It starts with the earth.

Driving into our high mountain plateau, one is first struck by the monoliths. Granite outcroppings dot the valleys and canyons, erupting like fountains across the landscape. They command our attention and their glorious majesty never ends, no matter how long we live with them.

Much more than the distant continental divide, we navigate by them, we monitor the weather with their backdrop, we orient the seasons with their snow cover. Sunrise and sunset on them tell us what time of day it is, how many hours of daylight we have left for our outdoor living. Alpineglow nourishes us with beauty, even when we're not paying particular attention.

What exactly are they? How old are they? What can they tell us about our fleeting time on this planet?

Jim Erdman was a plant biologist who lived just off Gate 10 for a while in the early 2010's. He left behind a concise, brief yet surprisingly thorough non-copyrighted publication he called A Brief Natural History of Glacier View Meadows. Our ever-resourceful Red Feather Lakes Community Library has a copy of his three-ring notebook, with typewritten pages inserted in plastic liner pages. It's a precious jewel of information.

Fittingly, Jim starts with what he calls Our stunning Granitic landscape--and nice Gneiss. Basing his work on the USGS Big Narrows Topographic Quadrangle, he gives a good overview of the layout of our area and the more prominent peaks we live with. Just outside my window--and perhaps the most visible orientation point for residents and nearby travelers along Highway 74E--is Haystack Butte, at elevation 7,789 ft. That's 289 feet above where I'm sitting as I write.

Diving in a bit deeper, from his 30-year career with the US Geological Survey Office in Denver he knew of the existence of a precise geological  map, and with the assistance of one of his colleagues provided a non-technical translation of what it all says.

Here's my attempt at making sense of even that translation.

Underlying our area is a vast structure that cooled and solidified underground (unlike lava flows, for example) called the Log Cabin Batholith. The name comes from "an historical feature" from just west of the Pot Belly Restaurant (Manhattan Rd at 74E) down to Rustic, along the Cache La Poudre River.

Buried in that batholith and bubbling up the surface at irregular intervals are two forms of granite from the Precambrian Era (1.4 billion years ago). Earth layers formed in this era were formed as vast basins with undersea sediments, organic and non-organic, which were buried and transformed by heat and pressure into solid stone. Injected into this basin were depositions of material formed by cooling earthen materials.

Most of these depositions prominent in our area are the Silver Plume (coarse grained) granite, with some fine- to medium-grained granite. Because these are not from lava flows or other externally-cooled sources, they are more ancient and closer to bedrock.

With photographs he took to illustrate, Jim writes of a tour he took of GVM to locate other types of rock. On a roadcut on Iron Mountain Drive, he shows a layer of 1.7 billion year old sedimentary schist., with its formerly molten Silver Plume granite above it. He shows and explains a granitic dike, pink colored. And a granitic gneiss.

My takeaway, through all the details? We live in an area close to the origins of the planet earth, left to interact with the forces of weather and atmosphere, reminding us of the age of the world we momentarily are a part of.

Helps me keep perspective in times I wonder what we're doing to the planet and each other.

If you're interested in the details, check out Dr Erdman's little notebook at our fine local library--the only place you'll find it.

And go on a bit of a field trip.