Water in a Dry Land: Joshua Tree National Park, and why Twentynine Palms is missing a few

It is, of course, a cliche to say that water is life. I can barely imagine a more terrifying thought than to be trapped in the open in a place like the Pinto Basin in Joshua Tree National Park (above) on a scorching hot summer day without a car, without a phone (no coverage anyway), and without water. The Pinto Basin is the rarely visited wilderness end of Joshua Tree National Park, a place far removed from the famous granite boulders of Wonderland of Rocks or Hidden Valley. The Pinto Basin is a vast alluvial plain crossed by two old dirt tracks leading to abandoned mines, and nothing else.

The Pinto Basin was never developed like other desert basins in California because of a lack of available water resources and the arrival of the Great Depression just as speculators were moving into the region. The establishment of the monument sealed the deal and protected the wide basin from any more development.

It wasn't always like this. Studies at Joshua Tree have established that the region was more tropical for millions of years, and that during the Ice Ages a stream flowed through the valley. It was a place where humans could thrive instead of simply surviving. Archaeological work has established the presence of a people (the Pinto Culture) that lived in the basin from around 9,000 to 2,000 years ago.
Water is precious in the desert, and there are precious few sources there today. Ironically, the source of the water that is there is the same as the water the Pinto People used thousands of years ago. The gravels of desert basins like the Pinto act like giant sponges, storing water in the spaces between sand grains in the thousands of feet of loose sediment filling the valleys. Billions of gallons of Ice Age water remain hidden deep in the sediments, revealed only when geological conditions force water to the surface.

California has her faults, and faults are one of the ways that water can be forced to the surface. The grinding along fault zones produces a clay-like material called gouge, which is impermeable to water. Water flowing slowly underground can be dammed by fault gouge and forced to the surface. I visited two of those spots last week.

The first is Cottonwood Springs at the less-visited south end of the park (picture above). Water still flows there, but only a trickle. During the mining era, some 3,000 gallons a day provided the only secure water source for many miles around. The palms were planted in the 1920s (though they are a native species). The cottonwoods were present earlier. Water has been present here for thousands of years, indicated not only by Native American grinding holes in the rock, but also from travertine-like rocks in the area, deposited by water over tens of thousands of years. Needless to say (but I always say such things anyway), the water attracts a wide variety of animal and insect life.

The second "spring" we visited was the Oasis of Mara in an outlier of the park that serves as park headquarters in Twentynine Palms. Early miners called the oasis "Twentynine Palms Oasis", but the present name is a derivation of the Native American name for the spot. The oasis is marked by a line of fan palms along a recently formed scarp formed by the active Pinto Mountain fault (visible in the picture above). I was fascinated by the beautiful little pond in the midst of the healthiest looking fan palms, but I soon realized it was lined with plastic. A bit of research (like reading signs on the nature trail!) revealed that the springs of the Oasis of Mara have been dry for decades. It's not too hard to figure out why. The presence of water led to the establishment of the town of Twentynine Palms, and the town residents started drilling wells right away, drawing down the groundwater table and and drying up the springs. I'm not sure there are actually 29 living palms left today.

The last source of water we saw was a lake, of all things, hidden among the granite boulders. That's a unique Joshua Tree story for another post.

I've used three sources of information about the park beyond my own observations:

Cates, Robert, 1995, Joshua Tree National Park: A Visitor's Guide, Live Oak Press, 100 pages.

Trent, D. and Hazlett, R., 2002, Joshua Tree National Park Geology, Joshua Tree National Park Association, 64 pages.

Eggers, M, editor, 2004, Mining History and Geology of National Park, San Diego Association of Geologists, c/o Sunbelt Publications, 119 pages.

What's Eating the Joshua Trees? What's Not Eating Them?

