From the Archives: The Other California- A Wandering Volcano and a Floral Outburst

I don't expect to be able to visit the Southern California "Superbloom", this year, but I have seen it in the past, and thought you might enjoy some geological perspectives on why the poppies do so well in the western Mojave Desert. I found it an interesting story. I also updated the photos to include higher resolution  and added a few bonus shots. This story appeared April 18, 2010 (that's the late Pleistocene in blog years...)

I can still be astounded....

There are lots of things I haven't seen and done in my life, but I can imagine what it is going to be like to see a rhyolitic volcano erupting at close quarters, or to feel a magnitude 8 quake (6.9 is my biggest so far). But sometimes things happen that just leave me breathless, if only from the unexpectedness of it all. That's what happened to me today.

I had always heard about the Antelope Valley California Poppy State Reserve, but had never seen it, especially in the late winter or early spring when the blooms are at their peak. We were taking an alternate route home, generally following the San Andreas fault from Cajon Pass to Grapevine Summit on Interstate 5. The desert was mostly dry and barren for much of the route, but as we passed Palmdale and Lancaster, I looked west and saw something I had never seen before: orange hills. Fluorescent orange hills. As we drew closer, it was clear that the California Poppies were at their golden best.

After expending several hours using vast amounts of digital space on my camera, I started to ponder why the flowers were here, and not elsewhere across the Mojave Desert, at least not in such dominating numbers. I first considered the slightly higher elevation, the local rocks and sediment, soil conditions and drainage, but I started to realize there was another dynamic going on...the flowers are a natural phenomena, but a natural phenomena with a very human influence. About seven miles west of the Poppy preserve there is another state park: Arthur B. Ripley Desert Woodland State Park. The park preserves 580 acres of what turns out to be the native land cover of the Mojave Desert west of Lancaster and Palmdale: juniper woodland and Joshua Trees.

A century ago, this high end of the desert was cleared of Joshua Trees and Juniper, usually by chaining (dragging a huge chain between tractors that knocked down whole forests) or fires in order to put in thousands of acres of alfalfa fields and other crops. Large areas were reserved for sheep and cattle grazing as well. The natural plant cover was long gone. Much later, some of the abandoned fields started to recover, and the showy wildflowers represent some of the pioneer species (I've noticed for years that the best wildflower shows in any forested areas occur after fires: Yellowstone, Yosemite, and many other areas). Without any nearby natural vegetation, there is no way for the native Joshua Trees and other large trees and shrubs to recolonize the valley floor; they don't have any method to spread their seeds widely (Joshua Trees were once spread in giant ground sloth poop...). Despite their incredible beauty, the wildflower displays are a monument to our extensive alteration of the environment that once existed here.

Just the same, the flowers were one of the most intense displays of color I've ever seen. Lest you think that I had discovered some isolated and unknown Eden, well, a look at the photo below should dissuade you from thinking that these poppies are a well-kept secret. It was actually impossible to get to the park visitor center due to the traffic. Just the same, there was plenty of parking both east and west of the park, and the poppies and other flowers were every bit as abundant. We had no trouble finding some wonderfully quiet corners to contemplate the beauty (addendum: trampling of the flower meadows is a real concern, especially this year. If you visit, stay on the roads and trails).

As to the wandering volcano of the title? Just west of the preserve, some unusual rock outcrops can be seen near the junction of Lancaster road and Highway 138 at Neenach. These rocks, the Neenach Volcanics, are about 23.5 million years old, and lie adjacent to the San Andreas fault. The volcano is only half here; the remainder sits on the other side of the fault, 195 miles to the northwest, at Pinnacles National Monument, which I have discussed earlier, here and here. For several reasons, the Neenach Volcanics have not been exposed in the spectacular manner of the rocks at Pinnacles, but the story they tell is just as compelling.

