Capitol Peak

Woody Creek lies amongst the Elk Mountain Range of the Rockies. Long ago the Great Salt Lake extended Eastward to Denver and Southward to the Sea of Cortes. The sediments of this ocean compressed into the sandstones of the entire Southwest, and this burden ultimately created a counterforce upward, an upwelling of molten magma intrusions that thrust up the sandstones and drained the pond, leaving behind that little puddle, the Great Salt Lake.

Uplift and erosion, apace, created the Rocky Mountains, Utah’s Canyonlands, the Grand Canyon, and all else of the great Southwest. In places the cooled magma is exposed as granite batholiths, and sometimes limestones are found in the boundaries that are rich in the minerals that brought the miners here.

In Woody Creek we stand on the red soils born of sandstone and look Southwest to the granite of Capitol Peak.

Such is the variety of our geology that one valley to the East stands Pyramid Peak of solid sandstone, and Lenado, near the headwaters of our Woody Creek straddles the Belden and Leadville limestones that created the now near-extinct mining town.

Woody creatures share a fatal attraction for these mountains as others, some of us included, share a fatal attraction for the ocean.

George Bernard Shaw said this about Darwinian evolution; “When its whole significance dawns upon you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hidden fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration.”  There are those out there who choose a different fatalism and they create a terrific nuisance.

The evidence is that the genes for neither our physical presence or our psychological behaviors have changed in any significant manner since the time of cavemen. Then cavemen too yearned for mountains and oceans! If our genes select for fitness, for the capacity not just to survive but to multiply, why then a yearning for the insurmountable and impassable? Humans are extraordinarily adaptable primates and currently live in all of the environments of the globe; but to migrate to these places needed to cross mountains and oceans. And for this purpose the yearning gene is essential, along with the temerity to move on to the new and unfamiliar. Does this help to explain Woody Creek?