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

Shock Jocks Attack My Students: Who Serves Society Better?

So let's see. I have hundreds of students in my classes every year whose goal is to better themselves, and to work for the betterment of society. They are young students just out of high school who are seeking direction, they are single mothers trying to get off welfare and start working, they are newly jobless working to learn skills for a new career, they are retired people who want to learn something new. They have goals for their lives, and we are a pathway for them to achieve their goals. When I say they want to work for the betterment of society, I mean it. Among my many students are idealistic people who want to become police, nurses, firefighters, and teachers.

So, I get word that some shock jock radio guys named Ken and John at KFI Radio in Los Angeles think that community colleges are a scam, and that the students who attend are parasites.

Let's see what I remember from my core biology class at Chaffey Community College: A parasite is a creature that attaches itself to some kind of host, and draws its nourishment from the blood or organs of the host without giving anything in return. Parasites weaken and cause damage to the host organism. Tapeworms are an example of a parasite.

On the other hand, there are symbionts. In symbiosis, organisms also draw nourishment from their host, but they give something back. There is a mutual benefit in the relationship. Bees draw their nourishment from flowers, but in traveling from one flower to another, they pollinate and allow the plants to reproduce and flourish.

Which of these describe the students with whom I work every day? And what term describes ignorant radio hosts?

It seems that conservatives have long pushed the idea that people have to take personal responsibility for improving their lives. I've heard them say that people don't have the right of "equality" of resources (i.e. socialism), but that they should have equality of opportunity. I don't disagree with this. It is, in fact, why I teach. I want to give all my students the opportunity to succeed, and I work very hard to encourage them. And they work very hard to achieve their goals. Some fail. It happens. But many of them succeed against very long odds. I gain so much from my relationship with my students, and society benefits as they become qualified for better jobs and careers, especially in the fields where they help improve the lives of others. If you want to look at it from a purely economic point of view, educated people have better jobs, have more money to spend on products and services, and pay more in taxes.

Given that such radio personalities want to "shock" their audience and thus raise their ratings, well, it worked. I'm shocked, and I am paying attention to their advertisers. I don't think that these advertisers want to know what I think about them when they support people like Ken and John. I want all my readers to pay attention to these advertisers. And let them know about the kind of people they support with their advertising dollars. They will, by the way, never see a penny from me...

Here are the advertisers, from the website at KFI Radio (links on their website):

American Vision Windows

Auto Insurance Specialists

AT&T Wireless

Ayres Hotels

Cadillac

Covenant Debt Solutions

Cunning Dental Group

Intercap Lending

Jarvis & Krieger Attorneys at Law

Saddleback Eye Center

Susan's Healthy Gourmet

Warehouse Discount Center

By the way, the website of these same men has pictures of the Republican state senators and assembly people who are still negotiating on the budget with stakes through their heads and bird droppings on their head. Does such violent imagery have a place in our societal discourse? I hope you will consider contacting these legislators and tell them you support the community college system.

I am proud of my students. I am proud to be a teacher. I am proud to be part of the single largest system of higher education in the world with 2.7 million students, a system that trains 80% of our police and firefighters and 70% of our nurses. And I am appalled when people like Ken and John are given such a loud platform to spread their ignorance and hate. I would ignore them, but apparently they have one of the larger audiences in the south state.

People like Ken and John are the true parasites.