Big Waves in Southern California: the Backwash...

A follow-up to my previous post about the huge waves that struck the Southern California coast last week. I was privileged to see some of the intense wave action at Balboa and Newport, and it was a sight. Some of the waves looked like they were reaching the height of the pier, and surfers were delighted. Unfortunately, conditions were very bad for casual swimmers with radio reports of at least 200 rescues, and one person was killed when he got caught between the waves and the boulders of a jetty. Where did these unusually large waves come from?

Waves result from the application of energy to the water in some way. On rare occasions the energy is supplied by an earthquake or volcanic eruption, and disasterous tsunamis (incorrectly called tidal waves) are the result (update: you can read more about tsunamis in this new post).

Most of the time waves are generated by wind blowing across the surface of the water. We are all familiar with ripples resulting from a light breeze, and it may be hard to imagine wind producing 20 foot monster surf, but when the wind is blowing hard, and over a distance of many miles, that is exactly what happens. We know from movies and "Deadliest Catch" (and for some, from personal experience) that waves in the middle of storms are violent, large and unpredictable. The waves are capable of swamping and sinking boats and ships. But what about when the storm is past? Shouldn't the sea calm down, and the waves disappear?

Sort of. They disappear because the storm is dissipating, but waves are a form of energy transfer, and the energy is not stored. It has to move. The longer the wind blows and pummels the surface of the sea, the more the energy builds up and it starts to emanate outwards, sort of like ripples in a pond (well, exactly like that). The thing is, waves are not exactly physical objects. The swells are moving, but the water is staying in place, rising and falling in a circular pattern.

Winter storms generally produce the biggest waves along the California coastline. When I lived in Santa Barbara, the summer swimming was usually no more turbulent than a swimming pool full of kids. But when the big storms started to blow out of the Bay of Alaska, the surf got intense. I lived a third of a mile from the seacliffs, and some nights I could feel the force of the waves impacted the rocks.

So, why doesn't anyone surf in the open sea? That would be because the waves in the open sea are in the form of swells, which don't break or roll, they just simply pass by. The turbulence of the water extends to the depth of about half the wavelength (the distance between the crests of the swells). They are the cause of sea-sickness, though. It isn't until the waves hit the shallow coastlines that things change, and that is the whole dynamic of what happened in California this week.

When swells encounter shallow water the energy is compressed into a smaller space. Friction slows the forward movement of the base of the swell, but the top of the swell continues forward unimpeded and begins to stack up, very steeply on the side of the wave facing the beach. The water finally spills over, forming the breaker, and sending a pulse of water upwards onto the beach itself. What's different now is that the water is physically moving forward with great force, and the energy is expended against the cliffs, the sand, or the bodies of the surfers who have wiped out. The precise amount of energy is determined by many things, including the shape of the coastline, the orientation of the coastline, the arrangement of offshore islands, and the distribution of shoals beneath the surface.

So it was that a typhoon in the south Pacific Ocean around Tahiti generated swells two weeks ago that traveled thousands of miles across the ocean basin in a predictable pattern and speed. Their arrival in southern California was foretold and warnings went out to safety authorities. The red flags went up on the beaches, the surfers appeared out of nowhere, and the giant waves started to pound certain south-facing beaches. For a few people it was a nightmare and a tragedy, but for most it was a great spectacle (and one geo-blogger put up a couple of pics of the waves and saw his readership quadruple this week...thanks for the visits!).

The View of Japan's 8.9 Earthquake from Modesto, California

First off, I am sorry for the quality of the photographs. We have a seismometer, yes, but it is a simple teaching model, and the computer program is something like 15 years old (and has never been updated), so the system barely works at all. But it was working well enough to record the shaking of the ground in Modesto, California for several hours after the 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Sendai, Japan. The quake, if the 8.9 magnitude estimate remains unchanged, is the 5th largest ever recorded (I'm hearing that it might be upgraded to 9.0 or 9.1). It has killed hundreds and unleashed a horrific tsunami that has spread across the Pacific Ocean basin, causing damage even in Crescent City and Santa Cruz, California. The simple pendulum-based seismometer records ground motions in my geology laboratory on the campus of Modesto Junior College.

The first photo (above) shows the onset of the waves from the quake. Earthquakes produce a series of different waves which move in different ways, and at different velocities. The first waves arrived in Modesto at 9:58 PM local time, about 12 minutes after the quake began shaking about 80 miles offshore of Sendai, Japan (that is if the computer clock is right, not a safe assumption actually). These are Primary Waves, compressional waves that are analogous to sound waves. Obviously they travel faster than the other waves. They are an example of body waves, those which travel through the earth, not just on the surface. The second set of waves that would have arrived were Secondary Waves, a slower set of body waves that are generated by shearing motions. The closest analogy I can think of is a whipping motion, like that of shaking a stretched "slinky" up and down (this is the demonstration I use in classes). The record on the seismograph doesn't allow me to pinpoint the S-wave arrival.