For some reason, the powers-that-be somehow failed to call the incredible geological desert in Southern California "Great Big Granite Boulders National Park". They called it "Joshua Tree National Park" instead. I don't quite understand, but that's the way things go sometimes. Really though, the bizarre little 'trees' have a geological history, and it may be their undoing.
The Joshua Tree is actually a member of the yucca family (Yucca brevifolia, meaning short-leaved yucca), and is so closely associated with the Mohave Desert that the boundaries of the one practically coincide with the other. The "trees" grow to a height of 35-40 feet, and are a centerpiece of the Mojave ecosystem, as many animals shelter within the tree and underneath it. The trees have a symbiotic relationship with the Yucca Moth, in which the moth is pretty much the only organism that pollenizes the flowers, and the larvae of the moth pretty much eat only the seeds of the Joshua Tree.
The iconic trees of Joshua Tree National Park are threatened, and as is often the case, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Human generated global warming is raising temperatures in the California Desert, just as it is everywhere else. Joshua Trees are sensitive to such climate change and are no longer propagating in the hotter areas of the park. As the climate warms, more and more trees in the lower edges of the desert will disappear. Normally they would propagate in higher cooler parts of the park, but there is a complication...the problem is a load of crap, or more properly a bunch of dung that is no longer being made.
Today, the only animal that transports Joshua Tree seeds is the woodrat, but they don't move much more than a 100-150 feet from the trees. That's not far enough to get the seeds to higher, cooler elevations, and so there is a possibility that within 50-100 years, most of the Joshua Trees will be gone from Joshua Tree National Park, just as the glaciers will be gone from Glacier National Park. There will be places at the north edge of their range where they will be able to survive, but they may have trouble getting there without human assistance.

So how did the trees get around in the past? That's where the dung comes in (or out...). It seems that we have discovered the droppings of giant ground sloths which once lived all across the southwest. It seems odd that we would have examples of their, uh, reprocessed food, but some of them favored dry caves and there are lots of samples to work with. And they contain a lot of Joshua Tree seeds and leaves. It is pretty clear that sloths provided mobility to the seeds of the Joshua Tree, and when they went extinct 12,000-13,000 years ago, the range of the Joshua Tree began to decline during the climate disturbances in subsequent Holocene time.
The picture above is a Harlan's Ground Sloth on exhibit at the Fossil Discovery Center near Madera in Central California. Despite the ferocious looking claws, it was probably a rather peaceful creature. I just hate that we cannot witness the wonderful menagerie of creatures that lived in North America just a few thousand years ago, although a few were probably the stuff of human nightmares (a future blog on this will be forthcoming). It occurs to me that instead of having humans simply plant Joshua Trees to insure their survival, we should be following a more logical solution. Doesn't it make more sense to use the DNA of the sloths to reproduce new sloths a la "Jurassic Park", and then release them into the wild to do the work that they were meant to do? How hard could it be, really?

For more info on the Joshua Tree and climate change problem check out this NPR story.

Taking Granite for Granted? Quick, Name a National Park in California!

Quick, name a national park in California...

Which ones appeared first in your mind? Yosemite? Sequoia? Maybe Death Valley? There are a few others, depending where you live, so Channel Islands, Redwood, or Lassen Volcanic might have been a first response. But who among you thought first of Joshua Tree National Park?

As a native-born and bred Southern California, I am guilty of ignoring the treasure that existed in my backyard. National monuments often get short shrift as part of our nation's national park system, and I am not totally sure why. Many people don't even know the difference, but somehow assume that monuments are somehow a second-tier series of parks, places that are almost as good as national parks, but not quite. Under law, national monuments are the equivalent of national parks, but monuments are declared by Presidents under the terms of the National Antiquities Act, and national parks can only be established by Congress. What this has meant in practice is that Congress has often been reticent about establishing national parks, given the many pressures exerted by special interest groups and lobbyists. Presidents, acting as a representative of all the people in the country, have recognized the national value and significance of these sites, and have declared them to be national monuments to provide protection of the resource.

