A couple of weeks ago, we went for a walk across a flat plain near our cabin in the mountains.
It’s not terribly high, I think about 1,000 metres. To the west you can see the Jotunheimen mountains national park:
We were walking towards this hole in the ground, called Dørfallet or “door falls”. I don’t know what it has to do with doors, at first I thought it was “Dødfallet”, or “deathfalls”, which would make more sense:
It’s a deep canyon,
where the rock has been eroded
by a little mountain stream, the kind they used to deploy in menthol cigarette advertising:
I’m one of those people who are very fond of rocks, and I was reminded of these cracks when I watched the video of Jon Piasecki and Stone River that I keep mentioning.
It’s hard to get a feeling for the scale in any of these pictures, they really need Topsy in them.
All the surrounding land is covered with this very pretty…
lichen:
The lichen is covering marshland, and you can suddenly find you’re in up to your waist. In our case, it was only ankles.
Then we went home.
This is a damp path, not a stream. It was on the way home that we met the sheep in the previous post.
A Bad Guide 
Gone to the hills to enjoy more rain, eh? I must say your canyon is very fine. The burn water looks very peaty: is it? Do people heat with peat locally?
You’re supposed to say eeh, it’s grand.
Dyveke’s vague about peat, she says “only people with a special interest” use it, as if it were a hobby. I must admit I like the idea of burning clumps of earth, but I know nothing about it.
Perhaps people with plenty of wood don’t bother with peat.
“I like the idea of burning clumps of earth”: a Roman author thought the Ancient Britons clever buggers because they could burn stone.
George Steinbrenner
etymology of peat
pothole : When I lived in the wilds of British Columbia, there was a volcano nearby (last erupted around 1750) and some ongoing volcanic activity in the shape of hot springs, most of them not “developed”. Once some of us hiked to one of them, which was next to a small stream: it looked just as if a round pot (about the size and shape of the old-fashioned, cylindrical kind of soup pot, or pasta pot) had been stuck into the ground and was bubbling. You could see that the native people had arranged a few rocks so that some of the hot water would be diverted into the little stream in order to form a cooler pool one or two persons could sit in, but without any more tinkering with the landscape.
There was a distinct odour of sulphur around, and the vegetation was obviously affected by it: only a type of fern grew within a wide radius of the pot, and the closest trees did not have leaves in the direction of the pot. The native people said that the place was still known and kept up because bathing in that pool cured skin diseases such as eczema, which is still treated with sulphur compounds.
It’s heart warming to know that the Marx family is related to members of the Kron family.
Could these big blocks be made of basalt perchance? (It doesn’t entirely look like it though.)
By the by, who looks after hoss and goats while you’re gallivanting?
Do you have any idea of why this little stream formed this impressive canyon? Is there very soft rock right there, or was there a pre-existing crevice to start it off? Is this flat area one where the streams are much more substantial at certain times of year (snow melt time ?)? Or was this the case in an earlier age?
I’m just shooting from the hip; I know next to nothing about canyons or geology.
Just rub it in, why don’t you.
Nah. I must have been The Flood™.
AMAZING PLACE and pictures!
I needed some fresh air… how I wish I could walk around there in person.
It looks like the “canyon” started from water taking advantage of deep cracks through the rocks arising from some other cause, rather than the water itself creating a canyon through intact rocks. Rocks eroded by water are usually rounded, but practically all these rocks, even those in the water at the place where the stream is wider, have definite angles and sharp edges, so this “canyon” cannot be (relatively speaking) very ancient.
Yes, exactly. Is there perhaps a localized deposit of some relatively soluble rock like limestone (he said, continuing to talk through his hat)? It seems unlikely …
I’m pretty sure those cracks were made by ice separation. For tropical readers: Ice separation is the process of freezing water acting as a wedge and widening the gap a little for every frost cycle.
Ouch! I pulled that term out of my head, but I don’t know how. Consulting Wikipedia, the correct term seems to be frost wedging. A similar effect is frost shattering:
Ouch again. I meant the final crack, not the big one. I read the post from my mobile earlier today, and answered from memory before rereading. This could quickly become a very annoying habit.
I’ve tried to find something on Dørfallet in what I have of geological literature, but no luck. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t created during the (melting of the) last Ice Age, though. So I’ll say a squirrel with a nut.
Trond, being neither tropical nor polar, I am well aware of some of the things that water freezing in a confined space can do, but perhaps not as aware as you Nordic types. Are you or are you not suggesting that this canyon began with ice in a crack?
I meant the final crack, not the big one.
Please explain. When you said what, you meant what? I suggest that you explain quickly, before thinking the matter through, because then you will probably get it wrong and have to say “ouch” yet again, and it will be funnier with every ouch cycle.
Sorry, I meant to avoid potential confusion by pointing out that the cracked boulder in picture (7 of 12), the last photo of a crack, is different from the canyon above it. I don’t know much about the forming of this particular canyon, but other canyons I know of were formed by high pressure meltwater in soft rock. This one looks a little different, though.
Something for Topsy to try?
