R. F. Diffendal Jr.Rezensionen
Autor von Great Plains Geology (Discover the Great Plains)
Rezensionen
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The travelogue section is the bulk of the book and gives along list, by province and state from north to south, of various places you can actually see geology on the Great Plains, as opposed to endless ranchland and center pivot irrigators. I’ve been to a lot of the places mentioned and they are all pretty interesting, but I feel they would give something of a mistaken impression to a visitor from outside the area – that there are more geologic features than there actually are. There are isolated outcrop of more resistant rock, usually given an evocative name – Castle Rock, Chimney Rock, Courthouse Rock – and the Black Hills, and now and then a volcano, but in most of the plains you could start a bowling ball rolling at the base of the Rockies and not have it stop until it got to the Mississippi. Concentrating on the outcrops also misses some of the evocative nature of having that endless sky; I remember reading an article about early settlers in Nebraska. They were from Norway and were used to hills and valleys; when they got to the plains some of them went off the walls before they got used to it. The flip side is the author of the article then interviewed their descendants who had grown up with the expanse; one farmer allowed, sheepishly, that he didn’t like to visit the creek on his property because “…there was a tree there and he felt closed in…”. The traditional place for anchorite solitude is the mountains; if you really want solitude try western Nebraska; it grows on you.