Airliner Chronicles: Do You Know California's Biggest Volcano? You May Be Surprised at the Answer

The summit complex of Medicine Lake Highland, with Glass Mountain at the top, the Medicine flow center-left, and Medicine Lake at center-right.

It's a real problem for a geologist to be flying through cloud cover. One loses track of time and location so when an opening in the clouds occurs, one cannot know for sure where one is. I can pick out the essential geologic details a lot of the time, but without temporal or spatial context, I can't recognize even some of the most familiar places that I've visited many times. That's what happened last Thursday when I was flying to SeaTac. I lost sight of the ground only a few minutes out of Sacramento, and when the ground reappeared again, I was totally fooled by the scenes in these pictures. I thought I might be over Newberry Crater in Oregon, but I couldn't place Paulina Lake with the steep ridge that should have been to the right in the picture above. So I figured it must be some place in the Three Sisters area that I wasn't familiar with. But then I got home and looked at the pictures on the computer instead of the camera. I was wrong.

The Medicine Flow dates to about 2,000 years ago. It is composed of thick dacite lava flows. Frozen Medicine Lake is to the right.

It turns out I was flying right over the top of California's biggest volcano. Mt. Shasta is California's most prominent volcano, rising to 14,162 feet above sea level. It's the largest stratovolcano in the entire Cascades chain, with more bulk than even Mt. Rainier, which we looked at in our previous post.

[At this point there is a bit of uncomfortable shuffling in the back of the room as a few of the geologists look at each other and start mumbling something unintelligible.

"Ahem, is there something you would like to add to the discussion?" I say.

"But we've seen Mt. Shasta, and it looks nothing like that".

"And you would be right" I say, "but give me a chance to finish". They relent.]

But this isn't Mt. Shasta. It may be the tallest volcano in California, and it may be the biggest stratovolcano in the Cascades, but we are forty miles northeast of Shasta, looking at an entirely different kind of volcano. It's a shield volcano called Medicine Lake Highland. Although it is not even 8,000 feet high, it is much wider, with a total volume of around 130 cubic miles, compared to about 108 cubic miles for Mt. Shasta.

The view from the ground shows a gently sloping edifice covered by a variety of cinder cones and plug domes. Medicine Lake Highland (MLH)is shield-shaped like the giant volcanoes that make up the Hawaiian Islands, and is composed in large part of basalt, the fairly non-viscous lava that can flow for long distances before congealing. But MLH is different in some important ways. Some of the magma chambers beneath the volcano originate in the crust rather than the mantle (dacite or rhyolite), and the silica-rich lavas that erupt at the surface are sticky and barely flow at all.

MLH is an active volcano. There have been at least 17 eruptions in the last 11,000 years, and the Glass Mountain flow (below) erupted only about 850 years ago. There are areas of geothermal activity that have been proposed for energy development, but these have been rebuffed so far (thank goodness).

Glass Mountain at the top of Medicine Lake Highland. The flow dates to 850-900 years before present.

The top of the shield complex is a caldera (a sunken crater-like depression caused by the inward collapse of the top of the volcano). It is about the size of the Crater Lake Caldera, but is not nearly as rugged, as it is many thousands of years older and has been partially filled with subsequent lava flows. Medicine Lake sits within the caldera, but is not volcanic in origin. During the ice ages, glaciers scoured the summit area of MLH and left behind some impermeable clay deposits that prevent water from sinking into the ground (there are very few streams or rivers on the volcano, as it is highly porous; massive springs are found around the base of the volcano.).

One of America's most interesting national monuments is found on the north flank of MLH. Lava Beds National Monument preserves more than 75 miles of underground lava tubes, one of the highest concentrations of such caves in North America (and maybe in the world). The park also preserves the memory of the last stand of the Modoc people in their struggle against the U.S. military in the 1870s. They held out for months in the barren lava flows but were finally betrayed and captured. The Modoc people survive, but much of their cultural history was lost when they were banished to Oklahoma.

The clouds soon closed in again and I saw nothing more until we were over Washington.

An Incredible Spot in the Mojave Desert, the Hole in the Wall. You could see it for yourself this summer

Summer is coming soon. If you are casting about wondering what to do, how about the adventure of a lifetime? Our department is offering a dyad class, Geology 191/Anthropology 191, the Geology and Anthropology of the Colorado Plateau, and it is an incredible chance to check out some marvelous geology along our southwestern tier of states: California, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. I want to give you a bit of a preview of the kinds of places we will be visiting...