I liked seeing all that leg work from underwater, especially compared to the dolphins. It’s as if it were running, just more resistance. Those retriever-type dogs will do anything that requires swimming, whereas Topsy loves the water but won’t go out of her depth. She walks parallel to the bank in fifteen inches of water and thinks everyone’s fooled. We ought to take her down to the Oslofjord so she can experience the buoyancy you get in salt water.
An awful warning.
http://gawker.com/5933517/drunk-bear-family-downs-over-100-beers-during-bear-rager
That’s 25 cans of beer each, I didn’t know they liked it. Can you offer them a six pack if they’re attacking you?
Nature News: found, down the garden, a clutch of large eggs on the ground. Presumably the hen pheasant’s.
P.S. Grouse shooting starts tomorrow. Not in our garden, obviously.
The beasts are getting bolder.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/13/kangaroo-escapes-fox-boar-germany
Do tree kangaroos jump from tree to tree? Why bother with a tunnel?
I wonder why the eggs were left on the ground.
Grouse aren’t allowed guns in Norway.
“I wonder why the eggs were left on the ground”: it’s their custom.
Maybe people planning to confine tree kangaroos refrain from having trees near the boundary fences.
” it’s their custom”
Amazing they didn’t get wiped out. Still, I suppose that way they don’t get eaten by the tree kangaroos.
Not about goats.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2189795/Norwegian-driver-swerves-avoid-hitting-moose–runs-BEAR-instead.html
Hanestad, that’s just a bit to the right of our cabin. From the Mail’s map you’d think it was the size of East Anglia. If the driver had read their website he’d have seen that they warn drivers about meeting things on the road, silly man. Hitting a moose is as likely to kill the driver as it is the moose.
Also utterly bloody terrifying
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Fen-Tiger-on-prowl-beside-country-road-17082012.htm
Cllr Deb Roberts, district councillor for Foxton and Fowlmere, has also reported seeing a suspected big cat in a field near her home.
I love local newspapers.
“I was the passenger in a car and we were driving to the Green Man pub in Shepreth …”: the journalist was careful to say TO the pub.
Anyway, Autumn is on its way – there were Discovery apples at the market this morning. Jolly good, too.
Bloody hot for Autumn though, here on the edge of London. For the first time since leaving New York some 75 years ago, tonight I wish I had an air conditioner. The weather of the last two weeks here has been delightful: sunny, blue skies, hardly any rain. I don’t know what all the fuss was about. My mother found Bramleys at Waitrose.
Scorcher here too. When my wife bought olive oil this morning, the chap insisted on showing her photos on his phone of this cousin’s Calabrian groves from which it came.
P.S. for you, Crown.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/375726b4-e60e-11e1-bece-00144feab49a.html#axzz23tBv0Ny1
P.P.S. 75?
Here it’s been hot a lot, and rainy a lot. Today, for a change, cold and rainy. Also, we found out that we had carpenter ants. A man came yesterday and poisoned them, and they came staggering out of the woodwork on the screen(ed) porch. Every time I look, their are a few more.
Today much nicer weather. This afternoon I took advantage of a quiet hour to do some pruning that I had been happily anticipating. Of the wistaria/wisteria. The massive one that I might have mentioned once in connection with Wikipedia’s statement “Wisteria can become immensely strong with heavy wrist-thick trunks and stems”. (One of our vines is thigh-thick at the base, I swear.) This is at our country place, where almost everything grows too fast. These vines climb on a sort of roof/lattice thingy over a deck.
I was clipping away, as I do every year at about this time, at the bits (rather, the mounds) of it that come creeping too far toward us, too close to the wall of the house proper. I climb carefully out a bedroom window and creep around with shears, and enjoy letting tangled heaped of biomass fall to the deck. That takes care of part of the job. For the other part of the operation–the relatively safe part, as I thought, where I was not on that roof–I stood on a 6-foot stepladder, which was on the deck. In a very stupid moment (my mistake was to pull impatiently on something) I fell off the ladder, off the deck, onto the ground, specifically onto some flat stones that make a nice walkway to the house.
My left wrist took most of the impact, and did it without breaking. In fact, I have been typing with two hands (one finger of each as usual). But indications are that it will be seriously sore, stiff, and swollen for days. I am looking for sympathy.
It’s funny, from the people around me here I want only a limited amount of sympathy. This is somehow connected with my embarrassment about stupidly falling off the ladder. So I turn to you.
Ice the wrist and have a large brandy-and-port.
Ice, ibrupofen, and alcoholic beverages have been applied.
I’m sympathetic, to some extent, and I do slightly hope you’re feeling better today. I don’t think there’s anything inherently stupid about falling off a ladder. It usually happens to me when I’m feeling very enthusiastic about a project and I’m not careful enough about taking precautions – that’s not the same as stupidity.
I recently heard that large amounts of scotch will relieve back pain (not that we have either one in this house). Brandy & port, dearie? Is that a real drink?
No, it hasn’t really been 75 years since I moved from New York. More like 18. Now I’m back in Norway, and it’s started to drizzle.
Ladders are OK for the young.
Back to the canyon… I came to realise that I forgot to ask: Is there a huge field of rocks in front of the opening in the lower end? If this was formed by a sudden breakthrough of meltwater, I think there would have been a gigantic squirt where the passage widened.
I didn’t really go to the lower end. I wanted to, but I was getting left behind. I’ll take a look next time.