Here's the picture you saw me taking.
...and a better shot of Mom with her giant over-the-glasses sunglasses. Notice the ancient North Dakota boat license. They moved from Grafton to Butte in 1988, but Montana doesn't require licensure for canoes, so this one's still on it.
Dad and Candy.
If you look closely, you can see a flock of geese right at the edge of the water.
Three minutes later, I found these guys posing in profile atop the bluff. Who knew geese had such an artistic sense?
Mom and I had a running joke about cows that weren't on the BLM maps. Only the blue and yellow areas are public land. The white area is private land, and mostly cattle ranches, so I guess in a way the BLM could say they DID map the cows.
Mom snapped these signs of civilization on the left bank.
The Missouri is a wide, flat river most of the time, and from the highway or railway it looks pretty boring, but when you see it at four miles and hour, it's anything but boring.
Mile 51 is the beginning of the "wild" designation, and now we get our first glimpses of Lewis' famed "white clifts."
Lewis wrote of "seens of visionary inchantment... eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary"
As they realized, erosion had shaped "the soft sand clifts... into a thousand grotesque figures."
I was seeing the same things Mom was...
To paddle the Wild and Scenic section is to float past the layers of time laid bare--ten million years of geologic history are on display. The formations are tilted so that as we go downriver, we're seeing progressively younger layers of Upper Cretaceous strata.
At this early section, the cliffs are low and close to the river banks.
The cliffs are patchy exceptions, though, as the badlands mostly continue as they hvae been.
It's only a trick of light that makes it look like dusk behind us.
I paddled right up to this cliff, where you can see higher water marks from earlier seasons.
I took this picture from below the overhang. I could have reached out to touch the sandstone, but curiously enough, we never did.
Where Lewis saw parapets, I saw Bauhaus ramparts.
Seconds later, Mom was photographing the opposite bank's similar formations.
This wide-angle view ahead shows how the white rocks are intermittent in this stretch of river.
The harder igneous layers on top are, naturally, much slower to erode than the sandstone below.
...leading to a lot of pillars with dark berets...
They look like they're standing around chatting.
Continuing river erosion carves notches out along the sedimentary layers.
It's a muddy river--that water color you see is how it really looks a lot of the time.
Mom noticed the fragile pillar in the distance...
...while I was taken in by the aquatic amphitheatre on the left bank. There were loads of swallows nests bored into a lot of these cliffs.
Pillars through here come in herds, just like cattle.
I had snacked while paddling earlier, so I took a nap while Mom and Dad ate lunch. I paid the price for not putting sunscreen below my knees, which are usually in shade when you're seated in a canoe.
Mom with the lunch cooler.
Candy always looked forward to her retrieving breaks when we were on shore.
Dad's photos aren't included here because he's using a (gasp!) FILM camera. Remember those?
Frank and Steve drifted past around lunchtime. Steve reported some skipjacks (gold-eyes, if that means anything more to you--not me) biting but nothing he wanted to keep.
The white cliffs only got more spectacular as we continued downriver.
Frank and Steve finally declared it lunchtime.
I never got used to seeing these spectacular formations cropping up all over the place.
Here's a panaramic sweep of the cliffs along the right bank.
I was periodically overcome by the need to channel Ansel Adams.
Ansel did black and white better, but even my humble attempts bring out the relief. Too bad the autofocus on G1 was feeling fuzzy.
Notice the igneous hulk behind the white cliff.
I was always captivated by these igneous non sequiturs.
Even in a wider-angle context, they're non sequiturs.
Mom and Dad paddling in the foreground help show the scale.
Big Sky Country, I'm telling you.
Lewis noted how about igneous dike that "nature had attempted here to rival the uman art of masonry."
Even non-geologists like me can see that here lava pushed through the cracks of the sandstone, which is softer and therefore eroded away faster.
Perhaps my geologist friend Allen Dodson can further enlighten us on the subject?
Allen writes, "I think your description is pretty accurate. The sandstone would've been at or very near the surface when the magma rose up through the crust, so it probably moved up by fracturing the overlying sandstone. Sandstone itself is mostly quartz (sand!) which is actually quite hard, but the grains are held together by softer material, which results in the rock not being very strong."
This stretch of river was slow-going because we had to stop paddling so often to grab our cameras.
More geese by water's edge.
Mom captured all the elemental layers here beautifully.
At 4mph, the immensity of this river can seem almost majestic.
Mom observed that this must be where they got those white columns for the Parthenon. Mom and I drove Dad nuts with observations like these. We're fun on cloudy days, too.
Another bunch of shots stitched together into a panorama to show the big picture.