Venue took a long afternoon detour south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to hike the surreal geological formations of the all but unknown Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument—a kind of American Cappadocia of weirdly repeating pinnacles shaped like fairy tale magic hats and glowing white in the constant sunlight.

Images of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument courtesy of the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management.

Similar to the visual pyrotechnics on display at sites such as Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, at times it seems as if the rock pillars are stuttering out of the hillsides, repetitive echoes of themselves and each other. You can almost see the formations marching forward out of the earth, one after the other, to be revealed slowly, over eons of time, for thousands, perhaps millions, of generations to come.



In fact, parts of the National Monument often look, in photographs, as if a processing bug has somehow cloned the slender columns and what we're seeing is not natural earthworks at all but a kind of representational error, a planetary glitch, the surface of the earth time-stretched.

However, it's all just differential weathering: the erosion of incredible stone shapes from the earth, like a mineralogical garden as designed by Max Ernst.



Every few seasons, flash floods roar through and reduce the ground level another few feet; tree roots now grow as if in midair and more and more bewildering rock formations are revealed. The slower, or less immediate, action of snow joins the chorus of forces taking the landscape apart each winter. Where the earth being locally dismantled reaches its most otherworldly extremes, we declare our national parks and monuments.



For all of its geologic complexity, however, Kasha-Katuwe—which means "white cliffs"—is neither large nor particularly strenuous from the point of view of hiking. Still, it feels so much like Turkey's Cappadocia region that it's tempting to propose a geological sister-park program, or some other administrative way of combining, and thus drawing connections between, geologically similar regions in very different parts of the world.

Image of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument courtesy of the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management.

Also like Cappadocia, Kasha-Katuwe has a long history of human habitation. The Monument itself includes several archaeological sites, including the cliff cave—or "cavate"—shown below. Curiously, a typo on the BLM's signage within the park labels it a "caveat," instead, suggesting that the human role in helping to shape this landscape is just a minor and relatively temporary exception.



The cavate, part of a whole regional complex of formerly inhabited caves stretching north from Kasha-Katuwe into Bandelier National Monument and beyond, has the effect of making humans seem vaguely sponge-like: reef-dwellers for whom civilization is more like a perforation in the landscape, a cut, hole, or pore excavated from the earth and made habitable as "architecture."

Images (top, bottom) of "cavates" from Bandelier National Monument; photos by Sally King/NPS, courtesy of Bandelier National Monument.

For their part, the Bureau of Land Management describes Kasha-Katuwe as a "remarkable outdoor laboratory, offering an opportunity to observe, study, and experience the geologic processes that shape natural landscapes."

In this case, the BLM explains, what we see now is the after-effect of widespread volcanic eruptions that occurred as long as 7 million years ago, "leaving pumice, ash and tuff deposits over 1,000 feet thick." The tent-rocks formations—also known as hoodoos, fairy chimneys, and even, in French, demoiselles coiffées, or ladies with hairdos—were then sculpted by a process of erosion, described by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources as follows:

Water and, to a lesser extent, wind erosion preferentially attacks the sand and ash grains around the base of large blocks in the gravel-rich beds. Eventually, the gravel clasts rest on pedestals, thus protecting the underlying sand and ash from further erosion. As time passes, the capstones are gradually undermined and the rocks topple, leaving an unprotected cone.

Put another way, as one ancient landscape, violently laminated atop an even older surface now lost somewhere far below it, begins to be erased, parts of it hang on, temporarily protected by the shelter of yet another more recent and resilient surface above. Slicing—or, in architectural terms, cutting sections—through these multiply intertwined surfaces are now slot canyons and trails.



The Monument's geological revenants form oddly stacked and twisting forms, strangely melancholic remnants doomed to disappear as many more millions of years of wind, rain, and snow scrub the ground of these temporary mountain ranges, preparing for future terrains to come.



The whole National Monument brings to mind an image of geological sculpture described by author China Miéville in his novel Iron Council.

There, Miéville describes something called "slow sculpture," a planetary artform in which outsized blocks of sandstone are "carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths."



Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, with its winding canyons and time-echoed rock formations, makes a compelling day trip for anyone interested in hiking the earth's own version of slow sculpture, an ever-changing procession of tented pillars, canyons, caves, and labyrinths, scooped in rippling contours out of the soft, white rock.

After a long drive down toward the Shenandoah Valley, passing southwest across Pennsylvania into the mountains of Virginia, Venue arrived near sunset at Luray Caverns, just in time for their final tour of the day.

