Winter Wheat in Goshen - Phil Hawkins

As summer ages, the mood of the Sink relaxes into an easy, gradual decline. The sun’s reign lasts through October, but his manner grows less tyrannical with age. The autumn air is loaded with the exhaust of the year, like thousands of smoky autumns before—the smoke of Indian burns and lightning fires.

A warm, mild rain fell at the close of October and washed the smoke out of the air, if only for a moment. Sam looked out through the living room window that first morning, collected his lunch sack, bade Buck a good day, and walked through the front door, inhaling the alien mix of wet dust and hydrated airborne compounds. It was foreign, and it was invigorating to fully breathe again.

Broad and shallow puddles of water and oils appeared everywhere, scattered about on roadsides and wheel ruts, as Sam stepped off over the strangely dark, soft, and moist earth. As he passed a plowed field, he sensed something off to the east. He turned reflexively to see whether something was watching him, and caught sight of a distant, narrow, white banner that stretched across the East, above and beyond the canopy of an orchard beyond the field. It was as though he’d never seen that broad, white crown before. Perhaps he hadn’t. Like a great phantom of ice and stone, it had been all but nonexistent before, and suddenly it appeared, vivid, white, and silent, hovering over the heretofore limitless plain.

The Range was suddenly so massive and vivid to Sam that it seemed to him that he could walk there and get back in time for lunch.

Throughout much of California, that first autumn rain is the first sign of spring, and a little while later, the winter solstice is accompanied by a burst of new green growth. So it is that the old Pagan festivals of autumnal rebirth are nowhere more appropriate than in California. In the Sink, even as the world is reborn, the cool mountain air slides off the Range, and the people of the Sink watch their breath turn to fog, like the white steam of dragon breath that fills the valleys.

Tule fog is a true winter white-out that sometimes lasts weeks without admitting any view of the sky, but in the Sink winter is wrapped within spring, for spring progresses even under the bone-chilling fog. There is no dead season there. Rain and fog nurse the seedlings of early winter, and as the white breath of the dragon burns off in the month of Mihr, fields bloom with color. It is all consummated long before the equinox that elsewhere marks the break of spring.

Continue …

wherein the whole world is not consumed in flame.

Pliny, Natural History

The dry breath of the Mojave blew tumbleweeds, ravens, voices, and parcels of waste across the plain. A yellow mongrel inspected scents from shrub to shrub, aimless as the dust devils that whirled and vanished around him, to a rusting electric stove that lay on its side, oven door ajar. Something had been there.

I’d be safe and warm if I was in LA.

Nearby, another creature stood under a black baseball cap, his green eyes squinting against the wind, dust, and ebbing sun. He was the dog’s master, a scent-blind primate who lived among the colors of the rainbow. An orange leash lay slung around his neck like a scarf.

I got down on my knees, and I pretend to pray.

A white wire wound out of his ear and through his sandy blonde hair, down into a black transistor radio in his right hand.

The boy’s thumb turned the tuning wheel as the sun was eclipsed by an unemployed utility pole—or was it the mast of some stray longship that sank into the desert sand at the ebb of a great flood, or the gallows for some forgotten messiah?

The dead do live long in the desert, in the sheltering shadow of the Range. The boy had not yet been trained to bury them.

The Mamas and the Papas dreamed California into his oblivious ear while he waited for the L.A. Dodgers broadcast to begin. The Dodgers were scheduled to play against the New York Mets and their centerfielder, Willie Mays. Number 24 was no longer wearing the black cap of the San Francisco Giants, but that made no difference to the boy.

The arid openness of Antelope Valley engulfed him. The face of the earth was a dehydrated, hexagonal mosaic of desert tile and isles of creosote and tumbleweed. He circled the ruin, holding it at a safe distance, stepping carefully from tile to tile.

He stopped. His eyes found his dog as it inspected a solitary brick chimney. There was no other trace of a house. Had the desert wind blown it away board by board or fed some fire that consumed it? Had anyone been there to watch it disappear? Did it happen a year ago or a century ago? Did anyone ever notice that it was gone? The questions circled around on the desert wind and the hours blew by. The sun dipped down toward the tail of the Range.

The Range. The Spaniards named it Sierra Nevada, literally “snowy saw blade.” It must have reminded them of that lesser sierra nevada down in Andalusia. But this blade of California is more than serration and snow: it is a granite dam that extends along much of the length of Alta California, squeezing the moisture out of the Pacific air. As the water cuts the gold out of the rapidly rising rock, the lands downwind are robbed of their share of life—without prompting any outcry for justice or compensation. The desert seems resigned enough to its fate.

