Progress!

The Hockett Trail was completed by Union troops during the Civil War as a light pack trail, with the intention of replacing the trail with a wagon road. There was no dynamite and no steel involved. The stream crossings and slopes were moderate. It was a route that a pack train could follow without any engineering at all.

In 1879, a mining road was completed to the valley of Mineral King, in anticipation of riches that never quite materialized. With this road, the western segment of the Hockett Trail would be bypassed by parties heading around the Divide. The new road was cut through treacherous terrain—not a natural route, but a direct cut through a canyon. From then on, getting around the Divide generally meant crossing Farewell Gap from Mineral King and meeting the Hockett Trail in Little Kern country.

The trail from Mineral King met the Hockett Trail where the latter crossed the Little Kern River, just east and downstream of Wet Meadows.

The trail drops rapidly from the summit of the ridge to the Little Kern, where it is joined by the trail from Mineral King.

Mount Whitney Club Journal, May 1903

The Hockett Trail west of the Little Kern developed a reputation as a rough trail, but this was probably because it was nearly abandoned after Mineral King Road was completed. That decline ended soon after the creation of Seqouia National Park in 1890. As before, the Hockett Trail was the labor of soldiers.

I have stated that the Hockett trail is the worst in the mountains. It has been greatly improved within the last year or two by the soldiers stationed in the Sequoia National Park.

Mount Whitney Club Journal, May 1903

The first trail blazed over the Great Western Divide appears to have been more circuitous than the current Coyote Pass route that replaced it.

During the summer of 1900 Forest Ranger, Ernest Britten marked out a trail from the vicinity of Bullion Flat (southeast of Mineral King and Farewell Gap) to the lakes on Kern River.

Mount Whitney Club Journal, May 1903 — Important Trail Work, pg. 83

The cut-off was soon re-routed and improved, and by Summer 1902 much of the old circuit around the Divide was largely abandoned. Soon after that, a bridge was built across the Kern River, and the old ford was abandoned as well. This, in turn, meant the old trail up the north side of Volcano Creek was also abandoned.

Early in the year 1901 the Visalia Board of Trade expended more than one hundred dollars on the “cut-off” from the vicinity of Bullion Flat to Kern River, improving the grade, and shortening the distance of actual travel to less than one half of that of the old Trout Meadow route. This is now the only trail regularly traveled between these points. Money has been appropriated by the bodies previously named herein to further improve this trail and to build a bridge across Kern River. The work will be done with the assistance of the forest rangers and the Mt. Whitney Club as early this season (1903) as the melting snow will permit.

Mount Whitney Club Journal, May 1903 — Important Trail Work, pg. 84–85

Though the original Hockett Trail fell into disuse within about 16 years of its completion, much of it is still maintained, and much of the rest can still be followed without too much difficulty. The old ford is still there, of course, and the route is relatively free of cliffs and dangerous stream crossings. The Hockett route, in fact, is much as it was when the trail was first blazed in 1863.

Metamorphosis

About thirty million years ago, the trailing edge of the Farallon Plate began to disappear under North America in the shape of an inverted 90° wedge, beginning at the location of present-day Los Angeles, and proceeding northeast under the continent, leaving nothing but hot mantle where before was the cold, subducting oceanic plate.

Burial of the Farallon Plate

Over the past twenty million years, that trailing edge has been crossing the Sierra Nevada region, and it’s traveled nearly as far north as Mount Lassen thus far, creating a great triangle between the trailing wings of the subducted Farallon Plate and the Pacific Plate.

With no more subduction to trigger the kind of volcanic activity characteristic of Mount Lassen and the Cascade Range to the north, the Sierra Nevada has transitioned into a new phase of plutonic activity. The hot, underlying mantle has pressed up through the great triangle, causing uplift and, as the uplifted dome has increased the surface area above, spreading. The spreading, in turn, has created grabens such as Owens Valley.

Though the stone that makes the Sierra Nevada was formed long before this uplift and spreading, it was this event, beginning about thirty million years ago, that actually gave rise to the Sierra Nevada that we know today. Still, there have been much more recent events that have contributed greatly to the general, large-scale structure of the range.

A New Age of Volcanism

This new incarnation of California lacks the Cascadian volcanism of its past, yet the existence of the eruption of the Long Valley supervolcano 760,000 years ago attests to the volatility of the present-day Sierra Nevada. It was an eruption 500 times the size of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption and 30 times the size of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption , surpassed by only four eruptions over the last million years:

1. Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia
2. Whakamaru, North Island, New Zealand
3. Lake Taupo, North Island, New Zealand
4. Yellowstone Caldera, Wyoming, USA

There are no stratovolcanoes along the spine of the Sierra Nevada, but there is evidence of something more terrible.