Often, when a national monument has been in existence for a few years or decades, Congress finally comes around and establishes the monument as a national park. This is true even for some of our most iconic parks; both Grand Canyon and Zion were first declared national monuments before Congress acted in 1919 to make them national parks. There are numerous other examples.

So, why am I talking about national monuments? Joshua Tree is a national park. It turns out, though, that Joshua Tree followed a similar arc of many other park areas around the country. It was established as a national monument by FDR in the 1930s, and still was a monument when I was growing up in SoCal in the 60s and 70s. And I was guilty of thinking of monuments as second-class parks. When I dreamed of traveling, my heart was up in the Sierra Nevada somewhere, and I really didn't get to know Joshua Tree all that well, my trips being mostly confined to a handful of scout camping trips. I remembered a lot of big boulders, joshua trees, and vicious jumping cholla.

Joshua Tree achieved status as a national park in 1994, along with Death Valley, another longtime national monument. And I was by then living elsewhere. These last few years I have been working to rediscover some of these places of my youth that I took for granted. So I made a trip out there last week to check things out and found out that I was also taking the park for granite, too.

What did I learn? The first thing was an eye-popper...having thought the park was made entirely of granitic boulders, I didn't know about the rich variety of other rocks found there, and how they relate to each other. The picture above is one of the starkest examples. Click on it and enjoy a unique panorama; you are looking at a scene from miles within the crust of the earth. This is the roof of a granitic magma chamber, where it was intruding into the surrounding older rocks. Yosemite is famous for its exposures of granitic rock, but you can't see stuff like this in the Sierra. Once I saw this exposure, I knew we were in for an interesting day! More to follow...

Come and See Joshua Tree National Park with the Far Western Section of NAGT, November 11-13

(Cross-posted with minor edits from Teaching the Earth Sciences, the blog of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers)

Joshua Tree National Park is one of the most unique desert environments to be found anywhere in North America (See a representative journey with Geotripper here). Sitting astride the boundary zone between the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the park displays a startling variety of plant and animal species, and stunning displays of a Proterozoic metamorphic complex and Mesozoic plutonic rocks. It is a great place to learn about geology.

Copper Mountain College will be the host for the Fall 2011 meeting, which will include explorations of the park, and a journey to the interior of the Mojave to see the scarps from the 1992 Landers earthquake, still starkly obvious after two decades. The magnitude 7.3 quake killed two and produced a fracture that crossed fifty miles of desert.

The Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers invites anyone interested in the geological sciences to join them, including students (especially students!). Membership in NAGT is not required. This is a wonderful opportunity to see a fascinating corner of California's geology, and a chance to meet earth science teachers from all over California and Nevada (Hawaii is in our section too). It is an exciting and economic way to see some of southern California's most incredible geology.

Friday November 11, 2011

6:00 PM Meet at Copper Mountain College Bell Center Community Room for Registration 

(On-site registration cost estimate is $50.)

7:00 PM NAGT Far Western Section Board Meeting

8:00 - 9:00 PM Registration

Saturday November 12, 2011

8:00 - 10:00 AM Meet at the Bell Center Community Room for Registration

10:00 AM – 5:00 PM Field Trips (Choose One)

Field Trip Number 1

Landers Earthquake: Scarps still visible after 20 years plus Pioneer Town: Dating of a Miocene(?) erosional surface – Bob Reynolds

Field Trip Number 2 

Geology of Joshua Tree National Park – Bruce Bridenbecker

Presentation: 6:00 – 9:00 PM Evening Social with Lecture on Mines and Mining in Joshua Tree National Park - Dee Trent

Sunday November 13, 2011

8:00 AM Meet at Bell Center Parking Lot for Field Trip to Desert Queen Mine – Dee Trent

Field Trip should conclude by 2:00 or 3:00 PM.                                           

Logistics:

Joshua Tree Area Services

For a directory of area motels and restaurants visit the Joshua Tree Chamber of Commerce Web Site at http://www.joshuatreechamber.org/.