The Mojave National Preserve is one of our nation's newest parks (established in 1994). It was carved out from Bureau of Land Management lands in the eastern Mojave Desert, preserving one of the most awesome sand dune complexes in the country, the Kelso Dunes, a barren landscape of geologically recent volcanic cinder cones, one of the largest Joshua Tree forests in existence, and some of the highest mountain ranges in the Mojave Desert, with rocks as old as 1.7 billion years old, as ancient as those in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The preserve also encompasses a California State Recreation Area, the Providence Mountains, and Mitchell Caverns, a unique limestone cave system. The caverns were closed during the recession, and then severely vandalized, but they have finally been reopened for visitation (see this Facebook page for updates).

One of the most interesting corners of the park is called Hole in the Wall, along with Banshee Canyon. We will be staying at the nearby campground our first night on the road on June 2. It is a wonderfully isolated spot, 25 miles off the main highway, and even farther from developments of any kind. It has some of the darkest night skies I've ever seen, and it is serenely quiet (except for crickets and coyote yowls).

The region is quite unlike other parts of the Mojave. Instead of deeply eroded mountain ranges and wide flat valleys, the area around Hole in the Wall is composed of mesas and plateaus that seem to share more in common with the Colorado Plateau province just to the east. But these mesas aren't like Arizona's either. They are composed not of sedimentary layers, but of volcanic tuff, rock derived from unimaginably huge volcanic explosions the likes of which modern humans have never experienced.

Twenty million years ago, the region was one of low relief, the result of tens of millions of years of erosion and relative stability. But conditions were changing as the crust was stretched and broken up into a series of tilted fault blocks. The release of pressure on the underlying mantle allowed partial melting to take place, and volcanic activity exploded across the region.

The first eruptions took place about 18.5 million years ago when the Peach Springs tuff coated the entire region from an eruption center near Oatman, Arizona. The eruption involved as much as 150 cubic miles (640 km³) of powdery white ash that was so hot that in many places it welded into solid rock as it landed.

Shortly afterward (in geologic terms anyway, as it was 700,000 years later), a second caldera developed. It was located even closer, in the adjacent Woods Mountains. The eruptive "crater", actually a collapse pit, was about 5-6 miles across, roughly similar in size to Crater Lake. Once again, all life was obliterated for hundreds of square miles as hot ash blanketed the landscape. The Wild Horse Mesa Tuff makes up most of the rock found at Hole in the Wall.

The strange holes that gave Hole in the Wall its name are called tafoni. Small differences in the degree of solidification or cementation cause depressions to form which end up staying wet longer, and the minerals decay into small fragments that can easily wash or blow away.

A short trail (1.5 miles) loops around Banshee Mountain and explores the best of the eroded tuff. Starting at the small visitor center, the trail drops through a rugged narrow canyon. There are some drop-offs, but rings have been attached to the canyon wall, making it a lot easier to climb up or down. Once past the narrows, the trail has a gentle gradient, and provides interesting views in all directions. There is a nice collection of petroglyphs on some of the boulders around the south end of the mountain.

If you want to visit this fascinating corner of the desert with us this June, please check out the previous post for details. We will be on the road for two weeks, and this will be only the first of many wonders that we will explore.

The Hawai'i That Was: Rising Out of Depression on Kaua'i, and Sleeping Giants

There's a different part of Kaua'i, one that doesn't quite fit the image of dramatic high cliffs plunging into the sea. It's a lowland, a region of lesser hills and ridges that only rise a thousand feet or so, covered largely by rainforest. It's unusual because Kaua'i is often imagined as a single deeply eroded volcano that should have been evenly eroded from all directions. It turns out to be far more complicated than that. In fact, it can be thought of as two shield volcano complexes, one of which developed on top of another.

The head of the Sleeping Giant (and a tough short climb)

Nounou Ridge rises above Kapa'a and this lowland area called the Lihue Depression. The ridge is composed of the volcanic flows of the older shield, the Na Pali basalts, that date back to between four and five million years ago. Strangely, the basin below has younger rocks, the Koloa Volcanics, which date to between 2.65 million and 150,000 years ago. Why strange? If this basin were hollowed out by normal erosional processes, the rocks in the basin would be expected to be older.

The story involves the destruction of a portion of the original shield volcano that built up the island. Shields are huge volcanoes with gentle slopes, but they are inherently unstable. As has been noted in some previous posts in this series, huge avalanches sometimes cause portions of the volcano to slide into the sea. On Kaua'i, it appears that a large failure caused the eastern side of the island to subside several thousand feet. This formed the low depression, which was later covered by basalt flows of the Koloa Volcanics.

A decade ago, I climbed Nounou Ridge. A delightful trail climbs the flank of the mountain from a neighborhood above Kapa'a, offering some incredible views across the eastern part of the island.