The surreally ordinary door through which you access Luray Caverns.

Discovered in 1878, the caves at Luray remain on private property. This means that, unlike their counterparts in the National Park Service, whose educational and recreational programs are constrained by strict ecological and historic preservation guidelines, Luray is a show cave—an artful blend of natural and built subterranean forms, visited by roughly five million people a year.

State laws extend into the subterranean world.

Also a popular destination for school field trips, the caverns are by no means wild or remote; they are well-lit, family-friendly, and not insignificantly altered, with as much as twenty percent of the original cave, our guide explained, removed or expanded to accommodate human passage.


The caverns, which extend throughout an area nearly sixty-four acres in size, are home to an array of formations, from dripping pillars that look as much like lithified swarms of ancient jellyfish as they do columns of rock to semi-translucent rippling curtain forms known as "cave bacon" and an extraordinary reflective lake filled with crystal-clear (although very shallow) water.

Their showpiece, however, is a nearly four-acre underground musical instrument made from the stalactites of the cave itself.

Yes, that's acres.


This organ, the Luray Cavern's website explains, was "conceived" by a man named Leland W. Sprinkle, "a mathematician and electronics scientist at the Pentagon."

The keyboard of the organ.

The instrument visitors now encounter, extensively wired up to the labyrinth of stalactites hanging down from the ceiling, actually takes its inspiration from an earlier version, as Russell H. Gurnee explains in his informative booklet Discovery of Luray Caverns, Virginia.

"A wall decoration not far from the Saracen's Tent," Gurnee writes, describing the "original natural instrument" from which Sprinkle's invention takes its cue, was not invented, as such, but instead "consisted of fifty-six graduated columns arranged like the pipes of an organ."

These graduated columns could be played: tapped with hammers or a flashlight, and resonant tones would result.

The mallets are remarkably easy to miss.

Sprinkle's organ relies on the same principle—tapping stalactites of different size and resonance, like a xylophone—but at a much more awe-inspiring scale. The organ keys are connected to small rubber mallets strung up to the rocks by way of five miles' worth of wires.

In the words of Luray's administrators, this "stalactite-tapping instrument" apparently took thirty-six years to perfect: "Three years alone were spent searching the vast chambers of the caverns to select and carefully sand stalactites to precisely match the musical scale. Only two stalactites were found to be in tune naturally."


The deliberately theatrical, Willy Wonka-like red keyboard adds to the sense of tourist gimmickry that pervades most show-caves—the addition of manmade wonders ("the largest musical instrument on earth!") sitting uncomfortably alongside the subterranean sublime.

The organ's music is, nonetheless, sonorous, omnidirectional, and highly atmospheric, as well as a virtuoso display of mechanical invention.

Instagrams of mallets and wires cobwebbed across the cave.

Only one man plays the organ, our guide informed us, but in his absence, we instead listened to a preprogrammed sequence, a kind of geological piano player; the song we thus heard was an old hymn by Martin Luther, called "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

It percussed and rang across the cobweb of rubber hammers in speleological surroundsound, indicating through echoes that there were yet more distant parts of the cave we would not have time to explore.


We stood there for three or four minutes in appreciative silence, listening to this electrical contraption that formalized the otherwise random actions of an earlier generation of explorers who merely tapped on the rocks around them. A habit, you might say, became a machine.

Hearing the Earth ping with music written centuries ago, it was hard not to wonder how literally fantastic it would be to have one's own, secret access to some vast subterranean instrument wired together in tangles of valves, mallets, and wires—sitting alone at night in a mansion in the mountains of Virginia, perhaps, as a fog sets in, playing this buried machine that uses the planet itself as a resonation chamber, hollow cavities, from the smallest tunnels to gigantic chasms several counties away, shivering with the induced seismicity of your own music. Sounds hum up through your old wooden floorboards, and glassware in the kitchen begins to vibrate.

Until such a day, it's easy enough just to listen to Luray on CD: indeed, we picked up a copy of a 2001 album offered by the shop upstairs called Midnight in the Caverns by Monte Maxwell. In that recording, the triggering of the mallets is clearly audible as a kind of secondary clicking beneath the music, which gives the songs a slightly robotic feel—an extra layer of strangeness that, like the addition of the organ to the caverns, it didn't need but, in the end, isn't any the worse for. We put the CD on repeat for the next few hours as Venue left Luray behind.