loved the Loves (David Love: Yale educated geologist, cowboy; John Love: David's father, mirthful Scot rancher/cowboy, nephew of John Muir; Ethel Waxham Love: David's mother, teacher, writer). He threads this family's golden personality and history with the geology and geography of Wyoming.
These books are dangerous and should not be given to children. I am keeping them locked up with my William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, etc. If my son or daughter (no field geology sexist me) were to discover these McPhee books too young (s)he might just grow up to be a passionate field geologist. Reading this as I near my 40s, McPhee almost makes me want to take up a hammer, hop on a horse, and ride into the mountains.
I give it four stars, simply because 'Coming into the Country' still exists for me as a slightly better book, but I think the combined energy of all of the 'Annals' is definitely amazing.
-- Malcolm McKenna, quoted in John McPhee's Rising from the Plains
I am nearly finished with the individual portions of Annals of the Former World (Basin and Range ☑, In Suspect Terrain ☑, Assembling California ☑). All I have left is to read the section 'Crossing the Craton' (a forty-page addition to his 40th parallel/I-80 project that filled in the blank in the map and allowed the publishers of 'Annals of the Former World' some additional McPhee text not found in the four main books/sections previously published to incentivize McPhee's fans to fork out the addtional $35 in 1998 to get the whole brilliant McPhee mess).
I read these books a little out of order over a little over the last year. I started off well with 'Basin & Range', 'In Suspect Terrain', but then jumped to 'Assembling California' since a couple of weeks ago I was going to be driving through California and figured it would be nice to have some geology of the geography I was going to be driving through next to me.
While I was a little disappointed with 'Assembling California', I loved 'Rising from the Plains'. I don't know if it was a return to my roots (Wyoming and Snake River and Mormon Country), or the fact that this book seemed just to excite McPhee more. You could tell he loved the Loves (David Love: Yale educated geologist, cowboy; John Love: David's father, mirthful Scot rancher/cowboy, nephew of John Muir; Ethel Waxham Love: David's mother, teacher, writer). He threads this family's golden personality and history with the geology and geography of Wyoming.
These books are dangerous and should not be given to children. I am keeping them locked up with my William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, etc. If my son or daughter (no field geology sexist me) were to discover these McPhee books too young (s)he might just grow up to be a passionate field geologist. Reading this as I near my 40s, McPhee almost makes me want to take up a hammer, hop on a horse, and ride into the mountains.
I give it four stars, simply because 'Coming into the Country' still exists for me as a slightly better book, but I think the combined energy of all of the 'Annals' is definitely amazing.
January 16, 2009
This book was phenomenal.
It is a must read for anyone interested in Rocky Mountain geology, or in getting a glimpse into the American west.
This book has been republished in McPhee's larger Annals of a Former World. It is a biography of the famous Wyoming geologist, J. David Love. But it also gives a beautiful overview of the geology of Wyoming through Love's eyes.
Some of the geology is a bit outdated, but it does not distract from the greater good.
It is a must read for anyone interested in Rocky Mountain geology, or in getting a glimpse into the American west.
This book has been republished in McPhee's larger Annals of a Former World. It is a biography of the famous Wyoming geologist, J. David Love. But it also gives a beautiful overview of the geology of Wyoming through Love's eyes.
Some of the geology is a bit outdated, but it does not distract from the greater good.
October 22, 2011
This is the third time I've read Rising from the Plains and it seems as fresh today as when I first read it for a geology class back in the mid-90's. John McPhee, who wrote for the The New York Times for many years, is an engaging writer and in this book weaves the geology of the high plains with the story of famed Rocky Mountain geologist David Love and his family, who settled in central Wyoming in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Having lived in Wyoming myself, I am familiar with the area about which he writes. Wyoming is filled with unexpected landscapes that are awesome, forbidding and beautiful. Even if you don't understand the geological terms or timeline, the book can be enjoyed for its depiction of ranch life in one of the harshest environments in the continental U.S.and the pure pleasure of McPhee's prose.
The Wyoming landscape is unique in the world and is composed of many mountain ranges in addition to the well-known Rockies and Tetons. The Rocky Mountains are new mountains, relatively speaking, that have covered older ranges. That is the case across the state; new ranges moved or enfolded older ranges pushing them every which way. Water has carved anomalies like the Devil's Footprint and Flaming Gorge. Wind has played an even larger role in shaping the landscape. There are fossils galore and along the I-80 corridor one views rock stratification created over millions of years, from the earliest days of our continent through later ages until more recent geological time - 10 million years ago.