Nounou Ridge is also called the "Sleeping Giant", and the ridge does indeed resemble a reclining big person. The story goes that a friendly giant help islanders with construction of heiaus and other structures. Celebrations followed, and the giant had too much to eat and grew drowsy and laid down for a nap. A very long nap (we've all been there, right?). I've seen stories that note that islanders started fires behind the ridge to highlight the profile in order to scare off potential invaders sailing in from offshore.

The mountain ridge in the distance in the picture above is Anahola Ridge, which like Nounou is composed of the older Na Pali basalts. If that steep pinnacle looks just a little bit familiar, think back to the memorable opening sequence of "Raiders of the Lost Ark".


The trail is mostly an easy climb to a picnic shelter on top of the "chest" of the giant. If you want to get to the high point, the "chin", you've got a bit of a climb ahead. The route (not exactly a trail anymore) is a scramble with a fair amount of exposure on both sides. I did the climb in ignorance (Read a field guide? Nah...), but I was glad to reach the summit. The view was outstanding.

The full extent of Anahola Ridge was visible off to the north, as well as the low country in between. The ridge is exposed to strong winds blowing off the ocean; note how the trees are bent over in the picture below.

The view to the south reveals Haupu Ridge, the memorable ridge that is viewed by most airplane passengers on the approach to Lihue Airport. The lowlands of the Lihue Depression fill the foreground, as well as the canyon of the Wailua River (Wailua Falls are hidden down there somewhere).

I would have included a shot of Waialeale, but as usual, the wettest mountain on Earth was shrouded in clouds.

"The Hawai'i That Was" is a series on the geology and anthropology of the Hawaiian Islands that explores the nature of the islands prior to colonization and the changes that have taken place since. If the rate of blog posting seems...um...slow lately, well yes, it's been a busy time. Have patience, and we'll finish our trip around the island in no time!

The Hawai'i That Was: Walking a Lake of Fire in "the Little Source of Great Spewing"

Kilauea Iki eruption in 1959. The prevailing winds caused debris to pile up behind the fountain, forming the Pu'u Pau'i cinder cone. Source: US Geological Survey

Kilauea is one of the five major shield volcanoes making up the Big Island of Hawai'i. As we found in the last post in this series on the "Hawai'i That Was", Kilauea is the most active of the island's volcanic centers, with an ongoing eruption dating back to 1983. On our first full day on the island, we had a look at the smoking pit of Halemaumau, but in the afternoon, we headed over to Kilauea Iki ("little source of great spewing").

Kilauea Iki from the northeast rim. Pu'u Pua'i is the mound on the right. The steam and gas in the distance is the ongoing eruption of Halemaumau. This picture is from 2009; it was foggy at this point on our recent trip.

Prior to the 15th century, Kilauea Iki was not a crater at all, but was instead a small shield volcano called 'Aila'au. It collapsed in the aftermath of an eruption, forming a pit crater 800 feet deep (the present crater is only half that depth). One of the lava tubes formed in the eruption is today known as Nahuku (Thurston Lava Tube). It is lit, and is an easy walk from Crater Rim Road (good luck finding a parking spot on busy days). Our goal for the day was to hike the north rim of the crater, descend into west end of the crater itself, and then climb the east rim, a distance of about 3 1/2 miles.

If that looks like an abrupt dropoff to the left, it is; it's a sheer 400 foot cliff into the crater.

The trail begins in a phenomenal high altitude rain forest (4,000 feet, ~100"/year) composed mostly of native Ohi'a trees and ferns. On my last trip in 2009, the forest was filled with kahili ginger, an aggressive invasive species. It has pretty flowers, but forms thickets that crowd out the natives. I didn't see any at all this time, although I am sure they are lurking in the forest away from the trail (kudos to the trail crews removing them).

Another serious pair of problems in the native rainforests were the feral pigs and goats. The pigs arrived with the Polynesians over 1,000 years ago. The goats arrived with Captain Cook and his crew, the first Europeans to discover the islands in 1778. Both animals wreaked havoc on the forest. The animals were finally removed by the 1990s, so the forests at Hawai'i Volcanoes are approaching something resembling their original state.

Our first look at the Pu'u Pua'i and the crater interior

The day had been overcast, but as we passed in opening in the forest we could see across the crater to Pu'u Pua'i, a mountain that is younger than I am. The extraordinary eruption that produced this landscape began in November of 1959 as lava started pouring from a rift system on the south side of the Kilauea Iki crater. The eruptions consolidated into a single vent within a few days, and for the next five weeks, spectacular things happened.

