The Other California: Limekiln, Part 3 - A Park Without a Friend

I'm heartbroken.

Limekiln State Park is closing. As soon as next month, you will not be able to visit this precious place. For the lack of $22 million dollars, 70 of California's state parks will be closing down. That's an average of just over $300,000 per park. The math is appalling: a single penny from each resident of California could keep Limekiln State Park open. A mere 70 cents or so from each resident could keep all 70 parks open. But our legislature couldn't do it. Our legislature, because of a minority party so intent on never raising taxes for any reason at all, would not even let the people of California choose for themselves whether to keep the parks through the referendum process. I am ashamed of this legislature, and I am ashamed that I am represented by a senator and an assemblyperson who are part of the Republican party.

What is it worth to these people in the legislature to make sure their rich benefactors don't pay a few extra dollars in taxes? Is it truly so important to them that they would destroy the things that can make California a livable place?  The education system of our state? The safety net for the most vulnerable of our citizens, the poor, the sick, the infirm? Clean air and water? The careers of teachers, nurses, police and firefighters? I'm heartbroken and angry.

There are some things you can do for the parks. Assembly Bill 42 has passed the state legislature and is headed to Governor Brown's office. It will allow partnerships with non-profit organizations to keep some parks open. A few of them anyway; you can sign a petition here asking Brown to sign the bill. You can also support the California State Parks Foundation. They've been doing good work.

I fear that Limekiln is a park without friends. There are certainly people who love the park (including some recent commenters), but it doesn't sit next to any urban centers where volunteers can easily donate their time. It's isolated and wild, a feature that makes it a wonderful place to explore, but it doesn't get enough visitors to support a "Limekiln State Park Foundation" as far as I know. No, I think this park will be simply swept away for budget considerations, and we will all be poorer for it.

And a penny from everyone was all that it needed....

The Other California: Limekiln State Park, Part 2 - What lies upstream?

Does anyone see the gnome climbing out of the fallen log?

The Other California is my on-again/off-again long running series on the fascinating corners of California that don't always make onto the postcards. The last post concerned a little-known state park on the Big Sur Coast, Limekiln State Park. We had a look at the small bouldery beach under a beautiful bridge on Highway One. We ended up wondering what lay upstream.

The first thing one notices is the redwood forest just a few yards upstream, and the park campground. The redwood grove here is one of the southernmost of the species, and according to some sources may even be a distinct subspecies. Many of the trees were cut in the 1880s (see below), but the forest has recovered nicely, and the campground is in a wonderfully scenic setting among tall trees and a loud babbling creek. Some areas of the park were damaged in the Chalk Fire of 2008.

The campground is decidedly different than most state park campgrounds. Space is at a premium, and sites are very close to each other as if planners were trying to stuff as many spaces as possible in the limited flat ground. This is a clue to the heritage of the park; it was once privately owned (one hiking guide calls it "Big Sur funky"). Limekiln only became a state park in 1995.

We had a sweet little experience on our visit. We were foolishly vagabonding, hoping to catch an empty camping spot on the Big Sur Coast...in the summer. Talk about a hopeless quest! The hosts at the camps farther south laughed when we asked about open spaces or cancellations. The young man at the Limekiln station looked at our small car, and suggested we check campsite 26 1/2, a campsite that doesn't actually exist, much like Harry Potter's King's Cross train station gate 9 3/4. There was no parking, and barely enough space for the Taj MaHayes tent, but it worked and we had a delightful night. Such a crowded campground has a potential for much noise and mayhem, but the night was quiet, and one of the darkest I can ever remember experiencing. During a late-night stroll, the only light in the whole camp was a single candle on a table, and the dim light flickered mysteriously in the trees up above.

As a new state park, the hiking system is not highly developed, but the trails are quite pleasant to explore. One trail follows the West Fork of Limekiln Creek to the limekilns. The park preserves exposures of Mesozoic granitic rocks and older metamorphic rocks, including marble. Marble is metamorphic limestone, which is an important component of concrete and cement. It must be heated to become lime, and that is what the limekilns are all about.

For three years starting in 1887, a group of kilns used locally cut redwoods to bake the limestone, and the lime was transported to the beach. Ships picked up the barrels of lime for use in Monterey and other nearby towns.