So there, I found a geologic connection that allowed me to show you some flower pictures. You'll probably see a few more gratuitous flower pictures in coming posts. I took around a hundred, and I have to show them to somebody...

For those who are new to Geotripper, the "Other California" is my long-running web series on the fascinating geological places in my fine state that don't usually show up on the postcards (although I've been known to break my own rules every so often; California's poppies are on postcards all the time).

Life from an Ant's Point of View: Springtime in the Sierra Foothills

I find that the average lifespan of an ant is something like a month or two. So bear with me while I have some silly thoughts about ant culture. What must the average ant think when it sees the explosion of color above when spring arrives in Sierra Nevada foothills? Probably not much, but it's fun to imagine the legends they might pass on down through the generations. "Your great aunt ant? Remember her? She was so old: four months. She told us of a time when the brown stalks were green and alive with color, and there was sweet nectar in the midst of the plants, and it was a time of richness, never to be forgotten in our legends"

I was off on another adventure this weekend. It was work, actually, helping a relative move in Southern California. I've been down Highway 99 probably 150 times in the last 25 years, so when we woke up this morning, the San Bernardino to Bakersfield drive prior to following Highway 99 to our home near Modesto just did not seem all that...appealing.

Luckily, we did not have a strict schedule, so we got very creative, seeing if we could spend as little time as possible on Highways 58, 14 and 138, and despite all my explorations, we found four roads that I have never traveled, or hadn't traveled in more than 25 years. They included Lone Pine Canyon along the San Andreas fault near Cajon Pass, Backus Road and Willow Springs Road outside of Mojave, Woodford-Tehachapi Road at the top of the Tehachapi Mountains, and Arvin Road at the bottom of the Tehachapi Mountains. Four adventures in one day, capped by the 200 mile drive on Highway 99 to Modesto. We had the most fun on the first part...

I took 200 pictures, and Mrs. Geotripper took even more, so there are probably a few more posts coming in the next few days, discussing faults, wind energy, trains, and wildflowers. Since wildflowers are the subject of today's photos, I can report that spring has arrived at the very south end of the Great Valley, and there are some beautiful sights along Highway 223 out of Arvin to the junction with Highway 58. It's been a dry year, so I don't know how the long the show will last. I don't know how often people find a reason to visit Arvin, but this is a really good time to head there. More coming on wildflowers!

Meanwhile, please enjoy these few shots of life from an ant's point of view....

A Day in the Field...Doing Geology in the Mother Lode

The state flower growing in the state rock next to a site where the state mineral was being mined...the only thing missing was the state mammal, and it's been missing for 80 years. On second thought, I would prefer not to have run into our state mammal anyway. It's the California grizzly, after all. I am talking about an early spring arrival California poppy growing in an exposure of serpentine along a fault in California's Mother Lode where gold was being mined from the 1850's through the 1930's. I was in the field last Saturday!

It's been an emotionally tough week. The sorrow and grief over the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, compounded by the ongoing meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has been bearing down on most of us. We face draconian budget cuts in our state educational system, and friends and fellow workers received layoff notices this week. Science is under attack at a time when it needs to be upheld as a way of working through serious and profound problems that face society in agriculture, energy and climate change. But the right questions aren't even being asked or discussed.

I have felt despair in so many ways. But like I said, I was in the field last Saturday, and I learned something. Teachers may think of their role as trying to inspire their students, but sometimes it's the other way around. The thirty students inspired me as they discovered some new things about their world. I wasn't dragging them around; they were pulling me...

We were exploring the southern Mother Lode between the Gold Rush towns of Mariposa and Jamestown, and learned how the gold was mined, how it formed, and a bit about the environmental devastation the mining caused. We got to collect the gold ore, quartz crystals, a rare chromium mica called mariposite, and pyrite. We also had a nice view up the Merced River towards Yosemite Valley! El Capitan is the steep cliff on the left, the tip of Half Dome appears just left of center, and Clouds Rest is the snowy peak behind El Cap.