A third group of waves arrive several minutes later. These are surface waves, and as their name suggests, they don't pass through the earth, they travel at the surface. One type of surface wave is analogous to ripples on a pond after a pebble has been tossed in. The surface of the water rises and falls, but fish in the water do not bob up and down. They are unaffected by the passage of the ripples. A second form of surface wave shakes side to side rather than up and down. Surface waves have a lot to do with the damage caused by earthquakes, given the way that energy is concentrated at the surface, and the distortions of the ground caused by the waves. Surface waves continued to be recorded at Modesto Junior College for hours after the quake (as well as reflecting and refracting body waves). In the picture above, 26 minutes had elapsed, and the monitor was off the scale for minutes at a time.

The seismometer is automatically set to record a two hour time period after being tripped, and at the end of two hours, the waves were still immense (above). They probably continued for three or four hours. It's important to realize that the earthquake didn't last this long. From what I've read, the shaking went on for around three minutes at Sendai, Japan (and that was more than enough to cause terrible damage). If the peal of a bell is an earthquake, the waves being recorded at Modesto are the reverberations of the bell. They waves travel back and forth around the planet for many, many hours. The refraction and reflection of these many waves provide seismologists with a picture of the Earth's interior.

A note about the magnitude scale: it is open-ended scale that originally measured the size of the biggest wave to determine if a quake was big, medium or small. It is not a 1-10 scale as is often stated in the media, although rocks can only store enough seismic energy to produce about a magnitude 9.5 event. A giant asteroid impact could produce a much larger event, well beyond a ten. The media often report that a rise of one magnitude represents a quake that is 10 times larger, but this is not exactly accurate. For smaller quakes, the increase of 10 times represents a 10-fold increase in the size of the waves. The waves of quakes at around magnitude 6.5 don't get higher, though, so the magnitude scale loses meaning.

Quakes obviously get bigger, though. The total energy of a quake increases by a factor of just over 30 times per magnitude number. Thus, a magnitude 7.0 like the one that devastated Haiti last year was 1/30th the size of a magnitude 8 quake, and roughly 1/1,000th the size of the Sendai quake. The horrible death toll of the Haiti quake (despite the smaller energy release) was the result of many other factors, such as the shallow nature of the quake, and the location of the focus directly underneath an urban area. The Sendai quake was 80 miles offshore of Japan.

I am almost always disapointed in the commentary of news readers on the cable networks. A few minutes of education would make a world of difference during fast moving events like the Sendai quake. Wikipedia has a reasonably good description of how magnitude is measured. And by the way, I am not the world's greatest authority on seismology, and I am open to correction if I got some of this wrong! That's what the comments section is for...

Postscript: Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment has a list of the geoblogosphere's response to the Japan earthquake here.

Update: Both the USGS and Japanese geologists have upgraded the magnitude of the quake to 9.0, making it the 4th largest ever recorded.

Big Waves in Southern California

I'm in Southern California on a mini-vacation with the family, and the big news this week is the giant waves pounding the coast. A big typhoon in the southern Pacific (I think I heard Tahiti mentioned) is producing the energy that is generating 10 foot + waves. We were on the Newport Pier watching some monsters pound the beach at the Balboa Pier, seen in the background in these pictures. I'm astounded that so many people were in the water in these conditions. Red flags were up everywhere, and the lifeguards were probably having a nasty day.

The waves were not as violent beneath us on the Newport Pier. I think the wave energy is being funneled by the shape of the shoals just offshore, and their height is being accentuated by the backwash of water flowing off the beach, but still it was an impressive display of wave energy during a time of year when waves are usually quite gentle.

(Check my latest post for a more extensive discussion of why these waves happened)

The Other California: Baymouth Bars - It's 5 O'clock Somewhere?

It's Friday, the end a long week! I'm home from a four day exploration of the California's North Coast country, and it was...uh...academically stimulating? Uh, a teacher's exploration dream? Er...a wonderful excuse to escape the heat in California's Central Valley? Yeah, that's it. We have to be honest here. But that doesn't mean I wasn't paying attention.

I haven't been up in the Crescent City - Eureka area all that much, and I am delighted to discover something new every time we pass through the region. Today I am offering pictures of some of the finest baymouth bars I've seen in California. Coming around a corner of Highway 101, one is struck by a line of sand so long and so straight that it almost seems artificial, but it most certainly is not. It is the baymouth bar enclosing Big Lagoon, a fresh-to-brackish body of water separated from the Pacific Ocean by a three-mile-long strip of sand that is no more than a few hundred feet wide. This lagoon and several others are protected in Humboldt Lagoons State Park.

