Sandstone COUNTRY
Thelma: [stopping suddenly at the edge of a cliff] What in the hell is this?
Louise: I don’t know. I think… I think it’s the goddamn Grand Canyon.
Thelma: Isn’t it beautiful?
Louise: Yeah. It’s something else, all right.
THE JOURNEY STARTS just down the road from my house, about 300 million years ago. Harsh, dry winds raged across a desert landscape, with rusty-coloured sand dunes migrating across what today are damp pastures. A tiny stream, the Linn Burn, has carved down into the 300 million-year-old red sandstone. It’s made a gorge 30 metres deep, but narrow enough to jump across the top of if you’re brave. Covenanters – religious refugees of the 1680s – hid out in the caves, and Victorian visitors carved their names into a natural sandstone doorway above the stream.
The opening of the Atlantic broke that long-ago desert in half; and now the slow dance of the continents has carried its western edge, now named as Utah in the USA, back into the same sort of climate. Once again the sandstone rocks are lying under a red desert of today. Where our Linn Burn has made one tiny gorge, Utah’s Canyonlands are more gorge
