Black Friday test for temps

Some want jobs beyond holidays

Hours into Rose Porter’s second day on the job, the line of shoppers inside the J.C. Penney store in Henderson had grown nine people deep.

Porter, 64, remembered her training. Call for help if need be. Make the customer feel acknowledged.

“Sorry,” she called out to those in line. “We’ll be right with you.”

Porter, one of 200 seasonal employees recruited to work November and December at the Henderson store, had a natural rapport with customers. She complimented them on the clothes they’d picked. She apologized if she felt she took too long.

“I’m still nervous,” Porter said. “But everyone has been so helpful answering my questions.”

A former office manager who had been unemployed for eight months, Porter was among 85 people hired through J.C. Penney’s annual job fair in October, and one of 7,000 seasonal workers across multiple retailers this season in Nevada, according to Retail Association of Nevada estimates.

Those seasonal workers can expect to be tested on Black Friday, when an estimated 116 million people nationwide plan to shop, according to the National Retail Federation trade group.

The group expects retail sales in November and December to increase at least 4.3 percent over 2017 for a total of at least $717.45 billion.

TEMPS

Older than the dinosaurs

At the time the tracks were laid down, the land mass that would become North America was closer to the equator and Nevada was covered by an inland sea.

“The supercontinent of Pangea was assembling. It wasn’t formed yet, but it was close,” Rowland said.

The age of dinosaurs was still more than 70 million years away. The Grand Canyon itself wouldn’t be carved for at least another 245 million years.

Scientists probably never will know exactly what kind of animal left the tracks, but Rowland pictures a lizard-like creature about 2 feet in length, similar in size to a Galapagos iguana.

Rowland presented his findings last month during the international Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He hopes to submit a scientific paper on the discovery in January, once he homes in on “the global significance” of what he found.

In the meantime, he said, he has been in discussions with park officials about what to do with the rock itself, which measures about 3 feet long and 2½ feet thick and probably weighs over 1,000 pounds.

Rowland said he would like to see them helicopter it out of the canyon and put it in a museum.

“More than likely that’s not going to happen,” said ranger Kari Cobb, spokeswoman for the park.

Removing the rock and putting it on display somewhere doesn’t really fit with the Park Service’s mission to preserve resources in their natural state, Cobb said. “But we may put up an interpretive sign telling people what they’re looking at.”

Sideways walk into history

Rowland said the footprints also are unusual because of the “peculiar gait” of the animal that left them. Based on the orientation of the toes and the direction of the tracks, it appears the creature was moving diagonally, like a line dancer sliding sideways across a dance floor.

Rowland has a number of possible explanations for this. Maybe the animal was walking along a steep slope or fighting a strong wind. Maybe another member of its species was nearby, and its movements were part of a territorial fight or a mating dance.

How the fossilized footprints ended up where they are now is an interesting story in its own right.

Rowland said the rock slab containing the hidden tracks tumbled onto Bright Angel Trail about three years ago, when part of a cliff collapsed. As the rock fell, it split in just the right way to expose the footprints.

As the park’s maintenance crew cleared away the debris, one of the workers noticed the strange markings and decided to place the rock along the walking path so hikers could see it. Rowland’s friend from Norway happened to be one those hikers.

“It’s this strange sequence of unlikely coincidences,” Rowland said.

But in a national park as vast and as rugged as the Grand Canyon, Cobb said, she isn’t surprised by a surprising find like this one, even on such a popular trail.

“There’s so much that’s waiting to be discovered,” she said. “I think that’s just one of the things that makes the Grand Canyon such an incredible place.”

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @Refriedbrean on Twitter.