One might wonder how a strip of sand can survive the constant battering by the powerful waves that constantly rip away at the coast, but it is actually those very waves that bring out the creation of the bars. Waves expend the full brunt of their energy against headlands, but the energy is dissipated as waves enter into coves and harbors (which is, of course, why boats shelter in coves). Sand is carried along the beach by longshore transport, where waves wash up the beach front at an angle, but flow directly back into the water. When sand along an uneven coast encounters one of these bays, the loss of wave energy causes a spit (a long thin sandbar) to develop.

If there are no large rivers flowing into the bay, the spit will eventually reach all the way across the bay opening, forming the baymouth bar. The water behind these bars is fresh or brackish, and seeps out through the sand bar. It is only when there are flooding events or particularly violent waves that the bar is breached, and a portion of the lagoon pours into the sea. These are important ecological moments because the lagoon may have numerous salmon fingerlings and juveniles just waiting for a chance to get to the open sea.

I was trying to find a spot to get a good shot of the Big Lagoon, and we discovered a nice little county park at the south end of the bar. County parks sometimes have less than altruistic reasons for existence, and I suspect that might be the case here. Yes, there is a wonderful long beach with tables and a small boat ramp and all, but you may notice there is also a paved road that quite literally dead-ends at the top of the seacliff. The fury of the waves in this part of California exacts a heavy toll on beachfront property, and I can't be sure, but there very well could have once been houses here. Cliff retreat has to be considered in landscape planning, and a nice beautiful park fits the bill when housing developments would probably fall into the sea.

Still, if you are a southern Californian or Floridian, it might seem strange to see a vast beach with barely a dozen beachgoers. True, it's not as sunny, but this is the way I like my beaches!

The picture above is Stone Lagoon, another of the lagoons in the state park.

A Google Earth shot shows Big Lagoon from above, if you had trouble visualizing what a baymouth bar like.

The Other California is my continuing series of articles describing geologically interesting places in our wonderful state that somehow miss showing up on the postcards. Check them out!

Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: A Geologist Walks Onto a Bar in Cascadia...

A very strange-looking sandbar at Big Lagoon in Humboldt Lagoons State Park on California's north coast.

A geologist walks INTO a bar. She may get hammered, vulcanized, laminated, stoned, cemented, bombed, or petrified. And all her drinks will be on the rocks...

But when that geologist walks ONTO a bar, she just gets sand on her feet.

Yeah, yeah, I know, shut up and stick with the science...

We're traveling north on a journey through the Cascadia Subduction Zone, exploring this unique region with an eye to the geology, and the beauty, of the region. We've explored the Redwood forests of the Eel River, and the Lost Coast where the Cascadia zone begins. Today we are looking at a unique state park along the coast north of Eureka, California, and south of Crescent City. It's called the Humboldt Lagoons State Park, and the three lagoons found there are bounded by stunning examples of baymouth bars.

Big Lagoon at Humboldt Lagoons State Park (source: Google Earth)

One of the reasons that the already infamous Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake might not be as bad as it could be is that so few people actually live on the coast of Washington, Oregon, or Northern California. Why is this? If one looks at a map, one notes the paucity of flat lands along the coast. There are sometimes some coastal terraces and a number of small natural harbors, but for most of the distance between Vancouver Island and Cape Mendocino, the mountains rise from the sea. There's no place to build. That's not to minimize the tragedy. There will be horrible results, but the largest cities like Seattle and Portland are inland, behind the coastal ranges, and they will be spared the worst of the tsunami damage, if not the shaking. There are certainly a number of towns along the coast, but there are also long stretches with few people. One of the lightly populated stretches of coast is between Eureka and Crescent City.

Big Lagoon at Humboldt Lagoons State Park

Along Cascadia's mountainous coast, wave action is violent and constant, and cliffs are quickly worn back, forming a relatively straight coastline. But there are also a number of drowned river valleys and coves, many caused by the rise of sea level after the last ice age. There are four small examples of these valleys at Humboldt Lagoons (one of which was filled in to allow some farming). But the coastline is very straight. Why?

Intense rainfall sends sediments down the many rivers and streams, and vast amounts are added to the coastal waters. When waves encounter the coast at an angle, the swash and backwash of the water causes sediment to be transported along the coast, a process called longshore drift. There is a tremendous amount of sediment in this coastal system.

Humboldt Lagoon also include a county park at the south end of Big Lagoon. It's a nice place to see coastal erosion!