I highly recommend this book, it's one of my favorites not only because of the memories it evokes but also because geology fascinates me and John McPhee, who does an excellent job of showing why.
Having lived in Wyoming myself, I am familiar with the area about which he writes. Wyoming is filled with unexpected landscapes that are awesome, forbidding and beautiful. Even if you don't understand the geological terms or timeline, the book can be enjoyed for its depiction of ranch life in one of the harshest environments in the continental U.S.and the pure pleasure of McPhee's prose.
The Wyoming landscape is unique in the world and is composed of many mountain ranges in addition to the well-known Rockies and Tetons. The Rocky Mountains are new mountains, relatively speaking, that have covered older ranges. That is the case across the state; new ranges moved or enfolded older ranges pushing them every which way. Water has carved anomalies like the Devil's Footprint and Flaming Gorge. Wind has played an even larger role in shaping the landscape. There are fossils galore and along the I-80 corridor one views rock stratification created over millions of years, from the earliest days of our continent through later ages until more recent geological time - 10 million years ago.
I highly recommend this book, it's one of my favorites not only because of the memories it evokes but also because geology fascinates me and John McPhee, who does an excellent job of showing why.
July 29, 2023
I love John McPhee's writing. My wife and I just finished a tour of Wyoming where we hiked seven of these regions so to understand the geology in this book and why there are so many broad valleys due to the miocene fill was fulfilling.
I knew that Yellowstone was a unique global geologic feature but I did not know that the Wind River Range is believed once to have been taller than Mt Everest today - at least once upon a geologic time.
There is a lot of limestone in Wyoming and it was too dry to dissolve so it remained as caprock when the other rock turned to rubble from erosion, so in several places the prairie merges with the limestone near the continental divide which is also unique geologically
5 stars
I knew that Yellowstone was a unique global geologic feature but I did not know that the Wind River Range is believed once to have been taller than Mt Everest today - at least once upon a geologic time.
There is a lot of limestone in Wyoming and it was too dry to dissolve so it remained as caprock when the other rock turned to rubble from erosion, so in several places the prairie merges with the limestone near the continental divide which is also unique geologically
5 stars
June 5, 2024
This book is like Madam How and Lady Why on steroids. The geology of Wyoming is quite fascinating. While some of it went over my head, I now want to find someone local who knows about these things. All the references to the wind made me laugh (or cry), and I enjoyed the story that was woven through it all.
January 12, 2019
Western history, memoir, geography, and of course, geology. All mixed into one relatively slim volume. People who have vivid mental maps of Wyoming, and have driven I-80 (preferably many times) will be the most avid readers. As I read, I kept wondering why the author/publisher didn't use illustrations. Verbal descriptions of geologic features aren't nearly as instructive as one good drawing. There is a map, but it's pretty general.
Another criticism -- there isn't an Index, which is an omission I don't understand. I know I'll want to refer back to specific discussions, so I ended up making my own brief index, including topics such as selenium, Larmide Orogeny, Never Summer Mountains (in Colorado), Hayden (and watercress), trona, antelope trap ... all referring to tidbits of info that I found interesting.
And here's one quote:
p 195 Before the federal Bureau of Reclamation built a dam there, Flaming Gorge was one of the scenic climaxes of the American West -- a 700 ft canyon in arching Triassic red beds so bright they did indeed suggest flame. ... Some of the high water penetrates beds of trona.
Trona. I'd never heard of it. McPhee explains that trona is 'sodium sesquicarbontate' used in ceramics and textiles, pulp and paper, iron and steel, and most especially, glass. Mining of this mineral has released a lot of salt into the environment, which of course is never good. And to think that I'd never heard of the stuff.
This isn't a book I'd read for pleasure. A few pages at a time were plenty. I had about convinced myself not to pick up another one of his books, but I've changed my mind. I'll watch for a book about an area that I'm more familiar with.
Another criticism -- there isn't an Index, which is an omission I don't understand. I know I'll want to refer back to specific discussions, so I ended up making my own brief index, including topics such as selenium, Larmide Orogeny, Never Summer Mountains (in Colorado), Hayden (and watercress), trona, antelope trap ... all referring to tidbits of info that I found interesting.