Localized Foundering of the Farallon Plate

As the trailing edge of the cold, dense Farallon Plate was detached from the supporting mass of any trailing oceanic plate, that trailing edge must have begun to sink — not merely as a caboose follows a train downhill, but rather more directly down, as it was no longer supported on its western boundary.

Delamination and Mantle Drip

Such a sinking mass must have pulled on the lithosphere above it, and possibly pulled the dense root of the Sierra Nevada downward and away from the mountain range. Once the trailing edge of the subducted plate passed, the detached root of the Sierra — being relatively dense — may have begun to sink more directly into the depths of the mantle, causing local downwelling.

Sinking mountains east of Fresno

Asthenospheric mantle flowed in to fill the gap where the Sierra’s root had been — probably liquefying under reduced pressure, and the Sierra, without the ballast of its dense root, became more buoyant, and began to rise, pulling even more asthenospheric mantle up with it, some of which would have liquefied. As magma, it would have injected itself into cracks in and around the thin Sierra block, ushering in the current phase of Sierra volcanism.

As the delaminated Sierra root descends into Earth’s mantle, it has created a local convection cell. The sinking root is causing downwelling in its wake, and pushing mantle rock downward and outward ahead of it. This downdraft appears to be causing subsidence in the Tulare Basin and the western Sierra adjacent to the basin.

As the displaced mantle rock is pushed aside, it then begins to rise, creating upward pressure at its edges — probably more along one edge, due to asymmetry. The upward pressure creates a local updraft, which may be adding to the uplift of the Sierra.

Further Reading:

Active foundering of a continental arc root beneath the southern Sierra Nevada in California

Watching Whales in the Sink

The continents of Pangaea

Up to about 200 million years ago, at the dawn of the Jurassic Period, there was no California. It might be said that even North America didn’t exist. North America had then part of the supercontinent of Pangaea, which was about to break apart.

As ancient peoples once imagined their world an island in a great sea, so Pangaea was an island in a great sea. For eons, the rivers of Pangaea carried sediments to that sea, loading down the dense, cool crust beneath the waters. That crust, it turn, was floating upon an ocean of lithospheric mantle, but the crust was getting heavier and losing its buoyancy, until finally it gave way, and began to list like a ship giving in to the sea.

Around Pangaea, ocean floors began to dive beneath it for the same reason, leading to what we know today as the Pacific Ring of Fire, and the Triassic supercontinent began to fracture under the strain of the spreading triggered by the suction of ocean floor subducting into its perimeter.

Here on the eastern shore of the great ocean, the Farallon Plate was born out of the disintegration of Pangaea. As this young oceanic plate dove under Pangaea (and later Laurasia), the uppermost layer of the plate was scraped off and piled against the edge of the continent, and so Cascadia was born. Cascadia is that land commonly known today as the Pacific Northwest. When California was young, it was part of Cascadia.

The continent was pulled westward and stretched along its margin, giving rise to the forearc basins known today as the Puget Sound, the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and California’s Central Valley.

The water-loaded serpentine hydrated the rock beneath the continent, liquefying the rock and causing streams of melt to form. This led to the formation of a volcanic arc along the Pacific Coast, and deep below, the plutons that would eventually uplift to become the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains of the present.

The hydrated magma streams that feed the volcanoes of Cascadia are not pacified by their water continent, but contrarily, rendered all the more volatile by the resulting steam, making for explosive releases of subterranean fire, not unlike the sudden expansion of a grease fire when fed with water.

Down in Cascadian California, there was no San Andreas Fault, nor any great granitic Sierra Nevada. These and other characteristic features of present-day California would arise as the trailing edge of the Farallon Plate began to disappear under North America.

To be continued …

Heraclitus was, after all, a subject of the Persian Empire, a land of fire worship, and the reputed cradle of alchemy. Alchemy is a practice of transmuting matter that depends greatly upon fire. It seems to be a natural—albeit mystical—offspring of the bronze age.

Perhaps after recognizing the ubiquity of fire, Heraclitus reflected upon the nature of fire, and came to this conclusion:

Burning Man effigy, Black Rock City, Nevada

fire is hunger and satiety.

—Heraclitus

Fire is indeed a hungry phenomenon. It seems to exist exclusively to consume, though the light and heat it has provided us through the millennia make it much more than a consumer. Yet it remains an archetype of consumption. Is not combustion the primal hunger within us? Is it not our deepest physiological craving for the fuels of combustion: oxygen and carbon compounds?

But fire is obviously not equal to hunger, for as consumption, it is also the satisfaction of its hunger.