Seventeen different times, lava shot high into the air, and the crater filled with millions of cubic yards of simmering basalt. At the end of an eruptive episode, some of the basalt would drain back into the vent, but as the weeks passed by, Kilauea Iki crater filled to a depth of 400 feet (recall the original crater was 800 feet deep). During the latest stages of the eruption, the lava fountain reached a height of 1,900 feet (580 meters), the highest ever recorded in Hawai'i.

In the aftermath of the eruption there was a brand new cinder cone, and a lake of molten lava. During the final draining event, the lake level dropped about fifty feet leaving behind a "bathtub ring" (sciency version: "lava subsidence terrace"). We descended out of the forest, over the bouldery terrace, and into a ghostly barren landscape. After a few minutes we passed the remains of the eruptive vent at the base of Pu'u Pau'i (below).

The eruptive vent of Pu'u Pau'i

From then on, we were walking on a lake of fire. The eruption may have ended in 1959, but a four hundred foot deep lake does not cool all at once. It doesn't take weeks, or even months. It takes decades. Four months after the eruption, the crust was only 9 feet thick! Drilling allowed researchers to track the cooling process. In 1967, the crust was 90 feet thick, and in 1975 it was up to 180 feet (See Hazlett's book for details). The lava lake was more or less solid by the late 1990s, but there is no doubt that it is still very hot down below. Whenever the rain starts (roughly every five minutes, it sometimes seems), steam can be seen rising from fractures in the lake surface (below). Steam rising up the old drill holes is hot enough to scald.

We continued across the surprisingly flat surface of the lava lake. There were pressure ridges and fractures here and there, but the trail was easy to follow, using ahu (cairns, or rock piles).

One of the most astounding things about this lake of fire is the stubbornness with which life seeks to take root. Native Ohi'as are one of the most adaptable trees on the planet. They can form hundred foot high canopies in the native rainforests, but they can also grow in one of the most ghastly environments possible, that of a fresh lava flow. We passed dozens of scraggly bush sized Ohi'as and hundreds of small ferns. Recall that the forest on the rim above is no older than 500 years. In a few centuries (barring new eruptions, which are likely), this barren surface will be a thick forest.

We reached the eastern edge of the crater just as the rain began to pour. The change back to rainforest was abrupt. We climbed four hundred feet up a relatively gentle gradient and found our way to the vehicles. We had crossed the lake of fire and survived!

We never really saw the sun on the day's journey, but when we visited in 2009, we were treated to a gorgeous rainbow as we set off across the crater floor. It was astounding.

If you ever have the chance to visit Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park and want to see a bit of the native environment of the islands (the Hawai'i that was...), this trail is one of your best chances to see what it was like.

Read more:
The Kilauea Iki Trail Guide from the National Park Service
Explore the Geology of Kilauea Volcano by Richard Hazlett (Hawai'i Pacific Parks Association)

Dreams of Summer and Southwest Travels: Hole in the Wall, Mojave National Preserve

Christmas is over and suddenly the snow and blizzards aren't so fun any more. I find myself dreaming of warmer places and times, including a great journey we took last summer across the southwest with my students. Since my current travels are over until February, I'm going to travel through the archives to check out some marvelous geology along our southwestern tier of states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. But really, no place is more southwestern than California, where we will start this journey.

The Mojave National Preserve is one of our nation's newest parks (established in 1994). It was carved out from Bureau of Land Management lands in the eastern Mojave Desert, preserving one of the most awesome sand dune complexes in the country, the Kelso Dunes, a barren landscape of geologically recent volcanic cinder cones, one of the largest Joshua Tree forests in existence, and some of the highest mountain ranges in the Mojave Desert, with rocks as old as 1.7 billion years old, as ancient as those in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The preserve also encompasses a California State Recreation Area, the Providence Mountains, and Mitchell Caverns, a unique limestone cave system. The caverns were closed during the recession, and then severely vandalized, but there are hopes that they will reopen in 2016 (see this Facebook page for updates).

One of the most interesting corners of the park is called Hole in the Wall, along with Banshee Canyon. We stayed at the nearby campground our first night on the road. It is a wonderfully isolated spot, 25 miles off the main highway, and even farther from developments of any kind. It has some of the darkest night skies I've ever seen, and it is serenely quiet (except for crickets and coyote yowls).

The region is quite unlike other parts of the Mojave. Instead of deeply eroded mountain ranges and wide flat valleys, the area around Hole in the Wall is composed of mesas and plateaus that seem to share more in common with the Colorado Plateau province just to the east. But these mesas aren't like Arizona's either. They are composed not of sedimentary layers, but of volcanic tuff, rock derived from unimaginably huge volcanic explosions the likes of which modern humans have never experienced.

