{"id":15632,"date":"2013-05-27T05:26:38","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T11:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=15632"},"modified":"2013-05-27T11:32:36","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T17:32:36","slug":"oolitic-sand-the-perfect-idiot-trap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/27\/oolitic-sand-the-perfect-idiot-trap\/","title":{"rendered":"Oolitic Sand – The Perfect Idiot Trap"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’ll be no birds in today’s post, I’m afraid.\u00a0 It takes me an hour to get to the island from my home and it’s not unusual for me to have clear skies when I leave much\u00a0before\u00a0dawn and then have it be\u00a0mostly\u00a0socked in when I arrive at the Farmington Bay\/Antelope Island area – a phenomenon I refer to as the “Farmington Curse”.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s exactly what happened yesterday morning so I\u00a0generally had poor light and got correspondingly low quality photos, which I deleted.<\/p>\n

The only saving grace of the morning was some karmic justice I observed on the island.<\/p>\n

Much of the area on the island\u00a0anywhere near the beaches is covered with oolitic sand, a type of sand found only in a few areas of the world.\u00a0 Most\u00a0sands are\u00a0tiny,\u00a0angular particles of disintegrated rock but oolitic sand\u00a0is formed by many concentric layers of calcium carbonate that precipitate around a tiny core of debris, usually brine shrimp fecal pellets in the Great Salt Lake.\u00a0 As a result,\u00a0the shape of the individual grains of this sand is round or oval – thus the name (oolitic means “egg stone).\u00a0 See this link for a photograph and description <\/a>from the Utah Geological Survey.<\/p>\n

If the wind blows even a few inches of this sand across the road, because of the rounded shape of the grains it bogs you down immediately and is almost impossible to drive through.\u00a0\u00a0Off road, where the sand is thick, it is<\/em><\/strong> impossible\u00a0to drive through.\u00a0 It’s also illegal, as the island roads are festooned with signs saying “Do\u00a0Not Leave Pavement” and “Please Stay On Road”.<\/p>\n

But some low-brow visitors to the island see such conditions as challenges –\u00a0to do it anyway and to get away with it…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"stuck<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday morning as I rounded a curve in the road I came across this Volkswagen stuck in the sand near one of the restroom\/bathhouses.\u00a0 It only made it a few feet off the road before it became hopelessly bogged down.\u00a0 Since this photo was taken just after dawn it must have happened the evening before.\u00a0 I suspect the driver may have hitched a ride off the island before they closed the gate for the night (or he\/she spent an uncomfortable night somewhere on the island) and then arranged for some friends or a tow truck to pull him out sometime the next morning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"stuck<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0This Volkswagen has front wheel drive and you can see the efforts expended to try to extricate the vehicle at the right-front tire.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"stuck<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0The left-front tire.\u00a0 You can also see\u00a0(here and in the first photo)\u00a0that this person(s) illegally ravaged native plants in a fruitless effort to gain some traction in this morass of microscopic marbles.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"stuck<\/a><\/p>\n

Now for some interesting speculation on my part.\u00a0 This photo was taken on June 7, 2012 – almost exactly a year earlier.\u00a0 Another car, stuck in almost exactly the same place (compare this image to the first one in this post).\u00a0 I can’t help but wonder if the driver of both cars could have been the same person.\u00a0 There’s many coincidences\u00a0shared by the two events – same place, same time of day,\u00a0very nearly the same date and\u00a0both vehicles were Volkswagens.\u00a0 It’s a long shot, but it’s also possible…<\/p>\n

Either way, it seems to me that what happened here is a form of\u00a0well deserved justice.<\/p>\n

Sorry\u00a0for the tangent, I’ll get back to\u00a0birds tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – I paid another visit to the island early this morning and this mess is what I found after the car had been dragged out.\u00a0 As you can see from the drag marks in the sand the car had been high centered down to its frame and undercarriage.<\/p>\n

\"stuck<\/a><\/p>\n

If this\u00a0clown had to pay for a tow truck I sure hope it wasn’t cheap…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’ll be no birds in today’s post, I’m afraid. It takes me an hour to get to the island from my home and it’s not unusual for me to have clear skies when I leave much before dawn and then have it be mostly socked in when I arrive at the Farmington Bay\/Antelope Island area – a phenomenon I refer to as the “Farmington Curse”. That’s exactly what happened yesterday morning so I generally had poor light and got correspondingly low quality photos, which I deleted.<\/p>\n

The only saving grace of the morning was some karmic justice I observed on the island.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334],"tags":[31,397,1479,1477,238,1478],"class_list":["post-15632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-farmington-bay","tag-idiot","tag-karmic-justice","tag-oolitic-sand","tag-utah-geological-survey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/idiots-car-0813-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-448","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}