What To Do on a Rainy Day? Explore the Mother Lode Underground!

So what does one do when an atmospheric river storm is barreling towards your region, with an expected 10"-20" of rain in some places? If you are among the intrepid members of the Geology Club at our school, you go caving! It's not that they planned on doing a field trip during one of the heaviest storms of the year, but this was scheduled two months ago. They looked at the weather radar and decided to go anyway. In the end we caught a bit of breathing space between two major storm systems. It was mostly drizzling and misting on us as we hiked the mile or so down the hill to the cave entrances.

California is not exactly known for her cavern systems, but the state does in fact have around a thousand known caves, and some are world class; one has nearly thirty miles of passageways. Seven or eight of them are operated as tourist attractions (Black Chasm, California, Mercer, Moaning, Boyden, Crystal, and Shasta are the ones that come to mind). Many are on public land and plenty more are on private land (how cool would it be to have your own cave?) but their locations are not widely publicized, because a well-known unprotected cave is quickly dismantled by vandals, and the damage to caverns is permanent. You can't grow stalactites in a human lifetime.

We explore a couple of wild caves in the hills around Columbia. They occur in pods of marble that originated as carbonate reefs and shelf deposits in the Pacific Ocean in late Paleozoic time which were accreted to the edge of the North American plate by the process of subduction. The suite of exotic rocks are called the Calaveras Complex.

We had to pay obeisance to the mystic black cows that guard the cave entrances (well maybe anyway; they certainly like to hang out on the grass-covered plateau where the caves are located).

There were two caves that we explored today. The first was a smaller "practice" cave that provided a few crawling and climbing opportunities and some nice speleothems in a small gallery. The cave had three entrances and several small rooms that angled away from the central area.

Caves are explored these days with flashlights and headlamps, but it hasn't always been that way. The miners used candles, and the native Americans would have used torches. The caverns have a completely different aspect by candlelight. There is literally a primal mystery hidden in the shadows. I developed a greater appreciation for the cave paintings done by our distant ancestors in Europe. Can you imagine being led into the depths, and then have the torchlight suddenly play on paintings of animals and people in the darkest parts of the cavern?

The other cave is a bit more of a challenge. One must first climb down some slippery boulders into the collapsed sinkhole, and then push up through a very narrow passage that is a pretty tight  squeeze...especially for late middle-aged fat professors. But what a payoff! The 150 foot-long main room is festooned with hundreds of unbroken stalactites and columns. The ceiling was high enough to prevent vandals from reaching and breaking them off. And frankly, most vandals are lazy bastards; it's a tough hike and fairly difficult to find unless you know exactly where to look (on my fourth trip to the caves many years ago I got lost in the fog and wandered aimlessly for an hour or so).

If you wonder about cave life, there are certainly creatures living in the darkness. There are usually two or three bats hanging on the highest ceiling (although there is no light, I suspect there is a vertical entrance to the cave somewhere, because I can't imagine bats negotiating the narrow hole we climb through, but maybe they can).

On this particular day we saw half a dozen 5-inch-long millipedes. I'm told they are mainly scavengers and don't bite, but I didn't experiment with the possibility today.

I didn't see any of them today, but a couple of years back we saw a beautiful orange newt deep in the cave (I think it is a Sierra Newt, but as in all things biological I am open to correction).

Wow, Thanksgiving is over and Christmas is coming, but I'm already out of shape and overweight. The climb up out of the cave and the long mud slog back to our vehicle was tougher than it should have been. But what a nice day it turned out to be...

2010, The Year of Traveling Dangerously (Geology Meme!)

OK, now Silver Fox at Looking For Detachment started it this year, and others are picking up the theme; the question is where you have traveled this year? It's always dangerous to ask a geologist about their travels. They do it a lot, whether for their jobs in industry, or as teachers leading field trips, or just for the fun of it. And they are always glad to expound on their experiences and show LOTS of pictures. And that, poor reader, is what is happening to you now. Some of our destinations will seem similar to those of last year, as I lead field trips to the same places, but a few new spots show up on the itinerary every year. I like seeing new places whenever I can, but I also like to return some haunts over and over, getting to know them intimately, and through their seasonal changes (note the Yosemite pictures that follow).