The boy turned around, yelled “come on, Seemo,” and headed for home. The dog pricked up his ears, popped up his head amid the creosote, and followed his leader toward a distant patch of eucalyptus green.

Continue …

Big Meadow: the damage, November 2011.

I brought the kids along this time. They insisted, hoping to make snowballs, and besides, they do keep the angels at bay.

I wanted to see Foresta, to see how the neighborhood had recovered from the A-Rock firestorm. I expected to find the great scar concealed under two decades of brush and young pines, but I found an open wound instead. I inquired into it at the visitor center and was told that a year or so back a 90-acre controlled burn broke free and devoured over 7,400 acres at the heart of the scar. Now the A-Rock generation of growth around Foresta is mostly gone. A new generation is in its infancy before us, and I feel a pang of resentment. I expected to watch the children of A-Rock mature as I grew old, but—ah, well.

I’m taking in one more look across Big Meadow and Foresta before we drive back to the city. The kids are waiting in the car.

A fire that seemed like the very final word on creation is itself slipping into oblivion—like the dissipating heat of last summer’s love. Some few will remember it, but even they won’t remember it like we will, eh, Sam?

“Sam,” I hear myself say.

“Have you seen her lately?”

The kids are getting restless.

El Portal, California
Mehekan Aramazd, 4503
February 21, 2011

Continue …

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 …

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.

Tulare County Sheriff SAR Jeep

I pulled into the part of the dirt lot reserved for foot-bound travelers and parked, only to be directed by a Sheriff’s deputy to another spot, to make room for the SAR (search and rescue) workers expected to arrive soon. There was already quite a showing of force: a trailer, a jeep, a couple ATVs, and several other vehicles. Word had it that a man who had been suffering from seizures was lost on the nearby slopes.

About 15 minutes down the trail, I realized that I’d left my wilderness and fire permits in the car. That seemed rather ironic, after having driven four hours to get to the ranger station just before closing time, only to leave the permits in the car. Oh well. Never fails. I always forget something. I decided to take my chances with the rangerfolk, rather than add 30 minutes to my evening hike.

I few minutes later, I encountered a group of cattle, who spooked with no more than a mutual glance, and kicked up a cloud of dust in their panic.

I bounded down the 1900 foot descent, past Jerky Meadow and Jug Spring (a watering hole for animals and the desperate), and arrived at the Little Kern horse bridge just after 8pm, with an hour of dusk to spare. I suffered from a typical spell of outback anxiety along the way, which means I missed my wife and kids terribly and felt guilty about being so selfish as to take this time to myself. Perhaps the evening shadows settling over the mountainside were affecting me. There is something ominous about the onset of nightfall when one has not reached one’s destination, though the night itself can seem quite comforting. Almost predictably, the anxiety disappeared as I settled in for the night.

The bridge over the Little Kern. Note the granite and basalt layers.

Two of the three campsites were occupied by SAR folk, so my choice was easy. I filtered some river water, had some trail mix for dinner, and unrolled my sleeping bag. I enjoyed the warm light of the fire at the camp across the river, laid back, and watched the stars appear one by one.

Antares—the heart of the Scorpion—flared red, like a campfire in the sky, not so remote as the astronomers calculate. I spotted a falling star, and watched a dim, red satellite make its way around and around the planet, first past Lyra toward the pole, then past Cygnus a little while later. Jupiter peeked through the ridgetop trees across the river. The full moon didn’t rise over the tail of the Great Western Divide until I had fallen asleep. I would waken occasionally, as see the Moon chasing Jupiter from west to east.

A full moon can be useful if one needs to get around camp without a light, or if one needs to travel by night, but it can disturb one’s sleep, rather like leaving the bedroom light on, and a moonless sky is certainly preferred by the stars.

Continue to Saturday

I’ve been looking for sister ranges of the Sierra Nevada; that is, other igneous ranges. What this means is that I’m looking for well-forested mountain ranges in Mediterranean climes. This generally means high mountain ranges, because altitude generally means two things: (1) orographic precipitation for production and (2) orographic lightning for combustion.

