Bristlecone Pine
These trees, found atop the White Mountains of eastern California, are among the oldest living species, some of which are more than 10,000 years spent on this earth. Bent and knarled, their cores reveal a history that makes our pale by comparison.

Sandstone
Once the site of an ancient desert, this piece of rock may be called a fossil sand dune. As pictured here from an outcrop in the Waterpocket Foled in central Utah, it flakes off in slabs.

Rounded Granite
Granite in the southwest weathers to this characteristic form, because of its 3 dimensional homogenous structure of interlocking quartz and feldspar minerals. Weathering tends to occur in directions that are mutually perpindicular, forming fractures that are accentuated by water and freeze-thaw of winter ice.

Pumice
Sliced to less than 0.03 millimeters thin and viewed through a microscope are the tortuous tubes of volcanic pumice, formed in the frothy expanision of gas charged volcanic magma. This piece is from the Bishop Tuff, a catacysmic eruption 600,000 years ago that formed the oval shaped Long Valley "caldera" known as northwest of Bishop, California.

Erosion
In the depths of Death Valley, this loose material is easily worn away by wind, desert flash-floods, and of course, time, leaving us these wonderful Badlands like landforms.

Trees like Toys
In the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, these trees were stripped and blown over like toys. The pattern in which they now lay indicate the directions of flow within the blast cloud as it moved at supersonic speeds away from the volcano.

Hole in the Ground
Approimately 50,000 years ago a huge hunk of iron from outer space collided with the earth. It hit with the force equivalent of some 20 million tons of TNT and left as its mark, this one mile wide, 500 foot deep hole near Holbrook, Arizona. The tourists call it Meteor Crater, the purists call it Berringer Crater.

Fossil Trees
Petrified wood represents the cell-by-cell replacement of a tree's material with silcon dioxide. The many colors represent impurities that seeped in during the process which converted this 200 million-year-old tree into rock. this one has spotted at Painted Desert/Petrified Forest National Park, in northern Arizona.

Sands of Time
Wind moves sand grain by grain, cascading over one another in sand-dunes, or forming furrowed ripples. The movement of sand is known as "saltation." Give it lots og geologic time, and you end up with cross-bedded sandstone.

Columns of Rock
The contraction upon cooling of magma or a lava flow produces regularly spaced columns, such as this photo from Devils Tower, in Wyoming. Note the rock climbers for scale.