As usual, I did travel a lot, for a lot of reasons. Traveling dangerously? It felt that way a few times, but mostly it was just a lot of fun exploring.

Our holiday travels brought us to within a four-hour drive of the South Rim of Grand Canyon, so we headed to one of our favorite winter destinations...icy roads, shivering cold temperatures, and no crowds. And a beautiful covering of snow to offset the intense reds and yellows of the Permian formations (the Kaibab, Toroweap, and Hermit Formation and the Supai Group).

A few days later, we got caught in a scary dust storm outside of Tucson. Four or five people died in a massive chain reaction accident in the southbound lanes. Visibility was as bad as I have ever seen, worse even than our Tule Fogs in the Central Valley. Apparently the dust was caused by agricultural fields being plowed, but I have heard that dust storms in the Four Corners region have been getting worse lately with the intense drought (apparently the worst in 1,000 years according to Ken Salazar).

February brought the big field studies journey to Death Valley National Park. We saw water in the Amargosa River (if you aren't from around here, the word 'river' is tricky; most years, very little water flows, but this year the river was almost navigable in a canoe). There were a number of road closures that stymied our efforts to see some of the popular overlooks, but we did get to see something unique: The Devils Hole Pupfish in Ash Meadows. OK, we didn't see the actual fish; a fence protects the extremely endangered species in their cavern entrance home.

March was our day tour of the southern Mother Lode between Mariposa and Sonora. I snapped a shot of a chunk of ultramafic rock in the serpentine exposures in the Bagby Grade area. Serpentine...I had no idea what was about to happen with that rock this year!

A week or two later, I was exploring the Red Rocks Area of Critical Environmental Concern, caught an interesting moonrise, and wrote about life on serpentine-based soils. Again, I didn't know what was about to happen with serpentine, our state rock.

I made some April trips to Yosemite Valley and found the park still in the grip of winter. It was a cold spring this year, and the snow runoff was delayed by weeks. The valley floor was showing just a hint of greenery, and the waterfalls were modest.

A few weeks later, the Geology Club at the school hiked down to a pair of natural bridges in the karst topography of the Mother Lode near Columbia in the Sierra Nevada foothills. They are imaginatively called "Natural Bridges", and are actually a pair of marble caverns that have been breached by Coyote Creek. They are a fascinating place to explore.

The National Association of Geoscience Teachers, Far Western Section had a conference at the beginning of May, and we explored the eastern Sierra Nevada and Owens Valley. We drove over Carson Pass which was still encased in snow, and had a wonderful time exploring Mono Lake and the Long Valley Caldera.

Later in May, we managed to pay a visit to Yosemite Valley on the peak day of runoff from the long delayed snowmelt. The river hit around 7,000 cubic feet per second, and there was some minor flooding of the meadows (yes, the wood pathway goes into the water in the picture below).

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In August, we headed out to the Hawaiian Islands, for a bit of personal exploration instead of a class. The lava was starting to flow again in Kalapana, and I had a brief moment at the edge of the lava flow.

In June, July and August, California's state rock turned into a nationwide news story, and I had a brief career as a hand model on the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle. I was glad I had a store of pictures of the serpentine landscapes in our Coast Ranges and Sierra foothills so I could participate in the efforts to retain the rock as one of our state symbols.

Fall arrived, and it was time for some more field trips with my students. We spent five days exploring the eastern Sierra, the Owens Valley, and the White Mountains. We were searching for amazonite and aquamarine when I snapped the shot above of the Owens Lake depression.

In October the NAGT--FWS had their fall conference, sponsored by CSU Fresno, with explorations of the Carrizo Plains, Yosemite, the Sierra foothills, and one of the deepest canyons on North America, Kings Canyon (above).

A week or two later, we took a day trip to the Mother Lode near Jackson and Angels Camp. Our journey included an underground tour of the Sutter Gold Mine (Sutter Creek), and Black Chasm Cavern outside the village of Volcano.

In November, we made one more trip into Yosemite Valley, and saw some glorious fall colors. There had been enough early rain to have a bit of water flowing over the falls. It was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.

OK, wake up now, the slide show is done! Have some more eggnog!