And here's one quote:
p 195 Before the federal Bureau of Reclamation built a dam there, Flaming Gorge was one of the scenic climaxes of the American West -- a 700 ft canyon in arching Triassic red beds so bright they did indeed suggest flame. ... Some of the high water penetrates beds of trona.
Trona. I'd never heard of it. McPhee explains that trona is 'sodium sesquicarbontate' used in ceramics and textiles, pulp and paper, iron and steel, and most especially, glass. Mining of this mineral has released a lot of salt into the environment, which of course is never good. And to think that I'd never heard of the stuff.
This isn't a book I'd read for pleasure. A few pages at a time were plenty. I had about convinced myself not to pick up another one of his books, but I've changed my mind. I'll watch for a book about an area that I'm more familiar with.
June 29, 2021
McPhee at his best. The author mixes geology, history and humans into a tightly woven story.
Wyoming could not be more alive than in this story about the early 20th century settlers.
John Love settled at the epicenter of Wyoming and has two sons and a daughter. His son, David Love, took up geology of Wyoming in a large way and his observations and tact are the center of McPhee's writing. A well-spun yarn.
Wyoming could not be more alive than in this story about the early 20th century settlers.
John Love settled at the epicenter of Wyoming and has two sons and a daughter. His son, David Love, took up geology of Wyoming in a large way and his observations and tact are the center of McPhee's writing. A well-spun yarn.
January 2, 2025
so much fun. as much a portrait of Wyoming throughout the 20th century as a geological exploration of the state. some of the stories are preposterous, but highly entertaining regardless. at points i felt as though i was hearing the plot of a western recounted to me. lovely prose, as usual. David Love himself is remarkable as well: geologist, grand-nephew of John Muir, an outdoorsman from childhood, an incredibly witty man.
June 11, 2025
it's not that it feels long but how does he pack so much into a book so short
June 16, 2025
good stuff
July 19, 2017
While studying general Wyoming history I learned by happy happenstance of John McPhee's 1986 book Rising From the Plains, which unfolds the geological story of the state from the perspective of those American Western pioneers and their descendants who have inhabited the land for the last century. Wyoming geologist David Love is McPhee's focal point. It's challenging to pin down this book. It's a portrait of Wyoming's geology, but also of David Love and his family, and occasionally it's more free-flowing nature writing. While McPhee's material is arranged in a distinctively unusual, if not idiosyncratic, manner, his writing is lovely and always riveting. Even if you are, like I, essentially ignorant of the fundamentals of geology, this book is sure to come as a revelation. I cannot imagine how anyone who discovers this book can fail to be moved by the stateliness of Love's chosen field of study, or by the greater story that the adventure of science collectively has to unfold.
Through a second act of synchronicity while reading this book I stumbled across Ken Burns' 1996 PBS video series called The West. Episode 8 contains extended interviews with David Love in which considerable portions recounted in McPhee's book are recounted. I would advise anyone who enjoys this book to seek out that documentary as well.
Through a second act of synchronicity while reading this book I stumbled across Ken Burns' 1996 PBS video series called The West. Episode 8 contains extended interviews with David Love in which considerable portions recounted in McPhee's book are recounted. I would advise anyone who enjoys this book to seek out that documentary as well.
November 3, 2016
Mind-numbingly abstruse. I don't see how anyone who is not in the geology field could find this book remotely accessible. Maybe I just lack the intellectual curiosity or capacity for this book. Or maybe it's just a slog of a book that few regular folks would find appealing.
May 30, 2022
“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.
“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.
November 20, 2024
This is the third installment as I work my way through Annals of the Former World. In Rising from the Plains, I was expecting a breakdown of my perennial question, as a Front Range resident, "how did the Rocky Mountains get there?" The Rockies are especially intriguing as, unlike the Alps, Andes, and Himalayas, there are no continental plates crashing into each other along fault lines. I had long assumed that volcanic action was behind it, but that's not accurate either. I'm not sure my questions have been answered in this book, and I may need to invest in more recent geology books to find a better answer. I know now that the Pikes Peak granite batholith was formed from slow-cooling magma deep underground 2 billion years ago, and at some point in the last however many million years, the batholith rose up through the sedimentary crusts, leaving a stripe of lovely vertical sandstone monuments all along the Front Range, from the Boulder Flatirons to the Garden of the Gods.