Joshua Tree Area Camping

Indian Cove is located 13 miles east of Joshua Tree Village and 10 miles west of Twentynine Palms on the north side of the Wonderland of Rocks. Indian Cove Road dead-ends at this secluded area. Campers register at the ranger station located at the entrance to the Indian Cove area. Water is also available there.

Contact Bruce Bridenbecker for additional information.

Don't Take Joshua Tree for Granite: The Fall Meeting of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers

There is still time to see one of California's most unique national parks!

(The folllowing is re-posted with minor edits from Teaching the Earth Sciences, the blog of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and from Geotripper on Oct. 1; registration forms, maps and more information on the Far Western Section website)

Joshua Tree National Park is one of the most unique desert environments to be found anywhere in North America (See a representative journey with Geotripper here). Sitting astride the boundary zone between the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the park displays a startling variety of plant and animal species, and stunning displays of a Proterozoic metamorphic complex and Mesozoic plutonic rocks. It is a great place to learn about geology.

Copper Mountain College will be the host for the Fall 2011 meeting, which will include explorations of the park, and a journey to the interior of the Mojave to see the scarps from the 1992 Landers earthquake, still starkly obvious after two decades. The magnitude 7.3 quake killed two and produced a fracture that crossed fifty miles of desert.

The Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers invites anyone interested in the geological sciences to join them, including students (especially students!). Membership in NAGT is not required. This is a wonderful opportunity to see a fascinating corner of California's geology, and a chance to meet earth science teachers from all over California and Nevada (Hawaii is in our section too). It is an exciting and economic way to see some of southern California's most incredible geology.

Friday November 11, 2011

6:00 PM Meet at Copper Mountain College Bell Center Community Room for Registration 

(On-site registration cost estimate is $50.)

7:00 PM NAGT Far Western Section Board Meeting

8:00 - 9:00 PM Registration

Saturday November 12, 2011

8:00 - 10:00 AM Meet at the Bell Center Community Room for Registration

10:00 AM – 5:00 PM Field Trips (Choose One)

Field Trip Number 1

Landers Earthquake: Scarps still visible after 20 years plus Pioneer Town: Dating of a Miocene(?) erosional surface – Bob Reynolds

Field Trip Number 2 

Geology of Joshua Tree National Park – Bruce Bridenbecker

Presentation: 6:00 – 9:00 PM Evening Social with Lecture on Mines and Mining in Joshua Tree National Park - Dee Trent

Sunday November 13, 2011

8:00 AM Meet at Bell Center Parking Lot for Field Trip to Desert Queen Mine – Dee Trent

Field Trip should conclude by 2:00 or 3:00 PM.                                           

Logistics:

Joshua Tree Area Services

For a directory of area motels and restaurants visit the Joshua Tree Chamber of Commerce Web Site at http://www.joshuatreechamber.org/.

Joshua Tree Area Camping

Indian Cove is located 13 miles east of Joshua Tree Village and 10 miles west of Twentynine Palms on the north side of the Wonderland of Rocks. Indian Cove Road dead-ends at this secluded area. Campers register at the ranger station located at the entrance to the Indian Cove area. Water is also available there.

Contact Bruce Bridenbecker for additional information.

Water in a Dry Land: Joshua Tree National Park, and Getting Tanked

A lake in the desert? That can't be right...

Joshua Tree National Park has a bit of a schizophrenic aspect. Geologicially, the park is divided into vast tracts of metamorphic rock separated from large areas of granitic rock. Topographically, the park is divided into the higher Mojave Desert and the lower Colorado Desert (the High Desert and Low Desert of SoCal weather reports). The elevation and rock differences result in large contrasts in water availability, and thus vegetation; the iconic Joshua Tree is not found in the lower parts of the park, for instance.

The higher parts of the park exceed 3,500 feet, and the climate is cooler and wetter ("wetter" being a relative term), and this higher elevation desert even receives the occasional snow flurry in winter. My vivid memory of January camping at Joshua Tree as a Boy Scout was that of coldness, absolute extreme cold (probably merely close to freezing, but I was a southern Californian; we panic when the temperature drops below 50 degrees).