I was expecting brick kilns, like those I have seen in Death Valley and the Owens Valley, but these kilns were made of iron. They are slowly being reclaimed by the forest. There are even redwoods and ferns sprouting on the roof of the ovens. The structures were just a bit eerie to me.

Another trail rises gently through Hare Creek. The water was sparklingly clear, and there was plenty of it, despite the late August date. The deep blue pools were inviting.

I've saved the best for last. Off the Kiln trail is a side trail to Limekiln Falls. It's one of California's unique treasures. The falls are about 100 feet high, and cascade down a cone-shaped edifice that is different than the usual cliffs found in the state. Flowing through the marble, the upstream portion of the creek picks up calcium carbonate (the mineral calcite), and some of the mineral precipitates out of the water while evaporating on the flight down the falls. I'm guessing that it is a similar phenomena that has produced the beautiful Havasu Falls in Grand Canyon.

The falls are one of the prettiest sights I've seen this summer. So, here is a little known state park that contains a beautiful waterfall, an inspiring redwood grove that is one of the southernmost in the world, a world-class beach, interesting metamorphic and plutonic rocks, and which includes a pleasant creek and cozy little campground. Doesn't it sound like a wonderful place to visit?

Well, you can't. Not anymore. As early as this October, Limekiln State Park will no longer be accessible to any of you. Find out why in the next post...

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: Mono Lake, the Barren, Worthless Wasteland

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel is an informal exploration of the geology of an interesting slice of the American West that I followed in July. Our rules were simple: see something new, or see something we'd seen before, but in a new way. We had been to Mono Lake many, many times (our previous visit was only a few days earlier), but in all our visits we had never spent the night or watched the sun set there. We grabbed some sandwiches at the Whoa Nellie Deli and parked on the near by hill top to watch the twilight envelope the barren Mono Lake basin. Click on the panorama picture above to see what we saw...

What a wasteland! It's dry, so there are vast areas of nothing but sagebrush. There's the lake, but the lake is so salty that no fish can live in it, just fairy shrimp and disgusting brine flies and their wiggling grubs. Nobody goes sailing or swimming in the scummy water. It's a worthless piece of real estate...

That's the way we judge a place, isn't it? Real estate...monetary value. And that's the way Mono Lake was judged too, for a long time. The water flowing into the lake was going to waste, so Los Angeles diverted the incoming streams, and the lake started to shrink. It was destined to become another dry lake, like Owens Lake did in the 1920's.

During the ice ages, glacial meltwater filled the fault basin, and the water overflowed into the adjacent basins, eventually flowing into Death Valley. The lake was 600 feet deeper than it is today, and covered a much larger area. As late as 1940, the lake was 45 feet deeper than it is now.

Migratory birds discovered Mono Lake thousands of years ago, and found the fairy shrimp and brine flies a rich source of protein to sustain them on their long journeys. As more and more wetlands disappeared along the coast and in the Central Valley because of human development, the Mono Lake area became an ever more important stop on the migratory flyways. Dozens of bird species (and many millions of individual birds) depend on this lake for survival. What is worthless to humans is life itself to the birds.

The fight to save the ecosystem at Mono Lake began in the 1970s as researchers started to realize the importance of the lake to the migratory birds. A 1994 decision by the California State Water Resources Control Board required that diversions be reduced, and the level of the lake be stabilized at 17 feet above the lowest post-1941 level. The problems are not all solved; the Mono Lake Committee is a good source of information on current issues.

What is the value of a place? If one tries to put a monetary value on a landscape, many places would be deemed worthless. Mono Lake basin once supported a modest agricultural economy, but the Great Depression destroyed the economy in the region, making it worthless enough for Los Angeles to move in. How many places across the country face similar choices...especially in today's economy? Surely it wouldn't hurt to build just one more dam here, or to build another housing development on farmlands, or drill another natural gas fracking well? It's a difficult issue of course. We have to have the homes, the energy, and the water. But who is looking out for the air, the water, the soil, and the other intangible values of a landscape that ultimately make life possible?

By the way, I bet you could pick up some cheap farmland in Texas right now...it's ripe for development.