When waves hit rocky coasts, they expend their energy wearing away at the rocks. When those same waves reach a cove of open water, the wave energy is dissipated as the waves spread out. When sand is being transported around the headland and into a cove, the declining energy causes the sand to settle into a curving sandbar, called a hooked spit. The spit may grow large enough to close off the mouth of the bay, becoming a baymouth bar.

In most bays along the Cascadia coast, rivers are large enough to keep the bays open, but at Humboldt Lagoons only small streams are present. Water can simply seep through the sandbar rather than flowing out. The bays are breached only during the wettest, most intense storms. The baymouth bars are miles long, and incredibly straight (see the Google Earth image above). They don't look natural, and yet they are.

Smaller Stone Lagoon is just north of Big Lagoon.

The lagoons are a fascinating spot along the north coast, and they get a bit less attention than Redwoods National Park and the state parks. They are an important link in the ecosystem of the region, and are marvelous spots for birdwatching and looking for other animals. If you ever travel that way, the state park (and associated county park) is well worth a visit.

The next stop on our vagabonding tour of the Cascadia Subduction Zone is Crescent City at the far north end of California. We'll have some things to learn about tsunamis in California.

Where the Sierra Nevada Rises From the Sea: A Compilation of Posts

The Sierra Nevada of California is one of the great mountain ranges of the world. The soaring granite peaks, the deep glacial valleys, and the towering Sequoia trees represent some of the most beautiful sights to be seen anywhere on the planet. What is less known is that a portion of the Sierra Nevada is present elsewhere in the state. Around 30 million years ago the San Andreas fault system became active and sliced off a portion of the southern Sierra Nevada batholith and carried it northwest for several hundred miles. It now makes up a considerable portion of the Central California coastline, stretching from Big Sur on the south to Bodega Bay on the north. It is in my humble opinion one of the most beautiful and dynamic coastlines to be found anywhere on planet Earth.

I recently finished my latest blog series, and I present here a compilation of the fifteen entries in the series. If you missed any, here is the place to find them!

  Seeking Geology Along the Most Beautiful Coast in the World

A sneak peak at the coming series. At this point I hadn't fully appreciated that I was going to be covering the entire Salinian Terrane, so I didn't mention the Sierra Nevada connection in the first post.

Where the Sierra Nevada Rises From the Sea: The Big Sur Coast

With the second post I hit upon the idea of the Sierra Nevada connection with my exploration of Limekiln State Park in the southern part of the Big Sur coast. It is a stunningly rugged stretch of coastal cliffs, and amazingly, the state of California almost shut down this beautiful place.

Geologic Change along the Big Sur Coastline: Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park

I punted on this one. I wrote this blog four months earlier about what may be the prettiest cove along the prettiest coast in the world. But the post fit well with the theme and scope of this series, so here it is: one of California's two tidal falls. And gigantic landslides.

Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park

A short distance inland from the coast we discover a gem of a state park, Pfeiffer Big Sur. The Sierra Nevada has the Sequoia trees, Big Sur has Coast Redwoods. And both the Sierra Nevada and Big Sur have huge wilderness areas. The wildlands around Big Sur are far less crowded.

Not the Easiest Beach to Find

Big Sur has some nice beaches, and not all of them are on the main highway. You have to be a bit of a sleuth to find Pfeiffer Beach, but it's worth the effort. And...garnet sand beaches!

The Granitic Rocks of Garrapata State Park

One of the lesser known beach parks of the central California coast, Garrapata is a beautiful place that belies its horrendous name ("tick" beach). It has some of the nicest exposures of "Sierran" granite in the region.

Sea Wolves and Underwater Yosemites

Point Lobos was named for the seals and sea lions, not for terrestrial canines. It is another gem along the coast with unique exposures of conglomerates that accumulated in deep underwater canyons that rival Yosemite in their depths.

A Quick Explore of the Monterey Peninsula

We finish our journey through Point Lobos and move north onto the Monterey Peninsular. Here it is trees that take up some of the geologic story. Monterey Pines grow naturally only in a few places, mainly on the Peninsula, but have become one of the most widely planted trees in the world. The Monterey Cypress is another unique species in the region.

Half Moon Bay

We take a look at coastline of totally different character as we reach the Half Moon Bay region. There are prominent marine terraces that make for gentle scenery (and apparently great golf courses). There are some nice tidepools in the area, and during the right time of year, the Mavericks hit, the gigantic waves that bring surfers from around the world.

Little Boxes on the Hillside, Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky: The Mess at Mussel Rock

The San Andreas fault looms large in the history of the Central California coastline, but hasn't made an appearance on our journey until now. At Mussel Rock in Daly City, the fault trace moves offshore. The epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco may have been close by. And there is a famous folk song about the cookie-cutter houses on the high, unstable slopes...