There's more water in the high desert, enough that the landscape could almost be classed as savanna. These higher elevations supported enough grass that a few ranchers scratched out a living in the region. Cattle need water, but the water doesn't flow at the surface much of anywhere in the park. The ranchers built a few small dams in scattered drainages to catch the runoff from rare rainstorms. These so-called tanks were of varying quality, and some have fallen into such disrepair that they no longer hold water, but others survive. One of the nicer (and popular) short hikes in the park visits Barker Dam in the Wonderland of Rocks area. We had a pleasant stroll there last week, on a sparkling clear day.

With a bit of revegetation effort and pathway control, one can see how grasses could almost support a cow, although the measure would be acres per cow rather than cows per acre. The grazing no doubt put severe pressure on the local population of bighorn sheep, who are occasionally seen in the vicinity of the reservoir.

The trail winds past some unique desert oak trees and a variety of yucca called Parry Nolina, which blooms into the showy stalks seen in the picture above. The bedrock in the area is entirely composed of a variety of granite called monzogranite, which formed deep underground as magma, and cooled slowly to produce the crystal-rich rock. As the granitic rock was exposed at the surface, expansion and stresses caused the rock to fracture along joints which became the focal point of weathering and erosion. The boulders weather more readily at corners and edges, giving them a rounded aspect. The process is called spheroidal weathering.

Closer to the dam, the rock is less jointed, and breaks mostly parallel to the surface, forming a dome-like structure, which is a relatively rare sight at Joshua Tree, and more familiar in places like the Sierra Nevada. This is the process of exfoliation (below).

The little reservoir captures the rare runoff from thunderstorms, and the resulting lake attracts all manner of birds, insects, mammals and other creatures, including tourists.

A look at the dam reveals what probably amounts to a lack of sophisticated dam engineering, but it has lasted for more than sixty years.

The area downstream of the dam is a beautiful landscape of rock and vegetation. A number of petroglyphs and pictographs (some unfortunately recent) can be found hidden in these rocks. The ranchers had probably built on top of a natural reservoir in the rock, and the area has been a source of water for a long time.

So what about these Joshua Trees? Is there anything geological about them? That will be next time...

Taking Granite for Granted? Looking at Gneiss Rocks in Joshua Tree

Where can one find the oldest rocks in California? And for that matter, any place west of Utah and Wyoming? Some well-seasoned geological travelers would point to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where dark metamorphic gness and schist lie exposed below the Great Unconformity. Others might point to the Black Mountains in Death Valley National Park, where similar rocks are exposed along the unique turtleback faults of the deep graben that forms the main axis of the park. These beautiful rocks formed during a collisional event (really two) between 1.65-1.75 billion years ago that formed a huge mountain range that extended across the southern part of the North American continent for an unknown distance westward. At the time, most of the continents of the world were combined into a supercontinent called Rodinia (which existed prior to the better-known Pangea).
If one takes granite for granted, as I did once at Joshua Tree National Park, one might miss one of the unexpected pleasures of exploring the park. The giant granite boulders in the Wonderland of Rocks may catch most of the attention, but there are secrets in the somewhat bland looking hills in the south and central parts of the park: the oldest rocks in the state! The Pinto gneiss and related rocks in Joshua Tree are related to those seen at Grand Canyon and Death Valley. These are the ancient metamorphic rocks that the granitic magmas invaded. These rocks once may have been sands on a beach some 2 billion years ago, or muds on a sea floor. Some may have been volcanic flows. All have been baked by the molten rock and squeezed into their present shape.
South of Cottonwood Springs at the less-used park entrance near Chiriaco Summit out of Indio, a desert gully along the park road exposes the contact zone between the granite and the gneiss (pronounced 'nice'). The contact is marked by an intrusion breccia, bits and pieces of the metamorphic rocks enveloped in the granitic rock. The isolated chunks of metamorphic rock are called xenoliths ('alien rock').
A hike to the Mastodon Mine out of Cottonwood Springs reveals one of the most unique exposures of xenoliths (or enclaves, see comments below) that I have ever come across. The metamorphic rocks are weathering differently than the granitic rock, and end up protruding like chocolate chips in cookie dough!
Joshua Tree National Park is a fascinating treasure. The story shall continue....