However, this book only briefly touched on this. This book is about the wild and confusing geologicalmess marvel that is Wyoming, interspersed with the history of geologist David Love's homesteading family who came to the state in the late 1800s. I enjoyed these historical sections a lot, especially coming off the pioneer classic My Ántonia (one of the ranch hands in that book was even a stage coach driver in Wyoming, making me wonder if he crossed paths with David Love's mother Ethel, who travels to the state via stage to be schoolmarm in the literal wilderness). Rising from the Plains echoes Ántonia also in its examination of the transformation of the West, in this case via uranium mining and oil extraction, ending on the melancholy image of the ancestral Love Ranch, derelict and abandoned within site of the uranium strip mines.
However, this book only briefly touched on this. This book is about the wild and confusing geological
September 29, 2022
There are two related and interconnected stories here: (1) geologist David Love's family's pioneering history in central Wyoming and (2) the geology of Wyoming. McPhee does his darnedest to mash and interweave them together, but he doesn't always succeed elegantly. Unlike his first book in the Annals of the Former World series, In Suspect Terrain, in which McPhee relates details of his travels on Interstate 80 west from New York to the Indiana border with geologist Anita Harris in a fairly linear and straightforward narrative, Rising from the Plains jumps around Wyoming exploring the state's geology piecemeal. Furthermore, McPhee interrupts the geology tour with the saga of the Love family and with David Love's academic training. The resulting book is scattered and sometimes difficult to put together.
McPhee is a geological and geographical name dropper, and it gets irritating ("Aren't I smart?"); sometimes, it feels like McPhee knows these names because he completes the New York Times crossword puzzle and picks up the names of obscure places and geographical features in the process.
Nevertheless, the book is interesting, both in its treatment of Wyoming's geology and the pioneering ranch family's hard luck and resilience.
I wish McPhee would have include some geological cross sections; they would have made some of the written geological descriptions so much easier to understand. Unlike in the other two books in the series, though, at least there's a map of Wyoming in this book highlighting many of the places McPhee visited.
McPhee is a geological and geographical name dropper, and it gets irritating ("Aren't I smart?"); sometimes, it feels like McPhee knows these names because he completes the New York Times crossword puzzle and picks up the names of obscure places and geographical features in the process.
Nevertheless, the book is interesting, both in its treatment of Wyoming's geology and the pioneering ranch family's hard luck and resilience.
I wish McPhee would have include some geological cross sections; they would have made some of the written geological descriptions so much easier to understand. Unlike in the other two books in the series, though, at least there's a map of Wyoming in this book highlighting many of the places McPhee visited.
June 19, 2018
With the last two Annals of the Former World books, it's become somewhat more obvious that these books are as much the story of of specific geologists as they are of the geology itself. This book spends a lot more time on the life of David Love and his parents than it does on the actual geology itself.
I suppose I should be disappointed by the bait-and-switch as I was with Our Senses , but I think the difference is that I wasn't reading this book because I was super interested in plains geology and I found the account of the Love family getting established in Wyoming charming and interesting in its own right. I think at this point in the series you know what to expect.
3.5 of 5 stars
I suppose I should be disappointed by the bait-and-switch as I was with Our Senses , but I think the difference is that I wasn't reading this book because I was super interested in plains geology and I found the account of the Love family getting established in Wyoming charming and interesting in its own right. I think at this point in the series you know what to expect.
3.5 of 5 stars
January 28, 2019
Another excellent book by John McPhee. This is about geology, specifically Wyoming geology, but it's also about David Love, an apparently legendary geologist. I say apparently because I don't know anything about geology. Much of the book went over my head. But within the story of Wyoming's geology is the story of David Love and his family - his parents' courtship and marriage, his childhood and college years, his love for his home state, the tension he felt between his environmentalism and his discovery of useful "products" of the land. Those bits I could understand.
I always say this: John McPhee can make any topic interesting.
I always say this: John McPhee can make any topic interesting.
February 9, 2022
I went back and forth on this. It's quite quite hard to comprehend the motions over time just by their nature and the extremity of the changes; but I was gripped by the story of the Wyoming-bound schoolteacher from her journals. What really sticks out, of course, is the geologist-explorer at the center, who thinks exploiting resources is his purpose but starts to have some hesitations that of course now we can see are glimmers of the unsustainable truth.