We started at the dredge tailings around Snelling and Merced Falls. To get at microscopic bits of gold that had been carried down the rivers into the Central Valley, the mining companies dug holes down to the groundwater table, forming ponds in which they floated a factory ship that dug out one end of the pond, processed the sediments for gold, and dumped the waste on the other end. They worked their way across the landscape, ripping up the topsoil and leaving behind square miles of rockpiles. The land is mostly useless now, but it provided us an opportunity to identify the kinds of rocks that occur upstream, and which reveal something of Sierran history. There was quartzite (baked and pressurized beach sands), metavolcanic greenstone, slate, and occasional fragments of marble and granite. Three quarters of the rocks found in the Sierra are various types of granitic rock, but in the Mother Lode, the more ancient and more common metamorphic rocks tell a story of ancient shorelines, terrane collisions, volcanism and other activity. These rocks are far older than the granitic intrusions.
Later in the day we explored an abandoned gold mine (just the outside, mind you) where we found the most interesting minerals, and found the famous outcrop just west of Coulterville where we could see the minerals and rocks in their original arrangement. This stretch of the Mother Lode was relatively barren of gold, so the outcrop was not mined like so many others.

It was nice to see them discussing and exploring the outcrop! That doesn't always happen.

Our day included a stop at the California State Mining and Mineral Museum in Mariposa, where a great many spectacular specimens are on display. I photograph a different group of minerals every time I visit, and somehow I concentrated on the gold this time. The leafy gold above is a piece of a larger 44 lb nugget discovered at the Harvard Open Pit Mine just before it closed down in the 1990's (the big nugget is on display at the Ironstone Winery in Murphys, a bit farther north just off of Highway 49. Below is the Fricot Nugget, weighing in at 13 lbs. It's the biggest specimen on display, and one of the largest to survive the Gold Rush era without being melted down. If you are curious, the largest single specimen ever found in the state weighed just short of 200 lbs. It got melted down, but a replica is on display in the museum.

Strangely enough, the specimen I found most interesting was one of the smallest. We tend think of gold as nuggets that have been rolled in a stream and rounded off. We don't often think of gold crystals, but there it is below. Gold crystallizes in the isometric (cubic) system, but not generally as square cubes. The specimen below looks to be more like a dodecahedron.

Across from the mine site we took a brief excursion into the Earth's mantle, which is normally found many miles below the crust, but which been pushed up to the surface along a major fault system. Most of the mantle rock (peridotite)has been altered to serpentine, but we could find some chunks of mostly unaltered mantle material.

We ended the day with stops to look at the abandoned Harvard Open Pit Mine that operated in the 1980's and 1990's, and at Table Mountain near Jamestown, a famous example of an inverted stream. I may have more to say about it next week, since our geology club is intending to climb it this weekend (in the rain, probably).

All in all it was a good day, a brief respite from sorrow, and a day of being inspired by the enthusiasm of some great students.

A Letter to Governor Schwarzenegger and the California Legislature...About Serpentine!?!

I seriously can't believe that with all the crap going on in the California state legislature over the budget, which does in fact have a direct bearing on my employment, my school and my town, that I'm spending time on an issue that shouldn't have come up in the first place, but there it is: a group of people want to remove the designation of serpentine as our state rock. I understand their feelings about asbestos, but they are aiming for the wrong target. Serpentinite is a rock that sometimes has chrysotile asbestos in it. But not always. And chrysotile, while dangerous if it gets into the lungs as small particles, is not the most dangerous form of asbestos fibers. Those from the amphibole group are far more worse. And there are possible legal ramifications in this bill, which I am not qualified to discuss. But I find myself wondering why lawyers are on record supporting this "non-controversial" bill.