Out in America's Never Never: The Mojave, a Vast Unknown Treasure

My students are reading this and saying "We didn't stop here". That's true. But I love the picture and any excuse to show it.

The first morning on the road into America's Never Never found us at Hole in the Wall in the middle of the Mojave National Preserve. The Mojave is a vast region in eastern California that is both well-known, and completely unknown to the residents and visitors to the state. It's "known" because millions of people travel Interstates 15 and 40 every year through the region on their way to Las Vegas or Phoenix. It's "unknown" because the vast majority of travelers never set foot outside their cars except for the bathrooms in Baker or Needles. The landscape between the two interstates is a vast terra incognita to them. It's no wasteland...it is an exceedingly fascinating region, geologically and biologically.

We did wake up to this sight, though. The Providence Mountains, west of Hole in the Wall.

We passed through the heart of the park, traveling from the Essex turnoff on Interstate 40 for 20 miles to the Hole in the Wall campground, and then through the Mid Hills and Mojave Road to Kelso-Cima Road and the Morning Star Mine Road to Interstate 15. Although our time was short, we saw some vast vistas of the third largest unit in the national park system outside of Alaska (I think only Yellowstone National Park and Death Valley National Park are larger; Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is also larger, but is administered by the Bureau of Land Management).

The park has a series of unique ranges, including the Providence, Granite, Clark, and New York Mountains, reacing elevations of just short of 8,000 feet. The great range of elevation allows a huge variety of plants to thrive. Of greatest interest (to me anyway) are the Joshua Trees and the White Firs.

Wait, Christmas trees in the desert? Yes! There are relict forests that cling to life at the tops of the highest peaks of the New York and Clark Mountains. During the ice ages when the climate was wetter, they thrived over a much larger area, but with the ending of the glacial advances and the drying, they retreated to the small groves that exist today. It's a part of the park I have not yet had the privilege to visit, and I can't find pictures on the Internet, so that may be part of a future trip.

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

The Joshua Trees, on the other hand, are right there. The largest grove in existence, more than a million individual trees, can be seen on Cima Dome. We stopped to have a look. The Joshua Trees are members of the lily family and are widespread throughout the Mojave Desert. Joshua Tree National Park preserves many of the trees, but Mojave National Preserve may actually have more of them. Some of the trees on Cima Dome have trunks 3 feet across, and may be centuries old.

Cima Dome

Cima Dome is one of the more unusual geological structures found in the Mojave Desert. The smooth gravel covered convex surface was thought at one time to be the end result of desert erosion of a faulted mountain block and pediment, but the origin may be more complicated. The Cima Volcanic Field on the west side of the dome may be related. Lava flows range in age from 7 million years to as recently as 10,000 years ago. The top picture of today's post was taken in a lava tube that is part of one of the recent flows.

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

From our perch high on Cedar Canyon Road, we could look south and see the Kelso Dune Field, one of the highest and largest sand dune systems in the country. The highest dune rises 650 above the surrounding desert. Numerous endemic species of plants grow in the dune environment, but the dunes are best known for "singing". Under the right conditions, the dunes "boom", but the reasons aren't clear.

Kelso Dunes

I have saved my outrage for the last aspect of the park region. Providence Mountains State Recreational Area is an island of state land within the National Preserve. It "preserves" a group of caves, including the Mitchell Caverns and the Cave of the Winding Stair. Originally in private ownership, the state promised to care for the caves and for years conducted tours and kept up the small but charming campground.

