TAKE A PEAK
‘New Mexico’s Magnificent Sandia Mountain’ takes an in-depth look at the geographical feature
Dirk Van Hart wants to set the record straight. The correct name, he insists, is Sandia Mountain, in the singular. It is not, geologically speaking, a mountain range, so it should not be identified in the plural, as in Sandia Mountains.
This is his view despite almost everything that he’s read about the subject, which has been in the plural.
In the introduction to his book “New Mexico’s Magnificent Sandia Mountain: The Complete Geological Story,” Van Hart presents supporting reasons why it should be in the singular.
Viewing it from north to south, he writes, the mountain has three high points — the North Sandia Peak at 10,447 feet, the Sandia Crest at 10,678 feet, and the South Sandia Peak at 9,782 feet.
“All three high points … are simply protuberances on a single ridge, rather than individual edifices,” Van Hart writes.
To endorse that position, he cites the U.S. Geological Survey, which has “rules” for the designation of peaks. One rule is that “a summit must be a mile from its neighboring summit and (another rule is) that it have a separating saddle at least 500 feet lower.”
Van Hart asserts the Sandia Mountain doesn’t meet those tough requirements to be a mountain range.
Moving on from that issue, Van Hart wants the public to know that he has written a book that he believes is the first reference work on the mountain that appeals both to general readers and to geologists.
He begins his informal, welcoming approach in the book’s preface. It contains three introductory “notes” that the author advises readers not to skip over.
NOTE NO. 1: “The book is not elementary, but it is almost entirely free of jargon and technical gobbledygook,” Van Hart writes.
He says that the plethora of figures (which include maps, charts and photographs) in the book may at first seem intimidating, but he predicts that the general reading public will become comfortable with them.
Maybe, but not that quickly, methinks.
NOTE NO. 2: The subject of rocks may seem dry or even tedious to the non-geologist, but Van Hart writes that they are more than inanimate objects. “They tell stories — if one knows how to read them,” he adds.
The book stresses the landscape forms that rocks produce and those forms we in New Mexico see all around us every day.
NOTE NO. 3: The book’s size may initially seem intimidating. It’s a large format book with more than 400 pages in the main section, plus five appendices, eight single-spaced pages of references cited and a 14-page index. Whew!
The book is hefty in size and can be overwhelming for the general reader in terms of the amount of geology-related information packed into the text and in the accompanying figures.
Still, Van Hart feels that the chapters have what he believes are an easy-to-follow chronology and developmental order. Another way he puts it is that the chapters are a series of “closely related vignettes.”
Despite this chronology and order, he argues that the book’s chapters can be read out of sequence or bypassed and read “at a later time when the interest calls.”
The author hopes that the large number of figures — more than 200 in all — will aid the reader’s visual experience.
Figures initially appear in the introduction. Among the figures are a location map of Sandia Mountain in a statewide context, separate topographic maps of New Mexico and of Sandia Mountain, a shaded relief map of Sandia Mountain and the mountain chain to the immediate south (the Manzanita Mountains, the Manzano Mountains and farther south, the Los Pinos Mountains), and a Google Earth image of Sandia Mountain.
“I tried to make it interesting to the average Joe. But Joe has to have an interest in this stuff,” Van Hart said in an interview. “There’s nothing that’s not accessible.”
The book, he noted, is a compendium of what we know, or think we know, about the geologic origin of Sandia Mountain, and its story is told within the regional geologic context of the American Southwest.
The book, he said, was a labor of love.
Van Hart, 82, is a native of New Jersey. He was a longtime petroleum geologist before moving to Albuquerque, where he did contract work for Sandia National Laboratories.