In any case, I have been trying for the last week to distill the arguments concerning this bill into a concise narrative that I can convey to the Assembly and to the governor. Yesterday's diary at Daily Kos was getting closer. The senate already passed the bill without a single dissenting vote a few weeks ago (UPDATE 7/10: this gets weirder and weirder. The Senate passed the bill last year, not a few weeks ago, but the bill they passed was about anaerobic compost. Then the entire language of the bill was swapped out in favor of the serpentine business. This is getting so fishy; Dan Walters at the Sacramento Bee is on the issue now, and I think he nails it). The bill is now in front of the Assembly and apparently to be voted on in the next few weeks. If you agree that this is a bad course of action, I would hope that you might consider getting involved. If you are on Twitter, try the hashtag #CAserpentine to see what others are doing. Or check out the geoblogosphere for recent news. I don't want to sound hopeless, but I wonder if these people even care what geologists and educators actually think. We aren't a very large or rich constituency. I guess there is the one way to find out. Here's my argument that I will be sending on paper (??!) this week:

To the Members of the California Senate and Assembly, and Governor Schwarzenegger:

The California legislature is about to strike an unfortunate blow at education. Senate Bill 624 would remove serpentine as the state rock of California, and furthermore would declare the rock to be dangerous to the health of state residents. I am a geology professor at a California community college, and a past president of the Far West Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT), and I strongly disagree with this legislative effort (the opinions presented below are my own, however, and not of my employer or the NAGT).

The bill and its analysis, contains several factual errors, and instead of being "noncontroversial" as one assemblyperson put it, may open up the state and residents to litigation, although I cannot speak to that issue with any legal expertise. Serpentine is not a “deadly” rock, at least not in the sense of being poisonous. It sometimes contains the fibrous mineral form called chrysotile asbestos, but chrysotile is just one of six different forms of asbestos. It is asbestos derived from the amphibole family of minerals that is proven to cause mesothelioma and lung cancer. Chrysotile may be implicated in some forms of cancer, but the link is not as clear-cut. Many other rocks and minerals can cause serious problems when inhaled as small fragments, including quartz and coal (dangers to the miners of these rocks are well-recognized). State laws have been crafted that deal with exposure to most of these materials. I am concerned that the legislature is making a statement of fact in this legislation without proper review by knowledgeable authorities and experts.

From an educational point of view, serpentine (or more properly, serpentinite) was an excellent choice for the state rock. It is relatively rare across the United States, but quite common in California. The original intent of the designation was to promote asbestos mining, and serpentine sometimes is a host rock for the fibrous mineral. But the educational value of the rock lies elsewhere

The source of the rock is deep in the earth's mantle, beneath the 15-25 mile thick crust, and its presence all over the state of California is a revelation and acknowledgement of the incredible forces that have shaped the state. California has the incredible scenery that it does because of forces of movements along plate boundaries, whether the lateral movements along the San Andreas fault, the vertical churning that occurs along convergent boundaries, where ocean crust is driven underneath the edge of the continent, or the splitting that occurs at the divergent boundary in the far south of the state.

The rock is also quite pretty, to this geologist's eye. It ranges in color from black to intense jade-green. The journey from deep in the crust to the surface along fault zones usually leaves beautiful polished surfaces on the rock.

When ultramafic rocks like serpentine are brought to the surface of the earth, they are far out of chemical equilibrium with the ambient conditions, which means they are easily attacked by oxygen, water and organic acids. Clay is a common product of this process, as well as red or yellow iron oxides. The surface layer resulting from this weathering process is of course soil. We tend to think of soil as a rich surface layer that supports plant life, but some soils lack the necessary nutrients for most kinds of plant growth. This is definitely the case for soils developed on serpentine, which lack nitrates, phosphorus, and potassium. To make things worse, chrome and nickel are actually toxins. Hence, only specialized species can thrive on these rocks. In California, there are many endemic species on serpentine soils found nowhere else on the planet.