Cave shields are a rare cave feature found in Mitchell Caverns (source: National Park Service)

But the recession destroyed the state budget, and the SRA was slated to be shut down. Even when money was found to keep the other parks open, Mitchell Caverns were shut down because the two rangers working there elected to retire. The park was gated and abandoned. The administrators of the park system must have assumed that distance and isolation would protect the facility. Administrators think that way. They were, of course, very wrong.

(source: National Park Service)

Vandals broke into the park visitor center, destroying exhibits, stealing equipment, and removing thousands of feet of copper wire that was used to light the cave. If the park is ever to be reopened, it will cost a great deal more to fix what has been damaged than it would have been to keep a caretaker on site.

(source: National Park Service)

There are hints that the state might be thinking about fixing things now that the state budget is in better shape. I hope they consider bringing back one of the gems of the state park system.

We made our way north out of the Preserve and made our way to the bathrooms and mini-marts over the border in Nevada.

There's No Place Like This: Celebrating 100 Years of America's Best Idea

"There's no place like this".

It's something that you hear once in awhile in a crowd of people seeing Yosemite Falls for the first time. You'll hear it from people seeing a geyser explode from the ground in Yellowstone, or gaping at the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. There are other places where you won't hear those words, because you won't be standing in a crowd of people. It might be while standing in a grove of 4,000 year old Bristlecone Pines at Great Basin National Park, or in an isolated slot canyon cut through the Navajo Sandstone in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, or watching California Condors from a windswept ridge in Pinnacles National Park. You won't hear it, but you will think it. Because there is no place like this, our national heritage of parks and monuments in the United States. It was our best idea as a nation, the idea of saving in perpetuity the unique landscapes that are like no other place on Earth.

I was out there in Yosemite Valley yesterday along with tens of thousands of other people, conducting a field class on the geology of the park. The traffic jams recalled the worst of our cities, and people were everywhere, taking in the best waterfall show in nearly half a decade. The four year drought has taken a toll, but there was enough of a snowpack this year that even the unnamed cascades were booming with water.

One can argue the particulars, but the idea of a national park began here, in 1864. The valley was discovered by Europeans in 1851, and the reported wonders of the place caused Abraham Lincoln to cede the valley to the state of California with the proviso that it be protected for all time. In 1876, the first official national park was established at Yellowstone, while Sequoia and Yosemite followed in 1890. The 1906 National Antiquities Act gave the president the authority to establish national monuments without the approval of Congress, and in 1916, a government agency, the National Park Service, was established to administer the growing numbers of parks and monuments. The Park Service is celebrating their centennial this year.

Seeing traffic jams in this precious place causes me to worry that we might be loving our parks to death, but in the larger picture, we simply need more parks to accommodate those who want to know what is unique and beautiful about our country. And we need those parks to protect what is left of the natural ecosystems of our land, the patchwork of habitats and migratory paths that protect the animals and plants that are also unique to our country. President Obama will have a significant place in our country's history, having presided over the first true attempt at national health care, and for shepherding our economy through the worst recession since the Great Depression, but he will also be remembered for establishing more land as national monuments than any other president (President George W. Bush declared a larger monument, the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which is the size of Germany, but it is mostly ocean). The monuments weren't piecemeal random choices. Many of them linked critical ecosystems, such as those in the California desert from the San Bernardino Mountains to Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. In many ways these monuments will be his greatest legacy, and greatest gift to our nation.

Yosemite was crowded on Saturday, even overcrowded. But even on the worst of such days, there are places of serenity and quiet beauty. I sent the students out to explore for a few hours, and walked the north part of the Valley Loop trail and in one mile-long stretch I saw but two hikers and a small party of birders with a Yosemite Conservancy guide. It was lonely enough that I gave thought to how many mountain lions lived in the valley, and where they hung out! But that short hike is only scratching the surface. Yosemite Valley covers about seven square miles, but Yosemite National Park protects more than 1,000. There is a lot of wilderness to be experienced, more than enough for a lifetime. Most of our national parks offer similar experiences.