Twenty million years ago, the region was one of low relief, the result of tens of millions of years of erosion and relative stability. But conditions were changing as the crust was stretched and broken up into a series of tilted fault blocks. The release of pressure on the underlying mantle allowed partial melting to take place, and volcanic activity exploded across the region.

The first eruptions took place about 18.5 million years ago when the Peach Springs tuff coated the entire region from an eruption center near Oatman, Arizona. The eruption involved as much as 150 cubic miles (640 km³) of powdery white ash that was so hot that in many places it welded into solid rock as it landed.

Shortly afterward (in geologic terms, anyway, as it was 700,000 years later), a second caldera developed. It was located even closer, in the adjacent Woods Mountains. The eruptive "crater", actually a collapse pit, was about 5-6 miles across, roughly similar in size to Crater Lake. Once again, all life was obliterated for hundreds of square miles as hot ash blanketed the landscape. The Wild Horse Mesa Tuff makes up most of the rock found at Hole in the Wall.

The strange holes that gave Hole in the Wall its name are called tafoni. Small differences in the degree of solidification or cementation cause depressions to form which end up staying wet longer, and the minerals decay into small fragments that can easily wash or blow away.

A short trail (1.5 miles) loops around Banshee Mountain and explores the best of the eroded tuff. Starting at the small visitor center, the trail drops through a rugged narrow canyon. There are some drop-offs, but rings have been attached to the canyon wall, making it a lot easier to climb up or down. Once past the narrows, the trail has a gentle gradient, and provides interesting views in all directions. There is a nice collection of petroglyphs on some of the boulders around the south end of the mountain.

If you want to visit this fascinating corner of the desert, you'll have to search it out. It's not a quick roadside stop, but is instead a place to take a bit of time to explore. The time is well worth it!

Driving Through the Most Dangerous Plate Boundary in the World: A Gentle Landscape Belies a Fiery Past

As we leave the Great Valley behind on our journey through the most dangerous plate boundary in the world, we finally enter the world of the Sierra Nevada. Many may think of Yosemite Valley or Lake Tahoe when the Sierras are mentioned, but the mountains rise modestly from the west side. The transition from the flat Great Valley to the gentle rolling terrain of the Sierra Nevada is not always obvious. Because most of my Sierra journeys begin there, we'll start in the central part of the range, the drainages of the Tuolumne, Merced, and Stanislaus Rivers. The picture below is the new bridge over the Tuolumne River near Old Basso Bridge upstream of Turlock Lake State Recreational Area.

This quiet gentle landscape belies a violent past in several ways. The initial rock outcrops along the rivers look sedimentary, given that they are layered and are composed of gravel, sand and silt, but the origin of some of these rocks was in fire. They are volcanic. Secondly, the lowermost rock layer found here contained gold, and miners ripped into these rocks with a ferocity that would humble today's heavy equipment operators. Thirdly, the rocks underlying these sediments record the intense deformation related to terrane collisions in an earlier time, when the Ancestral Sierra Nevada was forming.

The Sierra Nevada begins as prairie, or near the rivers, forests of cottonwood, sycamore, oak and the occasional Gray Pine. It's dry country, a far cry from the cool pine forests and alpine peaks that people usually associate with the Sierra Nevada. One can choose to follow the high-speed roads like Highway 108 out of Oakdale, or Highway 140 out of Merced, but I suggest some of the quieter avenues, like Lake Road or Highway 132. There are ranch roads that provide an even more serene journey through the foothills. The picture below is from Warnerville and Willms Roads east of Oakdale.

The basal sedimentary rock is called the Ione formation. The gravels, sands and clays of the Ione were deposited in a distinctly different environment than we see today. The sand was deposited along a beach strand, the clays (and associated low-grade coal deposits) in coastal estuaries and swamps, while the gravels settled in large rivers flowing into the coastal delta complex. Fossils in the Ione indicate tropical conditions. The Sierra of 40-50 million years ago was a coastal jungle, not unlike the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico today!

Things changed around 25 million years ago. The climate cooled, the sea retreated to the west, and intense rhyolite eruptions began from calderas off to the east, near the present-day Sierra Crest, and farther away in central Nevada. These eruptions produced not lava, but volcanic ash, the pulverized remains of rock that exploded rather than flowed. These eruptions are the most violent known, killing all life over hundreds or thousands of square miles. The Sierra Nevada, a mountain range that had been laid low by erosion, was stirring again. The mountains were about to rise again...

Next up: mud. Lots and lots of mud...