These ultramafic rocks are fairly rich in a number of unusual metal ores, including platinum, nickel, magnesium and mercury. One of the most important ores is chromite, which is the only significant source we have for chromium, the metal that puts the "stainless" in stainless steel. We import most of the chromium that we need from foreign sources, but in wartime (especially the two World Wars), the ores were mined domestically, and a number of operations were present in California.

The bill was promoted by cancer and mesothelioma awareness groups. So far as I can tell, no one involved with the bill ever consulted with geologists or teachers.

I do not want to belittle the problem of asbestos, lung cancer, and mesothelioma. These are serious issues, but going after serpentine is misguided, and I believe it will actually hurt the effort to raise awareness of any links between the mineral and disease. The fracas going on today will be over, and in another month no one will remember the issue. But any child studying the state symbols over the coming decades will discover an interesting rock, but also the connection to asbestos and disease.

State Senator Gloria Romero, defending her sponsorship of a bill, was quoted as saying: "This bill is about raising awareness to protect the health of our citizens. Serpentine contains asbestos, a known carcinogen. Toxic materials have no place serving as emblems for the State." This statement is not really logical. Consider some analogies:

California Poppies, our state flower, contain some morphine and codeine, the raw materials for making heroin, an illegal drug. We might as well get rid of poppies as our state flower.

Gold miners, breathing the dust of quartz in the milling and crushing of gold ores, died by the score in the mines during the Gold Rush, the event that led to the establishment of the state. Native American groups could very well argue that the Gold Rush destroyed dozens of cultures and the celebration of gold as the state mineral is an insult to them. We might as well eliminate gold as our state mineral. And the ghost towns of Bodie and Calico should not be celebrated as the official ghost towns of the state, because many people died in the mines, by the logic presented above.

Grizzly bears killed hundreds and hundreds of Native Californians and Mexican-Americans in the early history of the state. We might as well remove the bear as our state mammal. It is extinct anyway.

State symbols are a means for promotion of state interests, and a tool for educating our students. Cancer support groups should be seeing the use of serpentine as our state rock as an opportunity to educate the public about the possible dangers of asbestos.

The state legislature is contemplating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I strongly urge the State Assembly to reject Senate Bill 624. I urge Governor Schwarzenegger to veto the bill if it is passed.

Respectfully,

Garry F. Hayes
Professor of Geology

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater: The Serpentine Issue in California

State senator Gloria Romero, defending her sponsorship of a bill (SB 624) to remove serpentine as the state rock of California, was quoted as saying: " “This bill is about raising awareness to protect the health of our citizens. Serpentine contains asbestos, a known carcinogen. Toxic materials have no place serving as emblems for the State.”
Consider some analogies: California Poppies, our state flower, contain some morphine and codeine, the raw materials for making heroin, an illegal drug. Therefore “This bill is about raising awareness to protect the health of our citizens. California Poppies contain morphine and codeine, illegal drugs. Illegal materials have no place serving as emblems for the State.” Let's get rid of poppies as our state flower.

Gold miners, breathing the dust of quartz in the milling and crushing of gold ores, died by the score in the mines during the Gold Rush, the event that led to the establishment of the state (gold mining also pretty much ended dozens of Native American cultures through direct violence and disease). So... “This bill is about raising awareness to protect the health of our citizens. Gold ore contains quartz, a known cause of silicosis. Toxic materials have no place serving as emblems for the State.” Let's eliminate gold as our state symbol.

Grizzly bears killed hundreds and hundreds of Native Californians and Mexican-Americans in the early history of the state. So... “This bill is about raising awareness to protect the health of our citizens. Grizzly bears contain teeth and claws, known killers of people. Toxic animals have no place serving as emblems for the State.” Let's eliminate the California Grizzly Bear as our state mammal. Oh, wait. We did one better: we eliminated the California Grizzly Bear instead. The last one was shot in the 1920's.