I can talk about another aspect of the value of the Mono Lake Basin. It is one of the most stunning geological landscapes in the country. It is an active fault basin, with numerous scarps attesting to recent earthquake activity. Some of the youngest volcanic features in the U.S. are present on the south shore of the lake at Panum Crater and the rest of the Mono Craters. The islands in the lake (Negit and Paoha are shown in the pictures above) include a recent cinder cone and uplifted lake sediments from intrusions below the surface. The tufa towers, built by the action of algae and freshwater springs, have become a world-famous attraction for tourists.

What a shame that the state of California has decided to close their part of the lake, Mono Lake State Park, because the legislature can't see their way to an agreement to fund the park and 69 others that are slated to close next year. Maybe we can sell the worthless land to someone who can profitably develop it?

Anyway, what a beautiful, peaceful sunset, with the moon rising over the Mono Craters. Despite any misunderstandings about my title for this blogpost, Mono Lake is a treasure, one worth protecting.

California's Shame: The State Mineral Exhibit to Close; What will you do with your 58 cents?

For the lack of $22 million dollars, 70 California State Parks are closing. That's 58 cents for each resident of the state (thanks to Christy Rowe for pointing out the numbers). Now those in higher tax brackets (and their bought-and-paid-for representatives in the legislature) who think they pay too much for the right to be rich will argue that it really means a nickel from each of us and a whole 3 or 4 dollars from them. Well, whatever. The state parks of California are the real jewels of our state, and closing them costs each of us money in lost tourism. Just ask the folks in Mariposa, home of the California State Mining and Mineral Exhibit. It's one of the parks slated to close, and it is truly a gem (in fact, lots of gems, literally). It's ironic. The state mineral, which symbolizes our state, is gold, and the largest nugget remaining from the Gold Rush days is in this museum. Here is a blog entry from the Other California series that I posted on July 31st of last year:

The CA State Mineral Museum - this is art, darnit!

I know it when I see it. Purveyors of that which we would not call art would use shiny perfect minerals that would cause the viewer to objectify the image, and desire to possess it without appreciating or respecting the intrinsic value and quality of the mineral. I would never stoop that low just to get readership here at Geotripper. Just ignore the "xxx" and "big gold nuggets" in the blog tags. Besides, these things are in a museum. That makes this art, darnit!
And what a great museum it is! One would think that the official state mineral collection would be housed in the state capitol somewhere, or in San Francisco or Los Angeles. The collection actually was in San Francisco for many years, surviving the 1906 earthquake, but in 1983 the collection was moved to Mariposa in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode, where it resides in the California State Mining and Mineral Museum, a unit of the state park system. The choice of Mariposa makes a certain amount of historical sense, as the town hosted one of the very first hardrock mines and mills during the Gold Rush, the Mariposa, discovered by Kit Carson and ultimately owned by John C. Fremont, two of the big players in early state history.

One of the premier attractions of the collection is the Fricot nugget (that's a part of it at the top of the page), the largest single remaining nugget from the Gold Rush days, at 13.8 pounds. It sits in a vault within a vault. Most large nuggets were simply melted down (there is a larger nugget at the Ironstone Winery, but it was found in the 1990's at the Harvard Mine). There is a facsimile of the biggest nugget ever found, which originally weighed in at around 200 pounds.

The other smaller gold sample shown above is extraordinary as it shows the crystalline nature of the metal. The mineral forms octahedral crystals, but they aren't seen often because the malleable metal gets pounded into the more familiar nugget shape while being rolled in a stream. Samples like this one have to come from the quartz veins in mines.


The museum has a spectacular collection of other minerals, including some of the best specimens of our state gemstone benitoite. This exceedingly rare sapphire-like crystal is found at a single locality in the world, a serpentine outcrop in the Coast Ranges of San Benito County.

The museum has a host of other minerals on display, like the malachite sample above, and the aquamarine sample below. There are some excellent interpretive exhibits regarding the history and current state of mining in California, and even a 175 foot long tunnel that recreates a gold mine.

Admission is $4.00, but they offer discounts for school field trips (call in advance). The staff and volunteers are knowledgeable and helpful. The museum is located on Highway 49 just south of the town of Mariposa at the county fairgrounds. Unfortunately, the museum has been one of the pawns in the state budget wars, and has been threatened with closure off and on. It could use some friends in the capitol...

The Other California is part of my continuing explorations of the California that you don't always find on the postcards.

