At any rate, I really liked the gym there. Of course I liked the gym in Boulder too. I really just don't know. I'll be looking for jobs in both locations, and then I've also got the post-doc proposals floating around for me to stay in Davis. One thing I can be grateful for is that I can do whatever the hell I want, and I don't need to compromise with anybody. It's freedom. I relish it.
Other fun things that happened in SLC: I'm all caught up on Weeds (Brad has season 6), and a free CPR class at the BD headquarters (randomly, Brad's parents, brother and sister in law were putting on a course for employees the second night I was in SLC). The BD HQ makes the federal cubicles look like shit. I won't lie. That's a pretty nice building. It's almost enough to make me stop trying to save the world...or at least a few species that nobody gives a shit about.
Now I am in Moab and it's looking like I might only climb for a day, with Joe et al. These conferences can be pretty fun - especially now that I've gone to several over the years and I know a bunch of people. It's good to catch up and talk about fish and science. I had dinner with one of the Utah division of Wildlife folks who was on my Silver King Creek trip, as well as some navy biologists who I sampled Mohave tui chub with in Zzyzx several years go.
Side story: the internet wasn't working for my computer, so I called Jeff and he taught me how to hack into their system using a bunch of numbers and other random shit and reset their router. It was fucking badass. I couldn't believe it!
The IT guys had set their user name and password as admin. Suckers. Always gotta have a tech guy in reserve. And a tall guy who can reach stuff...and a big guy who can carry stuff.
Tomorrow lots of talks...and I should probably try to finish the talk that I'm giving on Saturday. I've never procrastinated this long before giving a talk. Hopefully it's under control and I don't embarrass myself.
Another side story: Moab is a collapsed salt anticline. It's cool. Salt moves a lot like a liquid under pressure, and will dome up through faults.
I give up (I don't even pretend to be a geologist): here's text cut and pasted from the Utah Geological Survey Website:
"During the Pennsylvanian Period (about 300 million years ago), most of Utah was covered by an ancient sea. The Moab area was located in an enormous depression called the Paradox Basin. As sea levels fluctuated over millions of years, multiple cycles of flooding and evaporating occurred in the basin, leaving thousands of feet of salt behind. The resulting Paradox Formation is 65 to 85 percent salt and is interbedded with layers of gypsum and anhydrite.
These salt beds eventually became buried by other rock layers. Because salt deposits are less dense than overlying rock deposits, they behave buoyantly and rise toward the surface. The salt squeezes upward and intrudes into the overlying rocks through zones of weakness such as fractures and faults. As the salt moves, it bends and penetrates the overlying rock. The intruding “salt bubbles” are called salt diapirs."
Here's more:
"Salt movement beneath the Canyonlands region contributed to the creation of many features peculiar to the region, including collapsed anticlines, grabens, fins, and arches. The weight of overlying rock layers squeezed the salt into areas of lower pressure, which were linear belts along deep buried faults. In these areas, the salt thickened and formed linear salt tracts. Later, horizontal compression in the earth’s crust bulged the salt belts and overlying rocks upward to form anticlines. The brittle, overlying rocks broke along faults and joints in and parallel to the anticlines’ crests, which enabled water to reach the underlying salt in some anticlines. As the salt dissolved, the overlying rock layers collapsed hundreds of feet (called collapsed salt anticlines), leaving valleys such as Salt Valley in Arches National Park and Moab Valley. Other anticlines, such as the Cane Creek anticline, have not collapsed."
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