I've been on this topic for a week now (see here and here), and Silver Fox has a nice review of the many factual problems in the actual text of the bill (serpentine is not asbestos; it may contain an asbestiform crystal habit, but so do five other minerals, and it is they which are most implicated in causing disease), as well as a review of geobloggers who have been discussing the problem. Also, check out Andrew Alden's take on this at About Geology.

I do not want to belittle the problem of asbestos, lung cancer, and mesothelioma. These are serious enough issues, but going after serpentine is misguided, and I believe, actually hurting the effort at raising awareness of the connections between the two. The fracas going on today will be over, and in another month no one will remember the issue. But any child studying the state symbols over the coming decades will discover an interesting rock, but also the connection to asbestos and disease.

They're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and since it has already passed the state senate, I fear they may succeed. If you are concerned about this, and you're in California, call your assembly representative or Governor Terminator with your views.

The Other California: Caught in the Vise (the Western Mojave Desert)

The western Mojave Desert is a little-known corner of California, except during the late winter and spring when parts of the desert come alive with Golden Poppies, Lupine, Goldfield, Cream Cup, and Desert Larkspur. Now, my readers know that I would NEVER stoop to thinking up some geology to talk about just so I could show some pictures of flowers from my trip through the area last week. So feel free to ignore any flowers that just happen to impose themselves between you and the very important mountains that make up the horizon of the pictures below.

The western Mojave is the relatively flat triangular region lying between the Garlock and San Andreas faults (see the NASA image above). The Garlock is a fault that few Californians hear about. It has not produced a major earthquake in perhaps a thousand years, with the largest historical quake being a 5.7 magnitude event in 1992. It is thought capable of producing much larger tremors, as high as magnitude 7.6 . The Garlock is a left lateral fault (the side opposite the observer moves to the left) that has shifted as much 40 miles.

In the picture above, the Garlock fault lies at the base of the Tehachapi and El Paso Mountains in the far distance. The Tehachapis are composed of granite and metamorphic rocks, and make up the southern "toe" of the Sierra Nevada. 4,000 foot high Tehachapi Pass (below) is a major transportation corridor between northern and southern California, including the last railroad crossing over the Sierra Nevada for some 300 miles (the next crossing north is at Donner Pass near Lake Tahoe).

The more familiar San Andreas fault is the 600 mile long transform boundary that divides the North American plate from the Pacific Plate. It was been responsible for two of California's biggest earthquakes: the 1857 Fort Tejon quake and the 1906 San Francisco tragedy. The area southwest of the fault is moving northward about 2 inches a year, breaking loose in large earthquakes every two or three centuries. In the picture below, the San Andreas lies just over the ridge in the distance.

I wrote about the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve in a previous post, so I won't add much here other than to say that the low hills of the preserve provide a wonderful view of the landscape produced when two major fault systems converge on each other...especially in spring.

The Other California is my continuing series about the less familiar parts of the state that don't usually show up on the postcards. I am cheating just a little because poppies show up on almost ALL the postcards. And yes, the picture below is just simply a gratuitous flower picture...

Life from an Ant's Point of View...

I was going to find some kind of geological note to add here, but I did that pretty extensively yesterday, so today, it is just a bit of whimsy...have you ever wondered what springtime on the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve looks like from the point of view of an ant??

The Other California: A Wandering Volcano and a Floral Outburst

I can still be astounded....

There are lots of things I haven't seen and done in my life, but I can imagine what it is going to be like to see a rhyolitic volcano erupting at close quarters, or to feel a magnitude 8 quake (6.9 is my biggest so far). But sometimes things happen that just leave me breathless, if only from the unexpectedness of it all. That's what happened to me today.

I had always heard about the Antelope Valley California Poppy State Reserve, but had never seen it, especially in the late winter or early spring when the blooms are at their peak. We were taking an alternate route home, generally following the San Andreas fault from Cajon Pass to Grapevine Summit on Interstate 5. The desert was mostly dry and barren for much of the route, but as we passed Palmdale and Lancaster, I looked west and saw something I had never seen before: orange hills. Fluorescent orange hills. As we drew closer, it was clear that the California Poppies were at their golden best.