Some Call it the Golden Gate...

Maybe you haven't heard that there is a big bridge that connects the city of San Francisco with the Marin Headlands and the rest of Northern California. It's not likely, but it's possible. There is some interesting geology going on underneath the bridge abutments.

On the Most Inaccessible Mountain Range on the Planet: The Marin Headlands

The Marin Headlands expose rocks that were once part of the midocean ridge, the vast planet encircling mountain range that no mountain climber can ever hope to climb. The scenery on the Marin is majestic. And to invaders in World War II, the cliffs would have been deadly.

Point Reyes National Seashore

The Point Reyes Peninsula has wide sandy beaches, sand spits, a bay that may have been a landing for Sir Francis Drake, Tule Elk, and a lighthouse that has to put up with some really rotten weather.

Tomales Bay and Bolinas Lagoon

If the Point Reyes Peninsular bears the brunt of violent Pacific Storms, the mountains of the peninsula shelter the lands to the east. Two bays along the San Andreas fault are peaceful and serene, which belies their violent origin.

Birds and a Hole in the Head at Bodega

We wrap up our exploration of the Sierra that rises from the sea with a look at Bodega Head, the site of a classic horror movie, and a horror story with a nuclear reactor as the main character. A reactor that was almost built on top of the San Andreas fault. It's also the northernmost exposure of the Salinian/Sierra Nevada rocks.

Tso, can you Tsurf a Tsunami?

Hokusai's 1831 "Great Wave off Kanagawa" and a picture of the Hilo Pier in 1946. The man (who did not survive) was named Antone Aguiar. According to the story at the Tsunami Museum in Hilo, he cut the ship Brigham Victory free from the dock, allowing it to ride out the disaster. The picture is from the archives at NOAA.

There are two main kinds of waves, those that are produced by winds blowing over the ocean surface, the subject of the last two posts on the huge waves that struck Southern California last week, and those that are produced by massive disturbances of the ocean floor, either by earthquake, volcanic eruption, or landslides. These are tsunamis, often (incorrectly) called tidal waves (there are tidal waves of a sort, called tidal bores, but they cannot be mistaken for a tsunami).

After my adventures this summer, which included a grand tour of the Hawaiian Islands with two dozen of my students, and a mini-vacation in Southern California that coincided with the arrival of unusually large waves along the coast, I am writing a short blog series on the dynamics and geology of waves. Tsunamis have been on my mind, having seen perhaps hundreds of tsunami warning signs all over the coastal areas of Hawaii, and seeing, for the first time, tsunami warning signs in Southern California. I don't know when they started appearing (I suspect in 2004), but they certainly weren't there in the years when I was growing up in the southland.

I used to have a more difficult time teaching about tsunamis, but that changed in 2004 when the Indonesian Earthquake produced the tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed around 230,000 people. Because it hit tourist beaches, thousands of videos and photographs documented the event, and international media coverage was intense. Prior to that event there were not a great many photographs that documented what a tsunami could do, and the really tragic events, like those in 1946 and 1960 in Hawaii, had receded into ancient history for most people.

Wind-driven waves and tsunamis are very different. Waves travel as swells across the seas, with turbulent water extending only a short distance beneath the surface (about half the wavelength). They travel slowly, a few tens of miles per hour, so they can take a week to cross an ocean, as the Tahitian waves did on their way to California this last week. The energy of the wave is expended only in shallow water at the coast, as the waves build up and fall over as rolling breakers. The amount of energy in a storm or typhoon is immense, but the energy is transferred to the water over time, and is dissipated over a period of days and weeks.

A tsunami is generated in a moment, as an earthquake shifts the ocean floor, or a volcanic caldera collapses. Large landslides off of islands sometimes generate tsunamis as well. The disturbance affects the entire column of ocean water, from surface to seafloor, and all of the energy begins traveling very fast outwards from the point of the disturbance. Very fast. As in the speed of an airliner, around 500 miles per hour. In open water, they may pass without notice, as the wavecrests may be a hundred miles apart, and only rise and fall a few feet. Ships at sea are rarely affected by tsunamis.

At shorelines, the story is vastly different. The oncoming waves hit the shallows at a high rate of speed, and friction slows the forward motion, but the energy is still there and it must be expended. The water surface rises and surges forward, quickly inundated the low coastal areas to depths ranging from a few feet to more than a hundred in some of the most disastrous events. The first indication that something is amiss often is a sudden emptying of shallow bays and a drop in sea level lasting several minutes. The surge follows shortly after. Other times, the sea just suddenly surges forward without warning.

