Space and Clouds

Ben Good-Elliott is a senior physics major. As somebody from Goshen, I am used to lots of trees. While there are plenty of corn and soy fields around, in town, there are trees blocking off large portions of the sky. Mesa Verde has plenty of large mesas to block off the horizon but at the top, or at a corner in the road, the horizon stretches as far as the eye can see. I can truly appreciate what people mean when they talk about the Big Sky. I don’t know that I have felt so tiny and insignificant before.

I always enjoy good clouds, and the trip has not disappointed! There have been so many opportunities to see amazing clouds as well as the process of clouds forming into storms that we can see raining further off. Unfortunately I was not able to capture the whole process, but I do have a lot of cloud pictures!

The sky is large, but the scale of the mesas will mess with your eyes. More than once, I had to double check that parts of the mesa were not directly connected and were instead on opposite sides of a canyon. The mesas are truly enormous and I find myself wondering at how large the waters that formed them were. To think that people were able to make their homes in the sides of cliffs hundreds of feet tall, to climb to the top of these mesas to do their farming, and to survive in such an arid climate. How would living in this kind of environment shape a culture?

Something that was on my mind a lot was how fire prone the area has been. When we were doing our hikes on Saturday, the humidity was 6%, which is apparently less than the moisture content of dried lumber. While driving to the park on Friday, we saw smoke to the southeast. Over the next couple days we were able to see the fire grow in size and eventually, the smoke grew so high and thick that it began mixing with the clouds overhead. We saw at least one helicopter fly over with a water bag hanging below it, and many small planes flying over as well (I don’t know if they were doing fire patrol or were flying over for some other reason). Sunday, all that was left to see was low clinging smoke, so we can hope that the fire has gone out or been put out.

For somebody new to spaces this large, the trip has been eye opening. Experiencing new spaces will be an ongoing process on the trip and I look forward to exploring the spaces around us.