After expending several hours using vast amounts of digital space on my camera, I started to ponder why the flowers were here, and not elsewhere across the Mojave Desert, at least not in such dominating numbers. I first considered the slightly higher elevation, the local rocks and sediment, soil conditions and drainage, but I started to realize there was another dynamic going on...the flowers are a natural phenomena, but a natural phenomena with a very human influence. About seven miles west of the Poppy preserve there is another state park: Arthur B. Ripley Desert Woodland State Park. The park preserves 580 acres of what turns out to be the native land cover of the Mojave Desert west of Lancaster and Palmdale: juniper woodland and Joshua Trees.

A century ago, this high end of the desert was cleared of Joshua Trees and Juniper, usually by chaining (dragging a huge chain between tractors that knocked down whole forests) or fires in order to put in thousands of acres of alfalfa fields and other crops. Large areas were reserved for sheep and cattle grazing as well. The natural plant cover was long gone. Much later, some of the abandoned fields started to recover, and the showy wildflowers represent some of the pioneer species (I've noticed for years that the best wildflower shows in any forested areas occur after fires: Yellowstone, Yosemite, and many other areas). Without any nearby natural vegetation, there is no way for the native Joshua Trees and other large trees and shrubs to recolonize the valley floor; they don't have any method to spread their seeds widely (Joshua Trees were once spread in giant ground sloth poop...). Despite their incredible beauty, the wildflower displays are a monument to our extensive alteration of the environment that once existed here.

Just the same, the flowers were one of the most intense displays of color I've ever seen. Lest you think that I had discovered some isolated and unknown Eden, well, a look at the photo below should dissuade you from thinking that these poppies are a well-kept secret. It was actually impossible to get to the park visitor center due to the traffic. Just the same, there was plenty of parking both east and west of the park, and the poppies and other flowers were every bit as abundant. We had no trouble finding some wonderfully quiet corners to contemplate the beauty.

As to the wandering volcano of the title? Just west of the preserve, some unusual rock outcrops can be seen near the junction of Lancaster road and Highway 138 at Neenach. These rocks, the Neenach Volcanics, are about 23.5 million years old, and lie adjacent to the San Andreas fault. The volcano is only half here; the remainder sits on the other side of the fault, 195 miles to the northwest, at Pinnacles National Monument, which I have discussed earlier, here and here. For several reasons, the Neenach Volcanics have not been exposed in the spectacular manner of the rocks at Pinnacles, but the story they tell is just as compelling.

So there, I found a geologic connection that allowed me to show you some flower pictures. You'll probably see a few more gratuitous flower pictures in coming posts. I took around a hundred, and I have to show them to somebody...

For those who are new to Geotripper, the "Other California" is my long-running web series on the fascinating geological places in my fine state that don't usually show up on the postcards (although I've been known to break my own rules every so often; California's poppies are on postcards all the time).

The Other California: The Day of the Fiddlenecks (a trip in the Mother Lode)

The Other California is my continuing exploration of the places in our state that don't tend to show up on the postcards, and are missed by most of the visitors. It's the first day of spring and we headed up into the Sierra Nevada foothills to seek out the Golden Poppy, which should be blooming explosively on the grassy slopes by now. We traveled east on Highway 132 out of Waterford towards the Gold-Rush-era town of La Grange. The poppies hadn't popped out in the lower foothill areas, but the slopes were alive with one of my favorite flowers, the Fiddleneck (Amsinckia). The shape of the flower is reminiscent of the head of a violin.

Amsinckia was utilized as a medicine and a food source by Native Americans, but the seeds and foliage are toxic to cattle. Today, for us, it was a beautiful splash of color along the slopes of the Tuolumne River, which were following out of the Central Valley.

