Kitty Ice Prints...

...or icy kitty prints?

I'm not much of a cat blogger, but I saw paw prints in the making the day before yesterday, when a couple kitties jumped up on the jeep right after it had been washed, leaving dusty prints all over the hood! The kitties were, apparently, interested in drinking water from the bowl-like indentations where the windshield wipers swivel, because all other water that afternoon was in the form of snow and ice.

The next morning, after an ice fog had partly lifted, the hood of my jeep looked like this:

Frozen cat prints on jeep hood.

Enlarged prints.

More prints.

More enlarged prints.

Little ice crystals comprise the frozen prints.

As Jim Lehane recently noted, ice is the solid, crystalline form of water. Ice crystals are hexagonal; the ones on my jeep were too small to examine without my hand lens — and I didn't stay outside long enough in the icy morning air for that!

Ice at Mindat.org
Ice at Webmineral.com
Is Water a Mineral? -- Is Ice a Mineral?

Road Trip

MOH and I just got back from a two-day road trip to Salt Lake City and back again. We drove to West Wendover, NV and then had lunch at a buffet in the Peppermill Casino. After that, we drove past Wendover, UT on I-80, and then sped past the exit for the Bonneville Speedway. Eventually, we came within sight of the Great Salt Lake and the Garfield Smelter. We pulled off at the Saltair exit, having already driven past several points of geologic interest - especially tufa-covered notches cut by ancient Lake Bonneville. A sailboat was out on the lake, and the air smelled sweetly pungent with the salt. A yellow-eyed cat came from the marina to greet us.
The lake is lower than it was during the 1983 Cordilleran Section meeting of the GSA, when the lake level rose rapidly, threatening to cover I-80 in a few places. That year, enough water was coming out of the Wasatch via City Creek that a main street in Salt Lake City (State Street) was sandbagged and allowed to become the State Street River. That same year, floods in the Mojave Desert of CA caused numerous road washouts, and mud was unusually common in a few places. Slide Mountain near Reno, NV, slid for the first time in many years. El Niño had struck heavily that year, and water was everywhere.