Seeing everything around us as governed by this paradox, one can easily see the function of fire in the philosophy of Heraclitus. Heraclitus taught that the world is governed by a harmony of opposites. Recognizing that harmony, he saw wisdom in the working of things, but it was a harmony of war, of hunger. Whatever equilibrium he could see was a dynamic, cyclic equilibrium under tension. To Heraclitus, fire must have seemed fundamental both literally and metaphorically.

The fire is in the bush from the beginning.

Why did an ancient Israelite think that God would take the form of a self-immolating bush?

It might be natural enough to think that fire consumes a bush, but there’s another way to see it—the way that many ancients saw it: the fire is in the bush from the beginning. It’s not really such a crazy idea if one considers that the fire cannot occur without what’s in the bush. Sure, the fire also needs oxygen, but again: the bush exhales oxygen as it generates wood and foliage. It provides the fire with everything it needs. It is, in a real sense, a terrestrial offspring of the sun, waiting to ignite.

With the igneous nature of vegetation in mind, consider the igneous nature of the earth. Volcanoes could not have escaped the awareness of the ancients. With accompanying seismic activity, it must have been easy to conclude that the earth itself has a fiery cauldron at its heart. Gas and oil seeps, when ignited, may have lent some corroboration to this conclusion. Indeed, it is well-known that a fire temple recently made use of the natural gas seeps at Baku, Azerbaijan.

Ancient peoples didn’t just see fire in vegetation and in the earth. They saw fire in the sky. Of course they saw the sun as a heavenly fire, but they even saw the stars as fires:

the brightest of these flames, and the hottest, is the light of the sun ; for that all the other stars are farther off from the earth; and that on this account, they give less light and warmth; …

—Diogenes Laertius, Life of Heraclitus

The Baku fire temple, depicted in a 1919 postage stamp.

It is easy to underestimate the value of fire to ancient peoples. Fire gave them an ability to function at night. Fire defended men from large predators. Fire was a weapon of war, a companion in the hunt, and a tool for managing vegetation.

But more remarkably, fire seemed capable of transforming things. Fire tenderized and flavored food. Fire sterilized flesh and purified water. Fire evaporated water. Fire transformed clay to pottery. When iron was placed in fire, the iron itself would take on the the color and heat of fire, and suddenly man could reshape matter.

But fire got even more amazing with the advent of the bronze age. Fire had previously been used to forge iron and transform flesh. Now it would be used to transform matter itself. Alchemy would naturally follow.

Ancient peoples must have felt a tremendous sense of awe when witnessing the transformative power of fire. It had long been our companion as a species, to be sure, and it had also remained an untamed force of nature. Whether embodied as the sun, the thunderbolt, or a metalworker’s forge, it is a god who holds a special place in his heart for humanity.

No wonder, then, that the Persians worshiped it. No wonder they associated fire with the very ordering principle of the universe. No wonder that Heraclitus—an Ephesian subject of the Persian Empire—did the same. Fire seemed capable of transform anything.

The dream of transformation that fire once nurtured in man lives on today, if only in the nooks and crannies of our cultures. According to the Persian religion that I was raised in—the Bahá’í Faith, the first sign of the coming Kingdom of God on Earth will be a new, revolutionary science of alchemy:

The first sign of the coming of age of humanity referred to in the Writings of Baha’u’llah is the emergence of a science which is described as that ‘divine philosophy’ which will include the discovery of a radical approach to the transmutation of elements. This is an indication of the splendors of the future stupendous expansion of knowledge.”

—note 194 to the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, p. 254

This very same religion assigns its most tortuous, cruel punishment to the crime of arson. Is not such a sign of respect for the power of fire a form of worship?

Today, we don’t think so much of fire, yet we, with our gas-fired power plants, furnaces, boiler rooms, and internal combustion engines, are every bit as dependent on combustion as our ancient forebears were—to say nothing of the other forms of fire. We are a civilization of fire worshipers, though our iconography has changed.

Green. Certainly, most observers would agree.

Yet when one considers what the green represents, one might not remain so certain. Green is the color of photosynthesis. It is therefore the color of the conversion of light energy to chemical potential energy—stored energy.

Fire Poppy: only appears immediately after a fire.

Isn’t life better seen as the active changes in things, rather than the potential for those things to change? What life would there be if nothing ever actually changed?

Life itself is in the consumption of the potential—the combustion of the products of photosynthesis. The actual life is in the burning, that is, the respiration.

A fire seems alive. It respires just as we do, needing the same oxygen and exhaling the same carbon dioxide. it is that same phenomenon—combustion, in the form of cellular respiration, that gives us life as aerobic creatures.

