Human Concept of Time

Time is something that can prove to be hard for humans to physically quantify. You can’t see it, touch it, hear it, or taste it…. You can only feel its effects. Someone once told me that humans can’t really comprehend time beyond three years. The more I think about it the more I feel this is true. Everything before college in my life seems like a big mix of memories where some feel slightly farther away than others. This being said, it can be hard for us to appreciate how long and how many different factors had to fall into place to create a watershed, let alone something as small as the Clavey Confluence. I learned a completely new way of looking at river formations on the Tuolumne River. I often found myself looking upstream or downstream and only as far up the bank as the bedrock might extend. On the last trip I forced myself to look up the hill slopes to see how much evidence could actually be found as far as landslides. I did see some consistencies that I found interesting and wish I had more time to look into. At the Clavey Confluence I found the rock slide that is pictured below. The only evidence I could find as to why it was there was a rock outcropping up the hill. I was curious as to how these rocks of similar size all got to be where they were when not much vegetation is growing on the pile of debris but surround it on all edges. Shouldn’t there be a path of destruction uphill from this? It leads me back to my concept of time. How often do these slides take place and how many landslide events did it take to make Clavey look the way it does. I have a whole new appreciation for the formation of river features and how the span of my life is almost nothing when compared to the geomorphic timescale of rivers.