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.
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.”
Edward Wolf
It’s a breathtaking video, and a stunning reminder that culture and landscape connect through rocks (sometimes lovely, useful rocks like chert; often ugly and damaging “rocks” like coal) and many enduring stories can be told through them. Thanks for the Kerouac passage; there are more great Hozomeen Mountain stories and photos in John Suiter’s lovely book “Poets on the Peaks” (Counterpoint Books, 2002).
Paul Howard
That is some pretty cool information! My wife and I teach primitive bow and arrow making as well as have an interest in all things stone-age. I feel like some of the tribal elders mentioned in that one of my goals is to teach as many kids(and older-than-kid types too) anything and everything I know and not have it all go with me to the grave. Thanks for the video – Paul