Upstream, the first bedrock outcrops we encountered were low cliffs of rhyolitic ash of the Valley Springs formation. This gentle, quiet landscape was the scene of great violence between 22 and 28 million years ago, as huge calderas to the east exploded out vast amounts of pulverized rock and sent clouds rolling down the slopes of what would one day be the western Sierra Nevada. The rock is solid enough to form cliffs, but is easily shaped, so it was ideal for use as a building stone in the towns of the Mother Lode.

We passed through the quiet village of La Grange, looking at the 1875-vintage schoolhouse and cemetery, and a short distance east we encountered some of the evidence of gold mining (below). The sediments covering the surface were washed away to get at gold particles trapped in the small fissures and cracks in the bedrock below. Sometimes hoses were used. Downstream, where the sediments were deeper, giant dredges were used (these methods will be discussed in later posts). One of the dredges used in the area sits abandoned in a meadow just south of La Grange.

A bit east of the hydraulic pits, the old metamorphic rock of the Foothills Terrane start peeking through the soil cover. These so-called "tombstone rocks" are slate and phyllite that originated as mud and silt on the ocean floor which were accreted to the western edge of the North American continent in Mesozoic time.

Some of the rocks include metavolcanic rocks and an occasional metaconglomerate (picture below, very small penny for scale). These rocks are far more resistant to erosion, and form long high north-trending ridges in the western Mother Lode. We found a delightful new pathway over the metavolcanic ridges from Don Pedro Reservoir to the village of Moccasin along Marshes Flat Road. On this spring day, greenery was everywhere, and most of the gullies had streams flowing.

Did we find poppies? They aren't widespread just yet, but a few beautiful patches showed up along Marshes Flat road. There will be a great many more in the coming weeks. If you are in the area, make time to check it out!

For an excellent road guide to some of the areas covered in this post, and for a discussion of remediation efforts along the Tuolumne River region, check out this guide from the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and Columbia College.

The Other California: Already off on a Tangent

It occurred to me while looking over my postcard post on the "usual" places of California that a discussion of places in California that are overlooked could also include a discussion of overlooked state symbols, especially in the context of geological significance. A lot of people know that the state flower is the California Golden Poppy (Eschsholtzia californica), and that the state bird is the California Quail (Lophortyx californica). Calling upon my students as a cross-section of our state's population (which they aren't, really), somewhat fewer know that our state mammal is not just a bear, but the California Grizzly Bear (Ursus californicus) which is probably the only state mammal in the United States that was actually extinct when it was designated (the last one was shot in 1922; it became the state mammal in 1953). Along with the California Condor (now why isn't the condor our state bird?), it was one of the last of the megafauna survivors in our state (more coming on that subject).

It takes people a little longer to recall our state mineral: it's gold of course, given the beginnings of our state in the 1850's in a massive Gold Rush that brought hundreds of thousands of migrants to the region. But what about our state rock? Our state gemstone? Our state fish, or fossil, our state Gold Rush Ghost Town, or our Silver Rush Ghost Town? Or our state soil? And what about our state tree (trees, actually)? I suspect the trees are pretty well known.

And what about our state song? I pretty seriously thought it was "California, Here I Come", but it isn't! A sampling from "I Love You California", by F.B. Silverwood:

Where the snow crowned Golden Sierras
Keep their watch o'er the valleys bloom,
It is there I would be in our land by the sea,
Every breeze bearing rich perfume.
It is here nature gives of her rarest. It is Home Sweet Home to me,
And I know when I die I shall breathe my last sigh
For my sunny California.

I love you, Catalina, you are very dear to me.
I love you, Tamalpais, and I love Yosemite.
I love you, Land of Sunshine, Half your beauties are untold.
I loved you in my childhood, and I'll love you when I'm old.

Really, how many songwriters could squeeze Tamalpais into a lyric?

More on these less familiar state symbols in another post. If you want to cheat and look ahead, the complete listing can be found here.