California's Shame: Closing Castle Crags to save tax breaks for the Rich

There is a budget crisis in California, due largely to a crippling recession, but also because a certain political party has decided that NO issue is important enough to talk about raising taxes on the richest members of our society, or that we must not continue to pay taxes and fees that we are already paying. To give you sense of what is at stake (and don't even ask me about education, health care, police and firefighters) I am reposted a few of my explorations of some of California's best places: the state parks. This episode of the Other California was originally posted last year on April 11...


Driving on Interstate 5 north of Redding is a sometimes terrifying affair. The highway follows the Sacramento River in a winding canyon with plenty of twists and turns. The terror isn't necessarily the road itself as much as it is the giant trucks and recreational vehicles which are being driven as if they were still on a straight freeway in the Central Valley. They don't exactly stick to their lanes. The other hazard comes from following geologists on their way north to see Mt. Shasta: at a particular loop on the highway near Dunsmuir, they are very likely to slam on the brakes as the Castle Crags come into view...

This is part of my continuing series on the "Other California", an exploration of those wonderful parts of our state that don't always show up on the postcards. Today we are wrapping up a journey through the Klamath Mountains. It has not been an exhaustive survey as it is one of the corners of the state that I have yet to fully explore. I want to reiterate my invitation: be a geotripper geoblogger! Have you been to Shasta Caverns? Backpacking in the Trinity Alps? Explored any gold mines near Weaverville or Shasta City? Write a short narrative, or if you don't trust your writing skills, just send some nice pictures, and I will find something to say.

The Castle Crags are certainly a shock when first seen from Interstate 5. The light-colored cliffs rise 3,000-4,000 feet above the river canyon, and stand in stark contrast to the lower heavily forested ridges that make up most of the surrounding area. The peaks and domes remind some people of the Sierra Nevada, and the comparison is apt; the Crags are composed of granitic rock, and as noted previously, the Klamaths are a northern extension of the Sierra Nevada. Their geologic history is similar, with one big difference: the Sierra range is composed mainly of granite intrusions (plutons), but in the Klamath Mountains, the intrusions are smaller and isolated from each other.

A batholith is a single intrusion exposed over an area of 100 square kilometers (40 square miles), although the term can also refer to a vast agglomeration of many dozens of adjacent plutons, as is the case in the Sierra Nevada. There are several of these composite batholiths in the western United States, including the Sierra Nevada, the Idaho, and the Southern California batholiths. The Castle Crags and other small isolated plutons are referred to as stocks. The limited areal extent of the Castle Crags pluton is apparent in the photo below. The surrounding rocks are the more easily eroded metamorphic rocks of the Eastern Klamath Terrane (the Trinity Complex).

The rocks of the Castle Crags formed about 163 million years ago when the Pacific Plate sank beneath the edge of the North American continent in an extensive subduction zone (the same kind of subduction that produces the Cascades volcanoes in the present day). Water released from the descending plate acted like a catalyst leading to the melting of rock deep in earth's interior, and the resulting magma bodies rose until they lay just a few miles beneath the surface. The rock cooled slowly, over tens of thousands of years, forming granodiorite (a coarse-grained granitic rock with significant amounts of plagioclase feldspar). At times, magma reached the surface producing volcanic eruptions, but the volcanoes at Castle Crags have long been worn away. In other words, standing on the granitic rock of the peaks here, one is actually perched under a long-gone volcano.

The sharp spires and rounded domes of the Crags are the result of having a great weight removed. Having formed at depths of three miles or more, the rocks expanded as erosion removed the heavy overlying rocks. But rocks can't expand like marshmallows; they fracture, much like the crust of baking loaves of bread. Vertical cracks are joints. Closely spaced joints promote the formation of the spires and towers of granitic rock. Fractures parallel to the surface are called exfoliation sheets. Exfoliation tends to remove to remove corners and edges, resulting in the formation of domes (Half Dome in Yosemite is a half-good example).

The Castle Crags were also glaciated, but with top elevations of less than 7,000 feet, the glaciers were small, and had less to do with the overall shape of the mountains than jointing and exfoliation. A few small lakes and moraines are found on the north side of the peaks.