Even when warnings are given, people can make bad choices based on misinformation. They may evacuate as ordered, but may enter the devastated area after the first wave recedes, only to be swept away by the second or third wave they didn't know was coming. Of course the millions of people living along the shoreline of the Indian Ocean didn't even get the chance to make those kinds of mistakes in 2004. Since 1946 there has been a Pacific Ocean-wide warning system that has given people many hours notice that a tsunami was approaching. The poorer countries bordering the Indian Ocean have never had such a system, even though it was well known that tsunamis were a distinct possibility. A horrific injustice...

So, does California have to worry about tsunamis? The good news (sort of): we have big earthquakes on the San Andreas and other faults offshore, but they usually involve lateral motion that does not disturb the sea floor in such a way as to cause tsunamis. The bad news is that the northernmost coast of the state is close to the Cascadia Subduction Zone that is very much capable of producing huge tsunamis, and did in the year 1700. And of course as noted above, tsunamis can cross entire oceans, so large quakes in Mexico, South America, Alaska, Kamchatka, Japan, and all the other major seismic zones in the Pacific Rim can cause tsunamis that could reach the California coast. In 1964, the magnitude 9 Alaska quake produced a tsunami that killed a dozen people in Crescent City on the far north coast.

Southern California is perhaps a bit more protected because of the presence of the Channel Islands, which would tend to break up some of the wave energy. But major tsunamis coming out of the south and west have some potential of reaching parts of the coast. And thus, the tsunami warning signs that have appeared.

I don't advise surfing a tsunami...it's hard to avoid breaking the third-story windows of the building you will be mashing into....

One last comment: when I lived in Santa Barbara many years ago, there was a tsunami warning based on the major quake that had devastated parts of Mexico City in 1985. Of course, people evacuated and headed for high ground, right? Of course not. They went down to the beach to watch. Thank goodness the tsunami was a dud in that case.

Into the Great Unknown: We Run the Big Rapids, Sometimes in Rafts

The sun rose on day nine of our journey down the Colorado River, into the Great Unknown, as John Wesley Powell had called it. Powell and his men had a terrifying couple of days following their discovery of Bright Angel Creek. They had lost much of their equipment in boat accidents, and their food was running seriously short. The rapids kept their pace frustratingly slow because they simply couldn't afford another accident. They portaged whenever they could, and used their ropes to lower the boats through the worst rapids. And now they were finding some of the worst rapids they had seen, rapids that filled the canyon bottom, offering few places to portage. And the rapids were big, bigger than any they had seen on their 400 mile journey. And that's where we found ourselves on this beautiful morning, facing nearly a dozen major rapids in one day, including two class 8 rapids, and a class 10, the ultimate rating.

The technology of rafting has changed and boatmen have the advantage of accurate maps and descriptions, so the rapids aren't the terrifying experience they once were. Today's rafts are better designed for running rough waters, and even when they flip, usually little equipment is lost (there are exceptions of course; I suspect a disturbing amount of equipment sits among the rocks at the bottom of a few rapids).

But the dangers couldn't be ignored. Crystal Rapid especially is a killer; at least five people have died here since 1983, and ominously, they all were men aged 54 to 66 (just guess how old I am...). Since Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963, the river runs very cold, in the low 50 degree range, and ironically, hypothermia can kill on a day when the temperature is over 100. The sudden shock of cold water has given people heart attacks.

But those are the bad statistics, and more than half a million people have run the rapids without dying, making running the river no more dangerous than driving on a highway (oh, wait...). We looked forward to an exhilarating day.

We scouted each of the big three rapids. I took videos of the rapids while we scouted, but no one is on rafts yet. As my brother's GoPro videos get posted, I will link to them. The ones I've seen give a nice feel for what it is like running a rapid.


It's a funny thing...if the run through a rapid goes well, it's over with in a few seconds, and the mind doesn't really have a chance to develop a distinct memory of that specific rapid. I had a bit of trouble recalling particular rapids at the end of the day unless something crazy happened, and most of our runs went well. The run through the rapid begins by floating down the smooth tongue of water at the top, and choosing whether to go straight down the wave train, or to go left or right to avoid holes, pour-overs and eddies. Those in the front of the raft usually get a soaking, and it's not always obvious which waves will do the deed. They often pop up out of nowhere. Then things settle down, and I dig into the dry bag to pull my camera out and take a shot of the receding rapid. That's Granite Rapid below, a class 8 riffle that we hit just a mile downstream of camp.

Then we scouted Hermit Rapid, another class 8 that is often described as the best roller coaster on the river, with standing waves that can be 10 feet high.