Not to take anything away from water or carbon, which to some extent all life seems to require; it’s specifically combustion that gives us life. Of course fire is a universal phenomenon of which combustion is but one example. Ultimately, it is fire that gives us the building blocks of life—elements such as oxygen and carbon; but for now let us stick with combustion.

Spontaneous combustion: It happens all the time.

The food that we consume is used to feed the internal combustion engine within us, just as a campfire consumes wood; just as a car’s internal combustion engine consumes petroleum. Like the life that we know, the fire grows as it consumes, and as it grows, it travels. Not only does an individual fire grow; some even bear children: they spit out fire children that rise on the parents’ convective currents and fly outward to begin lives of their own.

Perhaps you have seen a fire sleep, mimicking the stars in the sky with its constellations of red coals. Or maybe you’ve watched the mesmerizing dance of a fire. Maybe you listened to its crackling song while it danced. Was it a song, or was that the sound of its infernal molars crushing its food? Did you hear it breathe? It breathes in and it breathes out.

Have you ever suffocated a fire? Funny how that can seem a little like a killing.

Georgie (snapshots.parade.com)

This is a continuation of a thread on dogs.

Zoroastrian funerary rituals appear to indicate that ancient Iranians believed that dogs had a unique power to discern whether the life had departed from a body.

What follows next is known as the dog-sight (sagdid) ceremony. A dog, generally a “four-eyed” dog (a dog with two eye-like spots just above the eyes), is presented so that it gazes at the corpse. Although various reasons are assigned to this ceremony, the purpose in ancient times was to ascertain whether or not life was altogether extinct.

Solomon Alexander Nigosian, The Zoroastrian Faith

It may be due to this high regard for the perceptiveness of dogs, and not merely the loyalty and utility of dogs, that lead ancient Iranians to treat the corpses of dogs with the same care that they treated human corpses.

Not only did ancient Iranians believe that dogs could alone tell whether a human was truly deceased, they also believed that dogs guarded the bridge to heaven. They may have even believed that these dogs guided souls across that bridge into heaven.

In line with this, dog breeding is a religious matter in Zoroastrianism, and canine pregnancy is treated quite seriously:

It lies with the faithful to look in the same way after every pregnant female, either two-footed or four-footed, two-footed woman or four-footed bitch.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

The Vendidad establishes that people have a moral obligation to care for pregnant strays and the pups of strays. The book lays out—in detail—how to determine who is responsible for a pregnant stray. And upon whomever the responsibility lies, negligence is murder:

If he shall not support her, so that the whelps come to grief, for want of proper support, he shall pay for it the penalty for wilful murder.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Rough treatment of pregnant dogs is a punishable offense:

It is the third of these sins when a man smites a bitch big with young or affrights her by running after her, or shouting or clapping with the hands; If the bitch fall into a hole, or a well, or a precipice, or a river, or a canal, she may come to grief thereby; if she come to grief thereby, the man who has done the deed becomes a Peshotanu (deserving of two hundred strokes or a proportional fine).

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Similar penalties are established for abuse of dogs in general:

It is the second of these sins when a man gives bones too hard or food too hot to a shepherd’s dog or to a house-dog; If the bones stick in the dog’s teeth or stop in his throat; or if the food too hot burn his mouth or his tongue, he may come to grief thereby; if he come to grief thereby, the man who has done the deed becomes a Peshotanu. He who gives too hot food to a dog so as to burn his throat is margarzan (guilty of death); he who gives bones to a dog so as to tear his throat is margarzan.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Unfortunately, the attitude toward dogs in modern Iran is quite the opposite.

Another means of distressing Zoroastrians was to torment dogs. Primitive Islam knew nothing of the now pervasive Muslim hostility to the dog as an unclean animal, and this, it seems, was deliberately fostered in Iran because of the remarkable Zoroastrian respect for dogs.

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians, pg. 158

Nevada Fall, Merced River

Throughout the lowlands singers sing
of your deep, feminine soul;
How reclining, you roll down your bed
amidst your veils and embankments;
They marvel at your fluent, accommodating ways,
how you slip through the world,
flowing around every obstacle,
rounding every edge, and
polishing every turn.

You compel us, it is true, down to where you lie.
Your eyes are limpid pools—it is true what they say,
and it is rumored far and wide that you mirror
the soul.

But the footing is treacherous around you. Your tender loam
gives way beneath our fingers and toes,
but your glistening bones are more hazard still.

It is true what men say, but I know you better yet.
I know you,
murderer.

The bones of old trees and bush
lie tangled in your arms.
I see your work.

