Tuesday, April 26, 2011 - Devil's Canyon Campground, Blanding UT

Sandstone Plus, White Canyon, Fry Canyon UT, April 22, 2011

What is that I see?

Down there. In the crick bed. Amongst the wonderfully multicolored tumbled sandstone river rocks. Those harder, slicker, gray rocks. What are they? Here's my guess. Uranium. Well, uranium bearing rocks.

Toward the top of the colorful sandstone layers forming the buttes around here is a very distinct gray layer. You can even see it as bluish rings around the buttes on my Google Night Camps map - it's quite extensive. It seems to me these river rocks down here tumbled out of the eroding buttes above and that the gray ones came from the gray layer.

Sandstone Plus, White Canyon, Fry Canyon UT, April 22, 2011

Somewhere I read whilst at Capitol Reef a few days back that the gray layer visible there contains uranium. There are mines here - one I saw from the roadside was involved with the gray layer. There are uranium mines in this area. Ergo...

Night camp

Site 7 - Devil's Canyon Campground, Blanding UT

• Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - good signal
• Go to Devil's Canyon Campground website
• Locate Devil's Canyon Campground on my Night Camps map
• Check the weather here

Alex Can Think

Animal researchers are finally beginning to catch up to the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say Fifi the poodle can think. The fights are always between a big group of experts who think animals don't have a lot of feelings or aren't very smart, and a much smaller group of researchers who think there's a lot more going on inside an animal's head than we know. The really nasty fights always seem to go one way: it's always the animal "debunkers" who are on the attack. At least, I don't remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be dumber than people thought, and lots of studies like that have been done. Claiming that an animal can't do something isn't considered blasphemous.

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