The rapids were beginning to get really fun, and with a 9 and an 8 already under our belts, my confidence level was rising. As you may have noted in previous posts, I wasn't an adrenaline junkie who went on the trip for the wild rides. Frankly the big waves scared me (literally a phobia dating from my childhood). It was hard to stand on the shoreline and look at these waves, knowing that we would voluntarily go riding on them in a few moments!

Here's the video of Hermit Rapid:


It too went well (Maybe it went "too well"?). Splashy and cold, but it was a hot day, and the water felt great (in moderation).

We regrouped at the base of Hermit and moved on through Boucher Rapid (4) without incident.

Crystal Rapid lay just two miles downstream. The river, as always, was deceptively serene and the scenery was incredible. We were still floating through the deepest parts of the Granite Gorge, and every turn of the river revealed new vistas of the 1.7 billion year old rocks. At times we could see the Paleozoic sediments far above.

We passed a fascinating exposure of the metamorphic rocks with vertical fractures that reminded me of columnar jointing.

Boatman talk of Crystal Rapid in hushed tones (how's that for a cliche?). Until 1966, Crystal Rapid was barely a riffle, a class 1 or 2 rapid that hardly merited notice. Then an unprecedented cloudburst dumped around a foot of rain in the drainage above. A huge debris flow blocked the Colorado, forming a complicated rapid with a pinball-like maze of holes and whirlpools. What's worse is the length of the rough water. It might take only moments to pull someone out of the water in most other rapids, but there is no place for the other boats to station themselves until hundreds of yards downstream.

The end of the rapid is called the Rock Garden. It contains gigantic boulders that attract rafts, hoping to trap them for a few hours. That's it in the photo below.

So here is my video of the Crystal Rapid scout. Note especially the two huge standing waves at the top of the rapid.

I could hardly foreshadow things any more than I have, but I wandered down to the shoreline where the boatman were discussing the best route through the maelstrom. The picture below that I just happened to snap shows the problem spot at the beginning of the rapid. There's a huge (huge) hole in the main channel, and a problem rock on the right. The raft needs to find a route between them. If you can't quite see it, I've annotated it below.

You can see the surging wave at 17 second in this video I took from the shoreline.
 And so we hopped onto the rafts and started down the rapid. I think my boat ran third..

What happened next was not fun. And that's it for the pictures for reasons that will be clear. From my journal...

 Then, oh sh*t!

We hit the edge of the hole, I saw a wall of water and suddenly I was under water and under the boat. Too shocked to think about it, I bumped on the underside of the boat for a moment, and bobbed to the surface for a moment to face another huge wave, and another. Chaos! What to do? I couldn't think so I did what I imagined I would do over and over before the trip. I couldn't see the shoreline, but I saw the boat about 10-12 feet ahead of me...started swimming as hard as I could, and first I didn't feel I was catching up, but knew I had to...6 feet, 5, 4, 3, grabbed at the line, missed, grabbed again, caught it, hung on for dear life (really dear) and started thinking what next...

They say swim with your feet downstream and don't get in front of the boat...too easy to get caught on rocks. Of course the boat twisted and put me in front...I went hand over hand, past a hanging bucket so I was alongside, feet trailing behind me. Then I hit the Rock Garden and bounced off a few boulders on my behind, but I also found a handle on the boat. The turbulent waves finally ended and I was able to see that Barry and Bev were trying to get to me.

They pulled alongside and I was too tired to kick my way onto their boat (note: I had been in the frigid water for four minutes already, and it was starting to affect my ability to swim). Jeff jumped over to their boat and they were able to pull me in.

I could only sit and breath for the next 10-15 minutes while they wrangled the flipped boat. Pete was okay, he swam ashore near the top of the rapid (note: as I wished I had done). 

We had ultimately traveled 1/2-2/3 miles downstream, almost reaching the next rapid (which would have been a deadly outcome for someone in the water, due to hypothermia alone). We got everyone together and flipped the boat back to its proper orientation, then moved a short distance downriver to a beach where we had lunch and where I could collect my wits. I was unhurt despite bouncing off the boulders, and I quickly recovered from the frigid dunking in the hot sun. I was most disturbed by how my life vest rode up my chest and almost came off when they pulled me on the boat. Some have suggested that now that many passengers on the river these days are...um...kind of pear-shaped like me that life vests need a strap between the legs to prevent them from slipping off in emergencies. I tend to agree.

