Just when you were starting to admit to yourself that you find geology boring, someone goes and makes Northwest rocks interesting again. And beautiful too. Check out this short multimedia documentary about what you find in the North Cascades of southern BC and northern Washington.

[I’ve embedded it below, but you should really see it on Vimeo.]

 

Although “Hozomeen chert” sort of sounds like a hipster band, it’s actually a flint-like rock that was good for tool-making. And because the stone was useful to Northwest natives, it turns out that the geology can tell us something about our region’s history and culture too. It’s a nice piece of work put together by Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele, whose work I’ve praised before.

  • Our work is made possible by the generosity of people like you!

    Thanks to Corey Fitch for supporting a sustainable Cascadia.

  • And now, because I have the keys to this blog, you get a little Hozomeen-related literature to go along with your geology:

    Hozomeen, Hozomeen, most beautiful mountain I ever seen, like a tiger sometimes with stripes, sunwashed rills and shadow crags wriggling lines in the Bright Daylight, vertical furrows and bumps and Boo! crevasses, boom, sheer magnificent Prudential mountain, nobody’s even heard of it, and it’s only 8,000 feet high, but what a horror when I first saw that void the first night of my staying on Desolation Peak waking up from deep fogs of 20 hours to a starlit night suddenly loomed by Hozomeen with his two sharp points, right in my window black – the Void, every time I’d think of the Void I’d see Hozomeen and understand – Over 70 days I had to stare at it.

    That’s Jack Keroauc in Desolation Angels, his finest novel in my opinion. He’s writing about Hozomeen Mountain, which takes its name from a Salish word for “sharp, like a sharp knife.”