Water Hikes

We had the most beautiful Fall ever! It came later than usual because we had…hmm, now I'm forgetting. Maybe because we had a lot of hot weather and it didn't cool down at all until October? I think that's what it was. Anyway, the fall colors in the canyon are often good in September and basically gone by October. But this year the leaves were amazing in the mountains all through October! It was wonderful. I wanted to hike to several water…features as part of our unit, some we'd seen before and some we hadn't. We took the younger kids on some of the hikes and left them home with Sam for one of them. It seemed each hike was more beautiful than the last!

I put more pictures of these glorious hikes on the other blog:

https://light-in-leaves.blogspot.com/2022/11/hot-springs-hike.html

https://light-in-leaves.blogspot.com/2022/10/grotto-falls.html

https://light-in-leaves.blogspot.com/2022/11/gloria-falls-hike.html

but I will post a few of them here as well. Two hikes were to streams/waterfalls and one was to a hot springs.

We've never hiked Gloria Falls before, and we were surprised at how big and impressive the Falls were! I heard they are even bigger in the Spring and would like to see them then too.

By the time we did this hike, it was getting cooler in the mountains, and there was even some ice on the rocks by the Falls!

This was a hike with just the "school kids." These four cuties.

Good hikers, every one of them!

A glorious day!

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The hot springs in Diamond Fork Canyon are nostalgic for me because we went there lots of times when the big boys were young, and I have such vivid memories of playing there with them. I felt like I was seeing the ghosts of our earlier family superimposed over what I was experiencing in the present day!

Gus always reminds me of squishy little Malachi.

Zig was serious and focused and just a tiny bit nervous about getting in. He mostly played that he was a lifeguard. (He's so much like little Sebby!)

And Teddy was just off his own, exploring, daringly climbing around, doing big-kid things, so much like little Abe!

I even have an old picture of a tiny Daisy in this same pool!

Goldie was just a wee mite last time we came. Now she's a beautiful young lady!

And Junie has passed all her sisters up in height!

We found a really great picnic area after our hike, and ate our lunch in maybe the prettiest grove of yellow trees anywhere!

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The hike to Grotto Falls was a treat because Malachi came with us! And then he insisted on carrying the hiking backpack with Clementine in it! What a good boy he is. Everyone is always happy to have Malachi around.

It's a really easy hike to Grotto Falls, barely off the trailhead. And it's fun because there's a little shady cave (grotto?) to play in where the waterfall lands. We brought water shoes so we could wade around a little—though it was tricky getting everyone in and out of their shoes with wet and muddy feet! Next time maybe we should just hike in the water shoes!

Gus is excited

Goldie has duck feet

Poor Gus was sad about something, but forcing a smile here anyway

There is no place I'd rather be in the Fall than hiking through our beautiful mountains. I'm so glad we live close to so many beautiful places, and that the kids and I get to learn and explore together!

Erosion, Mountains, Rivers, Canyons

It's hard when posting about this subject, as it was when teaching it, to sort things into discrete subjects. Erosion and weathering are inextricably linked with canyon formation, and mountains and plate tectonics go together, but erosion goes with mountains too, and you can't separate rivers and water erosion. I'll do my best to place related topics in the same post, but if you need more ideas, you can check the tags at the bottom of the post too.

We did several small activities to demonstrate water erosion and weathering. We poured a small stream of water into a pan filled with sediment, then inclined the pan and watched how the water moved. We could see the gradual wearing of a channel, as well as the spreading out of the water into as it slowed or the slope decreased. We talked about deltas and alluvial fans (here is a page with related activities), as well as meanders and oxbow lakes.

Next we observed the effects of wave erosion on coastlines. We buried several cylinders of clay (representing layers of harder rock) in a pile of sand (the softer rock). Then we filled the rest of the pan with water and gently rocked the pan back and forth to make waves:

As you can see, the waves gradually picked up the sediment on the coastline and deposited it farther out, leaving a smoothed-out coastline and exposing the rock stacks. Some of the stacks were even left standing alone in the water. We've seen lots of examples of these types of stacks when we go to the beach (Haystack Rock in Oregon, for example). Some even form arches.

We watched the carving action of water as it runs down a channel. We formed several "canyons" in the yard, and saw that the river deposits sediments downstream in deltas as well. This is an even better way to observe meanders, as a slope evens out.

And of course we made play-doh mountains of various sorts: fold mountains, fault-block mountains, volcanic mountains, etc.

