Some Resources on Yosemite Valley and the Mother Lode of the Sierra Nevada

Because we all know I almost NEVER mention Yosemite or the Mother Lode on Geotripper....

It's been quite a long time since I first ventured onto the Internet, about 15 years ago. I quite clumsily put together a web page for my geology department, which included a couple of resources on the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode and Yosemite Valley. It turns out that my original web pages are due to disappear into the mists of time as the school has taken up a different web platform. If you want to see my messy first effort at a web presence, it will be around until May 6 at this site: (http://virtual.yosemite.cc.ca.us/ghayes/). Two of the pages that I thought most useful were a virtual roadside geology tour of Yosemite Valley, and a review of the Mining History and Geology of the Mother Lode.

The virtual roadside tour of Yosemite Valley has been updated and posted at Geotripper Images (see it by clicking here). I've added more than 100 photos to the tour, and noted some of the changes that have taken place in the last fifteen years since I first published the guide (a dam has been removed, and there have been a few serious rockfalls). If you are headed to Yosemite this summer, give it a look!

The Mining History and Geology of the Mother Lode (click here to see the new version) still needs work. I found out the website was slated to disappear right in the middle of the last week of school, right in the midst of a move to our new Science Community Center, and just weeks before leaving on a total of three weeks in the field, part of which involves writing a field guide for Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks. So I don't have too much on my plate or anything like that.

In any case the Mother Lode history needs some serious updating and I didn't have much time this week to do anything about it (I put it up in a hurry in 1998 and didn't update it all that much over the years). If you see some inaccuracies in the descriptions of mining, I'd appreciate some constructive criticism. There is plenty of history about the Gold Rush out there, but not so much in the way of geology.