We assessed the damage. No major equipment missing (it had all been strapped down), but we lost a guidebook (but had a spare). My dry bag with my camera had leaked, and the camera was not working. The thought of losing the 1,400 pictures I had taken broke my heart, and it took a few days to find out that they were okay. And...I had thought to bring a spare camera! The pictures would continue. My journal was soaked. I was able to carefully separate the pages and start drying them off. The red ink had run and was nearly unreadable, but the blue ink was okay and I've recovered 85% of my notes. Pete felt terrible about it all, but really, it was a matter of a few inches on the side of a hole in the worst (or second worst) rapid on the river.

We had eight more rapids to go through that afternoon. We made it without incident. Mentally I was okay, and really I had to be, although it was one of the closest shaves with mortality that I've ever experienced. There aren't many alternatives to continuing down the river. The steaks we had for dinner were pretty much the most delicious delectable culinary objects I had ever tasted in my life.

During the early evening, my brother's tent blew away in the wind. We never found it!

Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: Into the Realm of the Devil (and Sea Lions)

Ocean waves are powerful. Extremely powerful. Waves are one of the few erosional processes that operate within a time frame that can be perceived by humans. Gigantic rocks may be moved in one storm, and coastal cliffs can be eroded at rates that are measured in feet or meters per year. Rock can be extremely hard to erode, but if there is a weakness in the rock, it will be exploited by the impact of waves. I find it hard to believe that humans can survive the turbulence of the giant waves that experienced surfers love so much. This one fascinated me. I doubt my ride down Crystal Rapids, though the most violent non-automotive incident in my life, came anywhere close to the experience.

We were continuing our vagabonding journey through the northwest, driving north and leaving the sands of Florence behind. We almost immediately encountered rugged rocky cliffs. Although we didn't stop there on this particular trip, Sea Lion Caves provide a simply astounding example of what waves can do, given the right circumstances. A fault line cuts through the tough basaltic rock, and the wave erosion has produced one of the greatest sea caves in the Americas. Hundreds of Stellar's Sea Lions can be found hanging out in the caves or on the local beaches. It's one of the few places on the mainland where they feel safe enough to raise their young pups.

To visit the caves, you pay the somewhat steep entrance fee, walk down some steps and head down a paved path to the 200 foot elevator that drops you into the viewing area within the sea cave. From the trail,there is no view or sense of what lies below, given the steepness of the cliffs.

In a previous post, I looked to see if anyone has photographed the sea caves from the outside, and couldn't find any, so I used a Google Earth image. Since then, my own mom took care of the problem, and took a picture of the coast from a biplane.

Source: Geotripper's Mom, from a biplane! Sea Lion Caves are in the shadows on the lower right hand of the photo. The Heceta Head Lighthouse is on the prominent headland.

The cave has three openings and extends for 1315 feet, making it the tenth biggest in the world; very big, but not the biggest. The top nine are all in New Zealand, which tells me more than anything else that they've measured carefully in New Zealand, and that larger caves probably exist around the world.  In any case, the cave at Sea Lion Caves is impressive. The ceiling of the cave is 125 feet high. The little tan-colored dots on the rocks in the first picture are full grown sea lions. I don't have any idea how they climb up onto those rocks.

So, what about the devil referred to in today's title? There are a couple of connections, I guess. As I wrote previously, the noise is other-worldly, and if I were hearing it without the context, I would swear it was the tortured lost souls in Hades crying out for mercy. The vast opening echoes and amplifies the noise of around 200 sea lions.

One could almost imagine the dark cave leading to the River Styx.

But actually, as we drove north, I was struck by the parade of landforms named after the lord of the underworld, and which are marvelous monuments to the power of wave erosion. First, there was Devil's Elbow State Park, just a short distance north of Sea Lion Cave. It's a cove on the south side of the Heceta Head Lighthouse.  The cove fills with sand as waves lose their energy and drop their load of sediment. Additional sand and gravel is provided by the creek that flows into the cove.

We traveled a few miles north and found the Devil's Churn. The Churn provides a vivid example of how caves are eroded by wave action. There is a weakness in the rock, perhaps a fault or a joint, that has clearly been exploited by the vigorous wave action. Imagine that a more a stronger rock were on top of the churn, and one can visualize the formation of a sea cave.

Our next stop provided a fine example of what may eventually happen to some sea caves; they may collapse. Devil's Punchbowl near Depoe Bay is a hybrid sea cave-sea arch that formed when the ceiling of the sea cave collapsed. It has been termed a "littoral sinkhole".

The scale of this opening is hard to fathom in a picture. It's big. In the photo below note the person standing in the opening. I wish I could have had the time to hike down to the beach. The day I do, you can assume blog pictures will follow!

All of the emphasis on the prince of darkness threatened to become depressing. We headed farther north and visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory. It was a giant cheese factory with a dose of amusement park. It was kitschy, but drove the devil from our thoughts. And what great cheese samples!