Yesterday you might have been
merely a pool, and another, and another;
hung upon a sparkling, trickling necklace
virtually breathless and still
patient, accommodating
womb of a myriad, humming
vampires;
Algae multiplying,
colonizing your thickening blood.
The next day, you might be only lichen and bone.
Dry, white, crumbling bone, anchored deep within the earth—
or deeper still.
But now—
Now!

You gallop across mountains and vandalize
the sleepy canyons, tearing away the flesh and
leaving more bone drying in the sun,
your locomotive snarl,
your hissing, boulder-cracking roar!
Undulating waves, rolling and smacking,
sucking in air, mist storms exhaling!

Water the tyrant.
Water the destroyer—butcher, leveler,
Fury: skull-smashing and bone-snapping—sinew twisting;
Too murderously quick for suffocation; utterly

ruinous and
Beautiful kiss me.

This early account of the rerouting of a short segment of the Hockett Trail appears to corroborate my understanding that the Hockett Trail followed the same route that Horseshoe Meadows Road follows today, only with shorter switchbacks:

From Round Valley down to where it leaves the Little Cottonwood the old Hockett Trail is almost untraveled. The shorter route now in use leaves the valley at the lower end, drops over the Big Cottonwood, descends this past an old sawmill, and crosses to the Little Cottonwood, which it reaches about fifty yards below where it rejoins the old trail, at the foot of the Devil’s Ladder.

E. B. C., Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. III., No. 2, May 1990

For anyone who’s driven Horseshoe Meadows Road, names like “Devil’s Ladder” should come as no surprise. I’m guessing that this Devil’s Ladder is the name that was given to the eastbound ascent out of the Cottonwood Creek watershed to what is now called “Walt’s Point”, atop the grand descent down “Hockett Hill.”

The following demonstrates that, contrary to what appears to be a common understanding, the Hockett Trail did not cross the Great Western Divide at Coyote Pass:

Another trail in recent use is between Mineral King and the Big Kern, via Coyote (or Quinn’s ) Pass. I think they are the same. From the east it starts at the soda spring and keeps north of Coyote Creek up to the meadows. From the west it leaves the Hockett Trail, perhaps two miles south of Farewell Gap, and is indicated by a signboard—”Poison Meadow Trail.” According to the signs, the “Hockett Trail” leads to Mineral King, and the trail to Hockett Meadows is the “Hockett Meadow Trail.”

E. B. C., Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. III., No. 2, May 1990

A lapis lazuli pack train above the River Kokcha.

As early as five thousand years ago, the Pharaohs of Egypt traded for the precious, bespangled lapis lazuli that is still mined from the mountains that are still being excavated by the River Kokcha.

It is the River Kokcha that defines, more than any other stream, the natural boundary between the Pamir and the Hindu Kush. Because of this strategic significance of the river, it must have competed with Khyber Pass for traffic between ancient India and Bactria. This is corroborated by Franz Grenet, who draws clues from the Avesta that indicate that the River Kokcha may have been the major route between Bactria and India at one time. The Avestan pattern Ragha-Chakhra-Varena-Hapta Hendu appears to draw a course from the Panj (Oxus) to India by way of Chitral, Pakistan.

Grenet also suggests that the prophet Zoroaster may have been born and raised at a bend on this river. Alexander the Great would later found his city Alexandria on the Oxus at the mouth of the Kokcha, after he crossed into Bactria from India, likely by way of Dorah Pass, at the headwaters of the very same river, at the junction of the Hindu Kush and the Pamir massif, the “Roof of the World.”

Long after Zarathustra and Alexander, Marco Polo claimed to have traveled along this same river, seeing the fabled lapis lazuli mines, on his way to China:

From Hormuz to Kerman, passing Herat, Balkh, they arrived Badakhshan, where Marco Polo convalesced from an illness and stayed there for a year. On the move again, they found themselves on “the highest place in the world, the Pamirs”, with its name appeared in the history for the first time.

Marco Polo and His Travels

Even today, the majority of Afghans are Iranians. The Tajiks, who speak Persian, are about as Iranian as anybody—”Tajik” is just another word for “Iranian”. Though Uzbeks have ruled and settled the area from time to time, the Kokcha River region is primarily Tajik country. The land immediately across the passes at that boundary between the Pamir and Hindu Kush is called Kafiristan, which may translate, curiously enough, to “Land of the Infidels”. This is a subject of some dispute. It would seem to be apropos, given the great religious divides that must have existed between East and West back into the depths of human prehistory, but perhaps more important than the divisive aspect of these geo-religious differences might be the the enlightening aspect of cultural cross-pollination between early Hindus, Zoroastrians, Greeks, and Buddhists over so many centuries.