Castle Crags State Park honors the Castle Crags, but does not actually encompass them. The park boundaries include the heavily forested southern and eastern flanks of the crags, and part of the Sacramento River, but the granitic cliffs and domes are protected as the Castle Crags Wilderness Area, administered by Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The state park offers a nice campground, with several trailheads that provide access to parts of the wilderness, as well as 8 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. A park road leads to a spectacular viewpoint that takes in the Crags and nearby Mt. Shasta.

Vennum, Walter, 1980, Petrology of the Castle Crags pluton, Klamath Mountains, California: Summary, GSA Bulletin; v. 91; no. 5; p. 255-258.

Vennum, Walter, 1994, Castle Crags, California Geology, March/April, pages 31-38.

California's Shame

Look at the following pictures, and see if you can tell what they have in common...

If you guessed that these are important geologic localities in California, you would be partly right, and if you guessed that these are parts of California's wonderful State Park System, you would also be right. But the correct answer to the question of the day is that each of these is a picture of a California State Park that will be closing in a few weeks because the legislature can't produce a budget. This, despite that fact that every dollar spent to support a state park produces something like four dollars of economic activity in nearby towns.

There is a political party that is so adamant about not raising or maintaining taxes that they won't even let us decide as voters to continue taxes and fees that we are already paying to keep our parks open, to educate our students, to feed our hungry, to provide support for our unemployed. This political party thinks that despite the pain that nearly everyone in this state has suffered during our depression, the rich and well-to-do must not be inconvenienced by slightly higher taxes. It's more important to fire a policeman, a nurse or a teacher than it is to ask a person in comfortable circumstances to pay a bit more for the privilege of living in a society that allowed them to become rich. Kristin Olsen of the California state assembly? I'm talking about you. And Tom Berryhill of the state senate? I'm talking about you too. You supposedly represent me and my neighbors in Sacramento. Stop representing your rich benefactors, and try representing the people who live in your districts instead.

Yes, I am angry. I've given up thousands of dollars in lost wages these last two years, and have lost the entire equity that my house accrued over the last twenty years, but I would happily pay a few more dollars in taxes to keep our parks open, and to help the state maintain the programs that keep our people healthy and educated.

Wondering which parks are closing down? Here is the entire list, courtesy of the California State Parks Foundation (they also provide a few ideas of what to do):

Anderson Marsh State Historic Park
Annadel State Park
Antelope Valley Indian Museum State Historic Park
Austin Creek State Recreation Area
Bale Grist Mill State Historic Park
Benbow Lake State Recreation Area
Benicia Capitol State Historic Park
Benicia State Recreation Area
Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park
Bothe-Napa Valley State Park
Brannan Island State Recreation Area
California State Mining and Mineral Museum Park Property
Candlestick Point State Recreation Area
Castle Crags State Park
Castle Rock State Park
China Camp State Park
Colusa-Sacramento River State Recreation Area
Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park
Fort Humboldt State Historic Park
Fort Tejon State Historic Park
Garrapata State Park
George J. Hatfield State Recreation Area
Governors Mansion State Historic Park
Gray Whale Cove State Beach
Greenwood State Beach
Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park
Hendy Woods State Park
Henry W. Coe State Park
Jack London State Historic Park
Jug Handle State Reserve
Leland Stanford Mansion State Historic Park
Limekiln State Park
Los Encinos State Historic Park
Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park
Manchester State Park
McConnell State Recreation Area
McGrath State Beach
Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve
Morro Strand State Beach
Moss Landing State Beach
Olompali State Historic Park
Palomar Mountain State Park
Petaluma Adobe State Historic Park
Picacho State Recreation Area
Pio Pico State Historic Park
Plumas-Eureka State Park
Point Cabrillo Light Station Park Property
Portola Redwoods State Park
Providence Mountains State Recreation Area
Railtown 1897 State Historic Park
Russian Gulch State Park
Saddleback Butte State Park
Salton Sea State Recreation Area
Samuel P. Taylor State Park
San Pasqual Battlefield State Historic Park
Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park
Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park
Shasta State Historic Park
South Yuba River State Park
Standish-Hickey State Recreation Area
Sugarloaf Ridge State Park
Tomales Bay State Park
Tule Elk State Reserve
Turlock Lake State Recreation Area
Twin Lakes State Beach
Weaverville Joss House State Historic Park
Westport-Union Landing State Beach
William B. Ide Adobe State Historic Park
Woodson Bridge State Recreation Area
Zmudowski State Beach Map