You’d think that the Andes where they cross the Zona Central of Chile would be an ideal example, but the Andes are rather sparsely forested in the northern half of the Zona Central, perhaps because the Andes are too lofty to the north for extensive forestation. South of here, in the Maule district (VII) and even more in the Biobio North district (VIII), there is more forest, but there is also more precipitation. Rain is in fact so common that it’s hard to call the climate Mediterranean. There is really no time of year that is truly dry in the southern half of the Zona Central; not, at least, as dry as most of California is in Summer.

There aren’t very many other choices, as far as I am aware. There are many lower Mediterranean ranges, and several high ranges near to Mediterranean climes, but not many high ranges are in Mediterranean climates.

The only others I know of are in Iran: the Alborz, Zagros, and Sabalan mountains. None of these is heavily forested, but in the case of Iran we can be quite confident that they were once more forested than they are today.

At present, though, I can think of no mountain range in the world that shares with the Sierra Nevada this Mediterranean annual cycle of production and combustion at a comparable scale.

An enumeration of the elements of California might proceed as follows:

1. The San Andreas Fault
2. The California Current
3. The Sierra Nevada
4. The Central Valley
5. Redwood Forests

The San Andreas Fault

The Pacific and North American Plates, two of the world’s largest, collide from the Gulf of California to Shelter Cove, just south of Cape Mendocino, California. This collision, roughly delineated by the San Andreas Fault, is what put the place we call California on the map.

The California Current

California is probably best known for its climate, a phenomenon which owes no small sum to the fact that California is a collision between continental and oceanic plates, with two particular circumstances:

1. The collision has a north-south orientation, with cool ocean currents flowing from the north.
2. The collision occurs across a broad spectrum of tropical, subtropical, and temperate latitudes, from 23 to 40 degrees north.

All this adds up to a mild, sunny climate. Add to that an occasional quake to keep everybody on their toes, and you have the California of the Padres.

The Sierra Nevada

Another California was born in 1848, not of sunshine and mild weather, but of greed. That rebirth was initiated and sustained by four gifts of the Sierra Nevada:

1. gold
2. water
3. soil
4. beauty and recreation

The massive Sierra Nevada traps large volumes of atmospheric moisture, leaving the lands to the east dry. It being a large mountain block, much of that moisture is stored as snow and ice, meaning that the moisture is released when it is needed most, during the warm, dry springs and summers. As that moisture is released, it carries with it the sediments that become the soils of the great Central Valley.

As lady luck would have it, a smattering of that sediment is gold. It was the glitter of gold in Sierra streams that set the tone for the future of California and America, just as that glitter brought the world to California before her greatest riches were discovered. Beyond the extravagance of gold and the practical benefit of water and soil, we must not forget the beauty and recreational value of Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, the High Sierra, and the Giant Sequoia (more on that to come).

The Central Valley

Without Sierra Nevada sediments, much of the Central Valley might be known today as the Central Sea, like the Sea of Cortes (the Gulf of California) to the south, but the Sierra Nevada does not entirely account for the Central land form of California, be it land or sea, and there are other mountains that feed the Central Valley. The Sacramento River is proof of that. The Sacramento River is fed by the southern end of the Cascade Range on east, and the Trinity Mountains and other ranges on the west.

Redwood Forests

“From the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me.” — Woodie Guthrie

Another natural resource that plays a central role in the California myth is the California redwood tree, which lives along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Coast, from Big Sur the far southern Oregon.

Where is California?

Having taken all these elements of California into account, a natural eastern boundary of California can be seen to proceed along the following features:

1. The east coast of Baja California.
2. The Colorado River.
3. The crest of the Chocolate Mountains (just east of the San Andreas Fault).
4. The crest of the Little San Bernardino Mountains.
5. The crest of the San Bernardino Mountains.
6. The crest of the San Gabriel Mountains.
7. The crest of the Tehachapi Mountains.
8. The eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada.
9. The eastern edge of the Cascade Range. The boundary continues northward here to include the watershed of the Sacramento Valley.
10. The crest of the Siskiyou Mountains.
11. The northern boundary of the Smith River watershed. This is the approximate northern boundary of the region called “the Redwood Empire”.

From Cabo San Lucas to Cape Mendocino, California is characterized by a system of strike-slip faults between the Pacific and North American plates, but California is more than a mere side-swipe; it is a collision, and this intercontinental collision involves—like so many others—one continent wedging under the other. In this head-on component of the collision vector is born the Sierra Nevada.

The uplift of the Sierra Nevada has not been gentle. It was associated with one of the most powerful earthquakes in California history, the Great Lone Pine Earthquake. It has also been associated with one of the most fantastic volcanic events known to science: the Long Valley supervolcano.