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24 WE MADE JACK RYAN a member of the party when Maw left the cook stove to go home to Montana, when Mrs. Brown left us for relatives in California, when the oncoming fall term took the rest of our boys back to the college circuit. Jack wasn't as lovable as Maw, but he could cook. He could also wield a hammer, drive a truck, lend a hand in a dozen different ways. In the tag end of September, a time when summer is clearly over in the West, Jack took the truck and I mounted the company Buick to set out for Colorado and, ultimately, to catch up with the mystery dinosaur footprints at Cedaredge. Brown had gone on ahead by a few days on business in Salt Lake City, and we would get the show all together again in Grand Junction. Our season's boxed and plastered bones were stored in a Rock Springs warehouse. On the previous trip to Cedaredge with Brown, we had gone by way of eastern Colorado . This time, for reasons of nostalgia, I chose to backtrack along some of the route followed on my fIrst trip through this country by motorcycle. Then I had beenjust a biker gawking at the scenery. Now I had been exposed to enough geology so that the hills had something to say to me. We dropped with the road down below a familiar grey scarp in Willow Creek Canyon. Now the faces of the side draws were Green River shales, now we were crossing the Tertiary, now we were watching for the Mesaverde beds to appear. We came upon them in the lower end of Price River Canyon at a place called Castlegate. They were no longer just rock; now the Mesaverde was a familiar old friend, an often disappointing old friend, but one we were glad to see again just because we were no longer strangers. Ryan was in the lead, and the back of the truck's red body swung around one curve as the Buick swung into another. 121 A few miles beyond, at Price, we spent the night. Next morning we swung east on U. S. 50 toward Green River, Utah. Here sixty-fIve miles below Price, the road turned a corner under one of the massive cliffs north of town. These were the Book Cliffs. An observant child could have recognized in the laminated walls a likeness to the same sort of coal formations rising around Baxter Basin now two hundred miles northeast . The grey Mancos shale below was as easily recognized. The town of Price rested upon it, surrounded by irrigated alfalfa fIelds. Green River stood upon it too, and miles of empty desert stretching south were Mancos shale as well. Older Mesozoic formations were visible in the far distance in the San Rafael Swell, but except for a glimpse of the Jurassic Morrison, most of them were too far away to identify. The route passed east through Thompson and Cisno. The march of the Mesaverde, now on our north, was continuous. We stopped for a few photographs , and Ryan observed, "The Mesaverde is going to beat us in to Cedaredge yet." Brown was in La Court Hotel in Grand Junction , waiting for a long distance phone call. "You boys might as well go right on up to the mine and get established," he told us. "See you in the mormng. The clay road leading on up to the States Mine was bright with the afternoon sun, brilliant green with the quaking aspen under the cliff of Rollins Sandstone, still untouched by fall. Alfalfa fIelds were a brilliant patchwork across Green Valley. The stark grey tipple outlined against Grand Mesa contrasted sharply. Blue smoke still drifted lazily from the slag pile, tainting the air mildly, probably slightly poisonous but not unpleasant. Mr. States was in his office. "I'm certainly glad to see you boys," he greeted us. "Where's Dr. Brown?" It was agreed Ryan and I might camp in the bunkhouse. Jack soon had supper going on the gasoline stove. He lacked Maw's motherly ways, but his cooking was good enough. And we were both hungry. "How long do you reckon this job'll take?" he asked. "States seemed concerned about that fortyinch sandstone ceiling, didn't he? Cutting down a block eighteen feet long and six feet wide through that stuff sounds like all winter, huh?" Brown showed up early in the morning, and as soon as...

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