Permian Reef

Sunrise on the Chihuahuan Desert

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Looking up from the trailhead
to the crest of Permian Reef

What is a layman to believe when experts disagree?  At the monastery I heard the good teaching of St. Benedict.  And I learned that only Catholics go to heaven.  And on the Permian Reef yesterday, I tried to reconcile theories on how these rocks and fossils got here. 

I climbed above the Chihuahuan Desert to read Scripture written in stone.  If you know the language, sedimentary rocks read like a book, younger pages laid down on older ones, one after another.  Each layer was the earth’s surface until another layer came on top.  Disputes come, not over Scripture’s validity, but over interpretation. 

The dark area is where I added water
to make the fossils  more visible

So many fossils all piled together and
cemented with even smaller organisms

After these sediments settled in an ocean some 280 million years ago, movement of tectonic plates raised them; then erosion cut them away.  Change from deposition to uplift to erosion—that’s the theory that seems best to explain what I saw. 

When Texas was at the Bottom of the sea, a reef of living things built up near the shore as reefs do today.  But this reef was made of plants and animals that have mostly disappeared—except as preserved as fossils.  We call it the Permian Reef.  

Ammonoid in cross section

I hiked with notes and pictures from study of this fascinating structure, hoping to find some truth about this world’s distant past.  

Sediment, like memory, like dirt in my palm, hardened into rock.  As childhood memories are revealed through contact with people of like minds, so these rock layers give up their origins through contact with inquisitive minds.  I am no expert in geology, but truth seems coming just the same.  

Top of the Reef

From the top of Permian Reef, I look down to where I started, and with a telescope, can see where my car is parked  

They say that from high places like this, looking out through clear air over miles of flat desert, that you can see the curvature of the earth.  It might be camera distortion or it might be the true. 

The Trail winds Downward

Reefs are a fascinating fusion of biology and geology.  They are made of stone—but built by life.  Although the individual life-forms are typically tiny, the results of their activities can be gigantic, resulting in massive transformation of landscape.  

Please see a map of the places where I have slept, as updated each day by Michael Angerman:  Sharon in West Texas