" And at some immeasurably remote time beyond human caring the whole uneasy region might sink again beneath the sea and begin the cycle all over again by the slow deposition of new marls, shales, limestones, sandstones, deltaic conglomerates, perhaps with a fossil poet pressed and silicified between the leaves of rock. It "

― Wallace Stegner , Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West