Day 3: Rocky Mountains

We started off the day slowly (they guys were waiting for Dew Drop. Apparently she’s not a morning person…). We went to the diner next door for breakfast. We headed off at 11am local time, and thankfully crossed into the Mountain time zone – so we got to the hotel an hour earlier… it was still a 12 hour drive, but this means we get to sleep in an extra hour!

The first half of the drive was more grass and more hills. In Montana, it seemed that the only radio stations were country music ones! I guess I’ve learned to like it after so many hours in the truck. When we first saw the mountains in the distance, we all got so excited. We took so many photos! Sometimes the trees got in the way, though. I’m going to upload them all onto here.

But before we saw the mountains, we saw some rock formations. They had lines running across them. Since William is in civil engineering, he took a course this year on rocks and rivers. We saw so many! And the rivers were so pretty. He explained it all to me, but he does it better. This is what he said:

It was really quite amazing seeing all the different kinds of rock formations and rivers and looking at how they were made!
Starting with those really awesome Rocky Mountains: the first thing you can see when travelling towards them is all the different layers of rock – those are the lines you see.

Those layers are there from a long time ago when water use to be there. The water dropped lots of tiny pieces of rocks and sand. That’s what makes those lines you see. The reason we can see them is that when two different pieces of land (called tectonic plates) come together, they push the ground upwards and make all these large hills and mountains. In this case, it’s the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean floor! North America got all crunched up like a piece of paper. Try and slowly push a piece into the wall (or your mom’s leg). See how it bends? Keep pushing and it might even flip upward, to try and go over what it’s running into. That’s what North America is doing to the Pacific Ocean floor: it’s moving on top of it (that’s what makes lava – melted rock. It gets really hot underground). This is still happening now, but at a very slow speed. This means the mountains are continuing to get even bigger… but it’s too slow for us to notice it.

The rivers were all really blue – Dew Drop kept trying to convince us to stop so she could swim in them. There are three main types of rivers: straight, braided, and meandering. Straight rivers are what they sound like: rivers that flow in a straight line. These are hard to find in nature (unless we build them).

Braided rivers are several very thin strands of water that move back and forth – like a hair braid.

Meandering rivers are one main river that snake across the ground and are very common (these are the ones we saw along the road so far on our trip)

The other cool thing we saw while travelling was a train carrying coal. It had two engines on it because it was so long and heavy! I love the sounds trains make. Maybe I’ll drive a train when I’m older :)