The Whole World under My Feet

Predictions are for yet another La Niña winter, dry, again, instead of wet. I really, really, really hope the scientists are wrong because while my friends were here, and I discovered Elephant Rocks, I also discovered (at Elephant Rocks) a spot to Langlauf where I would not worry about going by myself.

I was thinking about the San Luis Valley (“You DO that, Martha?”) last night and I realized I found a place to live that comprises all the places I’ve lived and/or loved except the PRC. Elephant Rocks completed the assemblage. It is Mission Trails Regional Park. As we drove slowly along the loop trail, the rock formations pulled on my heart strings, “THIS, Martha, THIS!” Along the river is a tiny pocket of Nebraska forest along the Missouri. The valley itself seems to hold up a lost shard of the vast sky of South Central Montana. There’s even a little bit of beach out there in the Sand Dunes, and all of it is in Colorado, my old home. To make it even better, there are things that have been completely new that I’ve gotten to meet and learn about in these 8 years.

I did a little research into these amazing rocks and learned this: “The Elephant Rocks managed by the San Luis Valley Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), located in the San Luis Valley of south-central Colorado near Penitente Canyon Recreation Area. The Elephant Rocks area is a unique area that was once habitat for the Columbian mammoths that lived in the San Luis Valley during the Pleistocene Epoch. The giants once walked here. Local legend has it that these giant creatures left their mark on the rocks, leaving ‘rubs’ smooth surfaces 8-10 feet above the average man.”

I can’t think of much that is cooler than Langlauf in a mammoth world. Thanks to Southern California, my standards for snow are pretty low.

Elephant Rock

The significant features of the area are attributed the largest pyroclastic eruption in the world. The eroded ash forms the elephant- shaped boulders. It is part of the San Juan volcanic field and the La Garita caldera. The rocks resulting from this eruption were unusually uniform in composition. This would imply that the ash cooled as a single unit. This unit is known as the Fish Canyon Tuff. Many sections of the Fish Canyon Tuff are over 4,000 feet thick.

The area at Elephant Rocks is mainly grassland with scattered massive boulders laid out. It is also habitat to the rock loving Neoparrya (a relative of carrots) which flourishes in igneous outcrops or sedimentary rocks from volcanic eruptions. The Neoparrya is native to the San Luis Valley and is known to exist only here and in the Wet Mountain Valley regions. The Fish Canyon Tuff makes up the Elephant Rocks and gradually erodes over time to provide the proper soil chemistry and growth conditions in order for this plant to thrive. The recreation area is 378 acres with an elevation of 7,900 feet managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The area has cold temperatures and very little precipitation. (Source)

Photo: Lois Maxwell

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2022/09/13/rdp-tuesday-wet/