Sing the praises of hurricanes coming in from the Pacific Ocean! That is what it took for a couple days of rain to hit Utah. Actually it is pretty impressive how far inland the rain can come.
After a couple days of bliss, it went back to looking like Utah.
People who haven't seen red rock before go absolutely crazy over it. But that kind of infatuation is not long-lasting. Personally I move onto shapes of various kinds. It is strange how a guy can stay interested in shapes forever -- and maybe it is a guy thing.
It is easy for a dog-lover to remain permanently in love with dog photos, of course:
How many 'balanced rocks' are marked on map's in this world? I shudder to think about asking AI that question. Regardless of its answer about "America's Top Ten" balanced rocks, and regardless of the tourist industry's effort to make a minor tourist attraction out of them, most of the fun comes from discovering them for yourself such as the one that surprised us on today's bike ride:
That wasn't the only surprise. The road crossed a small arroyo right at the point when it suddenly morphed into a dry 100 foot dry waterfall and became [redacted] Gulch.
Maybe 100 feet doesn't sound so scary to you, but it did seem so to me. Perhaps it was because mining trucks used that bridge and I wondered about its strength. Or maybe it was the bizarre and twisted shapes of the malevolent gash into the earth. When you encounter a surprise, you don't know how bad it is going to get, so your imagination runs away with itself.
Upstream of the bridge the arroyo was small -- almost meek. There was no clue that something dramatic was about to happen. Perhaps humans have a habitual expectation or even preference for linear extrapolations of existing trends, whatever they are.
When the trend reverses or there is a sudden change, we just can't believe it. That happens many times in the eroded arroyos of Utah. Even sudden drops of only a couple feet in mudstone are fun to look at it.
Such changes make good visual metaphors for the old saying '...went bankrupt gradually, and then suddenly!' Similarly with health and old age, stock market crashes, or the disappearance of empires.
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