If you have not made a habit of exploring the lands of our national heritage, I hope you will make it a priority in your life. Your life will be richer for it. If circumstances dictate that you can't spend time in these special places, I hope you will read about them, or watch wonderful documentaries (start with Ken Burns' series The National Parks: America's Best Idea). You could even read geology blogs about such places! It's like learning our country's history; you can't stand with our soldiers at Valley Forge or Gettysburg, you can't step onto the Moon along with Neil Armstrong, and you couldn't march with Martin Luther King, but you can learn from all these historical events, and make better decisions for our country's future.

There were so many forces arrayed against the idea of our national parks, and there still are. If we had let these people use the land for monetary profit, there would be no old-growth rainforests on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, and there might be no Sequoia trees or Coast Redwoods in California (we cut down more than 90% of the original forests anyway). There might have been tramways to the valley rim at Yosemite, and geothermal development causing Old Faithful to no longer erupt. The Grizzly Bears and Bison would be gone, as would the wolves. The ruins of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon would have been torn down by pothunters. The petrified wood at Petrified Forest would be gone.

Make no mistake. Our lands our still under assault. There is an ongoing effort to build a tramway to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and a huge new city on the South Rim of the same park. There are plans to mine uranium just a short distance from the park boundary. There are people who believe that our national heritage lands should be turned over to the states for private development such as at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Thankfully the worst of them are in jail right now, but there are many more such people out there. Maybe worst of all, there are politicians in Congress bought and paid for who are trying to make these things happen.

And there are vandals. A story has made the rounds this week of several despicable individuals by the name of Staten and Andersen who left massive carvings in one of the most beautiful arches in Arches National Park. One might as well spray-paint Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and carve your name on the Last Supper. Once defiled, these precious places can never be the same, and the vandals have stolen something from all of us.

These places belong to us all. Protect and cherish them. There is no place like them in the world.

Thankful...

...for the privilege of having a career that allows me to show students the beautiful places of the world, for digital cameras that allow me to preserve the memories, a forum to share my images with anyone that cares to explore them, and for all of you who take the time to read and comment. I really appreciate your visits to this blog. Please enjoy a random selection of my favorite images and places that have appeared in Geotripper at one time or another. Follow the links for the story behind the pictures.

Yosemite Valley, in my favorite mountain range, the Sierra Nevada...

The Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies, resting place of some of the most primitive, yet advanced lifeforms ever discovered.

Cedar Mesa and Muley Point, one of my spiritual centers

The La Sal Mountains, viewed through an arch in Arches National Park

Antelope Canyon near Page Arizona. An unreal place...

It has not always been about rocks. Sometimes animals block the view...a bighorn sheep at Capitol Reef National Park

And there are the iconic views...Delicate Arch at Arches National Park

More distractions from the rocks...poppies blooming in Merced River Canyon downstream from Yosemite Valley.

Only a moron would stand next to a lava flow...or me. The Big Island of Hawaii

Or go wandering a lava flow at midnight...yeah I got in trouble with the family that night

Grand Canyon, one of the nation's jewels...

So many bizarre landscapes in the world...the hoodoos at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument in New Mexico

On the High Peaks Trail at Pinnacles National Monument, one of the great hikes I've discovered in the American West.

I love the seasons at Yosemite National Park

The native birds of Hawai'i have a fascinating story. An 'Elepaio stayed still long enough to photograph on Kauai

Joshua Tree National Park is one of the lesser known landscapes in California, unless you happen to be one of the 20 million people that live within a 90 minute drive...

Sometimes there are just magical moments: A rainbow at Glacier National Park

The many moods of lighting at Grand Tetons National Park...a gray morning...

And a crystalline sky at sunset...

Vagabonding our way to Rocky Mountain National Park

Closer to home, we explore California Caverns

And say goodbye to Yosemite Valley during an extraordinary sunset