This piece is part of a special project on deep time examining what the Western U.S. was like thousands, millions and even billions of years ago, and how that history is still visible and consequential today. Read more stories from the series.
My father was a petroleum geologist. A lot of my childhood, he was gone, away on oil rigs in the Powder River Basin and remote parts of Wyoming, living in man camps long before cellphones. We had to wait days to talk to him. When he went into the nearest town to shower, he’d find a payphone and call us. I was always breathless with news.
“I got an A on my math test! I have a new crush on Matt! Sparky can now shake paws!”
My sister and I waited on the sidewalk when we knew he was coming home. We jumped up and down to greet him. He always smelled of gasoline and grease, and I carefully helped him carry his tools, the UV box and offset logs into the house. He brought me things he found on prairie walks: rocks, arrowheads, antlers and once, a piece of china from a long-abandoned homestead, optimistically decorated with a sprig of roses.
When I was in junior high, however, my father was suddenly around a lot more. There was an energy bust, and now it was my mother who worked long hours. Every morning, while my sister and I curled our hair and set it in a cloud of hairspray, my dad made us toast and drove us to school. At a traffic light he named “New Word Light,” he taught us a new vocabulary word every day and asked us to use it three times that day. I still remember some of them: troglodyte, ennui, pernicious. Another corner was “Question Corner,” where we could ask him about anything. My sister asked if there was a God, why is there hunger. I asked about the Vietnam War and what it was like to lose a parent. And on one of those drives he told me something incomprehensible: If Earth’s history were compressed into
a single 24-hour day, he said, humans would appear in only the last few seconds before midnight.
The last few seconds before midnight. And yet, in those seconds, we have left our mark.
WE TOOK REGULAR school field trips to Independence Rock, which we called the turtle of the prairie. It looks like a giant turtle shell nesting between sagebrush. It’s an hour away from Casper, perfect for an elementary school day trip. We’d feel the wind shake the bus as we drove, and we ate a picnic lunch by the rock. It was where I learned to pee in the sagebrush.
My teacher solemnly explained that Independence Rock was known as the Register of the Desert; over 5,000 names were carved or painted on it during the Westward migrations. Pioneers, over half a million of them, passed through, and many of them literally left their marks on the rock. In 1961, the state of Wyoming designated it a national historic landmark.
The rock’s highest point is 136 feet above the surrounding terrain, the height of a 12-story building. It covers 27 acres and is more than a mile in circumference — 700 feet wide and 1,900 feet long.
Fur trappers named the rock in 1830, before the pioneers, when they camped and had a party here on Independence Day. And before them, the tribes from the Central Rocky Mountains — Arapaho, Arikara, Bannock, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, Lakota, Pawnee, Shoshone and Ute — left carvings and petroglyphs on the red-granite monolith, which they called Timpe Nabor, the Painted Rock.
But it was the pioneers who carved their names into the granite. They left messages, and it became a kind of bulletin board on the trail. I love reading their descriptions of the rock. According to Wyohistory.org, in 1832, John Ball thought it looked “like a big bowl turned upside down,” and estimated that its size was “about equal to two meeting houses of the old New England Style.” Lydia Milner Waters thought “Independence Rock was like an island of rock on the grassy plain,” while Civil War soldier Hervey Johnson reported that it looked “like a big elephant (up) to his sides In the mud.” One man called it a huge whale, another an apple cut in half and turned over.
As a geologist’s daughter, I marveled at it. Independence Rock is a granite boss — a term that makes me laugh, as I can’t imagine a rock being the boss of anyone. In geology, however, a boss is an intrusive igneous feature — molten rock that was pushed up from deep below. As it was pushed, it became a big dome and weathered into its big rounded shape.
Wyoming is full of such ventifacts, rocks that have been molded by the wind — “wind-faceting,” some call it. Over 50 million years ago at Independence Rock, exfoliation began. Water seeped into its fissures, and repeated freezing and thawing pried the grains apart. Thin sheets of crumbling rock washed away by rain and snow, exposing fresh rock below. Finally, around 15 million years ago, Independence Rock became a dome when windblown sand rounded its top.
“Independence Rock was like an island of rock on the grassy plain; like a big elephant (up) to his sides In the mud.”
I CALLED MY father while writing this to check my geology. So many of our car trips as children were filled with the Earth’s facts. He’d point out a fault scarp or hand me a rock that looked like nothing and then tell me its story. My dad is 85 now, and I see in him a different kind of weathering: His face is shaped by the years he worked outside; his gait is a little less steady. But he still goes on dinosaur digs. He spent last week in the field, being shaped by the wind, much like the rocks he holds. And I jokingly tell him I am a ventifact: Wyoming wind probably shaped me more than anything.
We each are shaped by the things around us, our parents, education and the journeys we take. And it is geology that perhaps has shaped me the most, growing up in a place with rocks the size of skyscrapers, and wind and open space and sky like a theater.
In 9th grade, my teacher made us memorize the geologic time scale. In the car, between Question Corner and New Word Light, I would chant, “Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic!” And then “Jurassic, Triassic, Cambrian, Cretaceous!” — words as foreign as my French class. My dad listened, registering everything I said. He was my own rock, on whom I left a mark. And I will be the same for my girls.
I think about deep time a lot. Humans are just a blip; we joined the party seconds before midnight. The turtle of the plains will be there long after I am gone — long after my dad is gone. And strangely, I find that comforting. Independence Rock has weathered the elements and graffiti and parties with fur trappers, and it still stands. I don’t need to carve my name on a rock to say I once existed. Knowing there has been so long a history before us reassures me and gives me a kind of optimism. We can each serve as a monolith to others on their own journeys.
I cannot imagine living on this Earth without my parents, and yet I know that day will come. I am not saying my dad will live on in the rocks I hold. But, in a way, he will.
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This article appeared in the January 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Weathering time.”
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