How Strange Has the Weather Been? This was the Death Valley Region only a week ago

Zabriskie Point in late May. It's usually over 100 degrees and sunny this time of year.

The weather was a bit...off last week as we hit the road to the southwest. We meant to drive over Tioga Pass, and made it to Crane Flat, only to find the pass was closed by snow. We headed back down to the Central Valley and crossed the mountains at Tehachapi. From there we arrived in Death Valley for two nights of camping. It's late May, the temperature is usually well over 100 degrees, but this is what greeted us at Furnace Creek:

We actually needed a light blanket in our tent the first night. We followed Highway 190 east to Death Valley Junction, trying to thread our way between storms. We watched the gully-washer turn Eagle Mountain into shadows.

We passed a small herd of wild horses near Death Valley Junction. They seemed unperturbed by the downpour.

The town of Shoshone is a small outpost of civilization east of Death Valley. It was wet too. There has been odd weather across the country of late. Seeing May snow in the Death Valley high country and rain across the valley floor certainly fit the pattern. I have no conclusions to draw from this, but it's strange to see droughts and record heat in California and the Alaskan rainforest, along with intense flooding in Texas and Oklahoma. Strange and interesting...

The Mountain That No Climber Can Ever Summit: Mt. Tehama (the Brokeoff Volcano)

The gigantic boulder is a glacial erratic, left behind by sheets of ice that once covered the Lassen region.

After being slightly distracted by ducks and the beautiful fall day in Yosemite, Geotripper is back on track to finish up his exploration of the Cascades volcanoes of Northern California. It was already approaching noon of our last day on the road back at the end of September, and we had six hours of driving ahead, so our list of features we were investigating was becoming short. In fact, one of the features we were interested in just simply wasn't there.

Mt. Tehama, or the Brokeoff Volcano, began erupting around 600,000 years ago just south of the present-day site of Lassen Peak. It was a stratovolcano similar to Mt. Shasta or Mt. Hood, composed mainly of gray andesite with interbedded ash and lava flows. The mountain alternated between explosive eruptions and effusive eruptions and eventually grew to a height in excess of 11,000 feet, hundreds of feet higher than modern Lassen Peak (10,457 feet).

There is a pretty good reason that mountain climbers can never summit Mt. Tehama, though. It's not there anymore. Around 400,000 years ago the magma chamber under the mountain ended volcanic activity. There has been debate about whether the mountain ended with a tantrum or a whimper, but the consensus seems to lie with the latter. The volcano stopped erupting and chemical weathering, river and glacial activity tore it apart. All that remains are a series of lower peaks surrounding the original throat of the volcano including Brokeoff Mountain, Mt. Diller, Eagle Peak and Diamond Peak.

 In the aftermath of the eruptive cycle that ended activity at Tehama, several plug domes erupted and grew on the flanks of the older mountain, including Lassen Peak itself about 28,000 years ago. Hot rock continues to simmer beneath the complex, evidenced by the recent (1914-1917) eruption of Lassen Peak, and the presence of geothermal systems like Bumpass Hell and the Sulphur Works.

From the Bumpass Hell trail, the peaks of Brokeoff Mountain and Mt. Diller seem to provide a near-perfect profile of the long-gone volcano, but the original edifice was much larger, something like 15 miles around. The center of the volcano was in the foreground and the two peaks were just part of the western flank. An aerial photograph of the mountain (from a Canada flight in 2005) offers a different perspective...

I annotated a version of the picture for a previous post on the volcano, and it is reproduced below. I'm mostly satisfied with it, although the height of the peak may be a bit exaggerated. In any case, good luck climbing to the summit!

Up next, the final stop of our trip!