You can find several other erosion and weathering activities at the bottom of this post.

Here are some illustrations of anticlines and synclines.

You can also see examples of mountains in the Plate Tectonics post.

Here's a cute landforms flipbook to make.

Topaz Mountain Field Trip

Even though we had mostly finished our study of rocks and minerals, I wanted to squeeze in one more field trip before the weather got too cold or wet, and Topaz Mountain sounded like it would be really fun. But it was pretty far away, and it didn't sound like it would be as easy as our other field trips for just picking things up off the ground! You actually have to hunt for the topaz, and to know what you are looking for. So we waited for a day Sam could come with us!

We found directions to Topaz Mountain on the Utah Geological Survey site, but I liked these directions even better because they have little pictures to show you what the signs look like at each turn! Very helpful. That guy's site also has suggestions of what to bring and where to look for the topaz crystals.

We set off early in the morning. The sunrise was beautiful! We prepared the kids for the expedition by telling them how topaz was quite rare and we probably wouldn't find any---and if we did find some it would be VERY very lucky and surprising---but we were going to have fun even if we didn't find any! Low expectations are the secret to successful outings, I've found. :) And it was true, I didn't know if we'd be able to recognize the rhyolite that the topaz was in---or to break open any to find the crystals! Our Utah topaz is a lovely pink or brown color in its natural state, but after being exposed to sunlight for even a short time it becomes clear and colorless. I thought even the clear crystals would be pretty and was hoping we'd at least find some of those, but we had a picnic packed and we do love a long car ride, so it was going to be a fun day regardless.

There's a great site for collecting obsidian (the smooth rounded kind called "apache tears") only about seven miles away from Topaz Mountain, so we stopped there first. (I'll write about that in another post.) Then we slowly drove out the dirt road up to Topaz Mountain. It was pretty flat for the most part, but rocky, so we had to take it slow in our minivan! It was doable, though.

We weren't quite sure, in spite of our good directions, where to start looking at first. We hiked up a hill nearby and just started looking for veins in the rock that looked like crumbling mortar. Once we got started it was pretty easy to see what to look for. The topaz is embedded in this light-grey rhyolite:

And you can see the sort of porous parts that run through it. That's where you're most likely to find the crystals, I think.

It was pretty hard work chipping away at the rock, so mostly the older boys did it, but Daisy enjoyed having a hammer and chisel to bang some rocks with too.

Junie found a Juniper tree

It was a really windy day---not very cold, but so sandy that we kept our rock goggles on most of the time. I mostly stayed by the car with Marigold and Junie, and we could see a storm was coming, so we didn't want to get stuck out there with only muddy roads to get back on. It was really fun searching for the crystals, though---like a treasure hunt. Next time we will bring heavier-duty sledgehammers to break rock with, and we only had one chisel between us. But we had quite a bit of success just hunting for loose clear crystals among broken rock at the bottoms of the hills. It got way easier every time the sun came out, because you could see the crystals glinting in the sun. The rhyolite often had teeny-tiny crystals (too small to separate out) embedded all through parts of it, and it was very pretty in the sunlight.

We were glad we had brought little containers to put our crystals in, because they are easy to drop and, in the dust, very hard to find again! A container with a screw-on lid is very useful.

Finally it was time to go, so we reluctantly packed up and headed out, with the stormy wind getting stronger and stronger as we drove! We saw lots of tumbleweeds.

We stopped to eat our picnic in one of those tiny towns we'd passed on the way. The trees were whipping in the wind!

Seb played with this piece of styrofoam that was blowing around

Brrr! We were glad we'd left for Topaz Mountain early enough to get our collecting done!

When we got home and could clean and really examine our crystals, it was so exciting! They were so beautiful! We had found some of the pink ones and we liked those best of all, but the clear ones were great too. I read that topaz are often used for fake "diamond" jewelry because they are so clear and sparkly.

Some of our very favorites were these that Abe and Sam found when they split open this rock. They are too delicate to remove from the rhyolite matrix, but I like them just as they are. You can see the perfect hexagonal crystal shape of the one on the far left. Gorgeous!

We definitely would like to go back to this site on a warmer and sunnier day, with more chisels, when there's no approaching storm and we can really take our time hunting and sorting through all the rocks. We are already planning it for next Spring! But we felt so lucky to have found some topaz (even some pink topaz!) and to have had such an adventurous day. We love where we live!