Fractals in the Dirt

Not long ago, I drove six hours with the Mancos Shale riding shotgun. That isn’t a buddy’s quirky nickname, as in: Yo, my man Mancos, my Shaley bro, hand me the Doritos and Sour Patch Kids, would ya please? It is in fact a geologic formation, a remarkably friable gray-blue-brown mudstone deposited in the Late Cretaceous, some ninety million years before present, when much of what we today call the American West was inundated by a vast inland sea. To an unsuspecting bystander, a turkey vulture or big-rig trucker, I must have seemed to be a lone soul on a desert road trip, only the radio’s pop divas, evangelical preachers, and static for company. Wrong. Mile after mile, the Mancos was at my side, catching the corner of my eye, whispering sweet nothings in my ear, keeping me intrigued and entertained.

That’s how it goes across great swaths of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. The Mancos is here, there, everywhere—an