January 16, 2020
This one is about Wyoming. The Love family geologists, Scottish stubborn survivalists, living rough and ranching. Jackson Hole and how it formed, how the Rockies got exhumed, how oil and uranium were unexpectedly found in Wyoming’s basins. Also the theory of hot spots, how plates move over them to form island chains, and how the deep theory works until it is / isn’t proven. Also some reflections on office vs field geology, and how one might regret a uranium gold rush in your childhood backyard & the attendant ecological fallout.
May 22, 2020
Oh, this book was very close to being a 5-star read, but McPhee just got too technical for a novice like me toward the end. Still, I feel blessed to have read this book and the McPhee cared enough about the state I live in to spend the time to write it. For anyone who loves Wyoming or loves geology or both!
August 3, 2017
3.5 *
September 12, 2023
A first rate introduction to the geology of Wyoming. John McPhee's superb writing skills are noticable.
November 24, 2021
“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.
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.
June 27, 2020
Very interesting account of the geology of Wyoming! I really enjoyed all the facts, like why the Wyoming rivers have strange paths, and how Union Pacific got a leg up due to a route in Wyoming, and why people in Pinedale have accelerated tooth decay. I love geology because it literally underlies everything, and this book highlighted that.
Read
June 8, 2020I'm just never going to be able to get through the geology series.
March 1, 2023
I faced an unwelcome prospect my first year in college: a mandatory lab science course. My options included Rocks for Jocks and Rat Psych. I took Rat Psych. Didn't learn much. But that's okay. Fifty years later I read Rising from the Plains and undoubtedly learned more about geology than I would have by signing up for Rocks for Jocks.
Not that I understood all, or most, of Rising from the Plains, focused on Wyoming and a geologist named David Love, whose life proved to be a western saga Wallace Stegner might have written, or, heaven forbid, James Michener. The problem was the avalanche of names and data centered on Wyoming's epic role in Earth's history, the collisions of forces and permutations of chemistry over billions of years. Fascinating stuff but hard to keep straight. Every chapter should be accompanied by a map. I love maps. And there should be photos, lots of them.
Nonetheless this effort in force-feeding the geologically uninitiated taught me a great deal, which I do not, dare not, hasten to explain, starting with the contrast between everything thought to be known about geology and everything yet to be known, the contradictions within plate tectonic theory, for example--how to resolve them...or just live with them-- the anomalies presented by certain rocks located where they shouldn't be, and so on.
Much of Wyoming is beautiful, notably the Tetons and Yellowstone. A fair amount is ugly. Now I would look at the ugly parts differently, thinking about how they got to be so ugly.
One of my favorite observations in this book concerns lakes, which are described as rivers who have lost their getaway driver.
Unfortunately the geology saga goes this way: once upon a time there were field geologists; now there are geologists holed up in offices. Field geologists focus on accumulating facts. Office geologists focus on theories--too bad for them.,
Not that I understood all, or most, of Rising from the Plains, focused on Wyoming and a geologist named David Love, whose life proved to be a western saga Wallace Stegner might have written, or, heaven forbid, James Michener. The problem was the avalanche of names and data centered on Wyoming's epic role in Earth's history, the collisions of forces and permutations of chemistry over billions of years. Fascinating stuff but hard to keep straight. Every chapter should be accompanied by a map. I love maps. And there should be photos, lots of them.
Nonetheless this effort in force-feeding the geologically uninitiated taught me a great deal, which I do not, dare not, hasten to explain, starting with the contrast between everything thought to be known about geology and everything yet to be known, the contradictions within plate tectonic theory, for example--how to resolve them...or just live with them-- the anomalies presented by certain rocks located where they shouldn't be, and so on.
Much of Wyoming is beautiful, notably the Tetons and Yellowstone. A fair amount is ugly. Now I would look at the ugly parts differently, thinking about how they got to be so ugly.
One of my favorite observations in this book concerns lakes, which are described as rivers who have lost their getaway driver.
Unfortunately the geology saga goes this way: once upon a time there were field geologists; now there are geologists holed up in offices. Field geologists focus on accumulating facts. Office geologists focus on theories--too bad for them.,
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