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| Red Rock Revisited This is hardly the first time I've extolled the virtues of this area of Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park. Red Rock Canyon is one of my favorite "this can't be Southern California" walks. The namesake rocks are an excellent example of the Sespe Formation. 40 million years ago, this stuff was volcanic peaks. Now, it's layered sand and pebbles towering over some guy with a camera who's sharing them again with you.
This is a sign.
The sediment layers used to lie in a flood plain. Blame plate tectonics for the angle of this section.
The colors in the strata are the first thing you notice, but the size of the material is more telling. It indicates how severe the erosion was that caused the deposits.
To give you some sense of the scale, there's a falcon or small hawk at the peak on the right end of the ridge. Some of the sediments are more durable than others. Modern erosion of the exposed sandstone carves out the soft stuff first leaving distinctive shapes.
A bit o' green.
Same ridge, same bird, but a nice view of a layer of larger conglomerate. There was some kick ass erosion going on in that layer.
Just to show you I was also interested in more recent things, here are some area fauna.
This finch was plucking fuzzy stuff (a botanical term) out of the flowers on this shrub to reach the seeds.
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When diet and exercise just aren't enough, there's Ipecac.
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 TwoFrogsPremium,MVM
join:2002-01-20
Downtown
 ·Verizon FiOS
| Good day at Red Rock.
Really had to zoom to make out the hawk (bad eyesight doesn't help). What resolution were you using for the sandstone formations?
And, I don't quite get the first picture.  |
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Host:
Wireless Networking
All Things Unix
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Southwest Chat
1 edit | Thanks. The ones I posted are scaled to 1600 pixels on the long side for easier uploading. The camera sensor is ~10 megapixels. Here's one at full size. Even then, you'll need to zoom and squint to see a while blob that sort of looks like it might be a bird. (I saw it land and looked at it through a telephoto to try to identify it, so I know it's not just a rock. )
Here's a zoom of it from another shot.
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