Scree

I like scree. I like the word; it sounds sharp and jagged, like the stone and rocks it refers to. Scree. The crumbled bones of the earth.

Sometimes the stones are small and gravelly. Sometimes they're mixed with broken branches. Sometimes they're almost square-cut and too heavy to move. On a hillside where I lived some years ago, the cliff face was clay, which oozed in rainy season; after the spring thaw, round rocks pushed their way through the clay and piled up at the bottom.

I stop often to poke around at the bottom of cliffs, cautiously, because the stones are usually unstable, and more overhead are just waiting to fall. Sometimes I bring home a stone or two in my pocket, only to abandon it later. A few end up in my garden.

I liked the pattern on these two rocks at the base of a cliff beside Buttle Lake.

The black stuff looks like tar; shiny, blue-black. But solid, welded to the rock.

Another one.

Scree is a collection of broken rock fragments at the base of crags, mountain cliffs, volcanoes or valley shoulders that has accumulated through periodic rockfall from adjacent cliff faces. (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia gives a list of processes that give rise to scree. Weathering, thermal and topographic stresses, biotic processes (burrowing, etc.). But they forgot this very common one; road building, blasting through rock to make a ledge. Unless that falls under biotic processes, actions by living creatures, in this case us and our earth-moving machines and dynamite.

Most of the scree at the side of the Buttle Lake road is man-made. Down on the shore, the stones are smaller, more uniform in texture and shape, a bit worn down; they've been there since before our time.