OUT AND ABOUT: The great granitic boulder along the Dutch Flat Trail

BAKER CITY — Geologic time has almost nothing in common with what you might call human time. For us, a single year is a considerable span, one that encompasses birthdays and holidays and other milestones. The phrase “next year” means, in effect, that whatever the subject, it’s not something we need to worry about any time soon. In geologic time, by contrast, a year is so minuscule that it defies comparison with anything on the human time scale. Even a second, the interval that is about as scant as we typically can discern, is far greater, comparatively, than a year is in the immensity of Earth’s history. Or to shift briefly from units of time to ones of money, one year in geologic time is akin to one dollar in Elon Musk’s net worth — something which is, for all intents, without meaning. I pondered the vast difference between time scales the morning of Nov. 8 while I was hiking the Dutch Flat Trail in the Elkhorn Mountains northwest of Baker City.

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