A Resolution Recommendation: See the World. See as Much of the World as You Can

Grapevine Mountains in Death Valley National Park

When I first began to think about what I wanted to do with my life sometime in my teens, I knew I wanted a job that would take me outdoors for much of the time. When I was in high school, "earth science" or "geology" didn't exist as a course choice. So far as I knew, the "outdoor" major was to be a wildlife biologist, and I started heading that way. But in my first semester at community college, all the classes were full, so I took some course called "earth materials". The next semester I took "earth history", and a field course to the Grand Canyon. And by then I was hooked. I wanted to teach geology (many thanks to my first teachers, Marlin Dickey and Rod Parcel).

Death Valley National Park

My journey to a degree in geology was not an easy one. I did okay in my community college courses, achieving a pretty good GPA, enough to get me into a quality program at Pomona College, where I found the limitations of lazy study skills. I spent three years getting my act together, and another two working for the department before I started the graduate program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Once again I was challenged to the limits of my abilities, especially with a young family to support. But I made it through, holding a crying baby at two in the morning while typing my thesis on a Commodore 64 computer with a daisy wheel printer.

The Trona Pinnacles in the California Desert at Searles Lake

Somehow, I made the cut for a position as a laboratory teaching assistant, and later adjunct faculty at Santa Barbara City College. I worked there for four wonderful years before I was fortunate enough to be chosen as an instructor of geology at Modesto Junior College, where I've been teaching for 31 years and counting.

The 2019 "Super-bloom" in the Mojave Desert of California

Geology provided my one of the greatest gifts of my life. A doctor explores the human body. A computer programmer explores the circuitry of processors. A chemical engineer explores atoms and compounds. But a geologist explores the earth. And I can't imagine a greater privilege. The greater privilege though has been that I have spent a third of a century introducing students to a world outside the confines of their home cities. There is nothing quite like seeing the response of a student seeing the Grand Canyon or Yosemite Valley for the first time in their life.

Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley National Park

Our world, despite our horrible abuses, is a wonderous place, still full of beauty and adventures. Seeing it is a marvelous journey, but having some understanding of how it came to be gives the adventure deeper meaning. Even the plainest of landscapes, say the Central Valley (to us the Great Valley) has a fascinating story, one filled with oceans full of mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, gigantic sharks, and savannas full of mammoths, giant sloths and sabertooth cats.

A Five-spot in Death Valley National Park

Not everyone can travel and explore the planet, for lots and lots of reasons. When digital cameras became widespread, and this thing called the blogosphere appeared some time back in the cyber-early Pleistocene, I finally realized I had another tool with which to share the world. In 2008 I started this blog, with the idea of posting lots of pictures of the beautiful places of the planet. It became a way of introducing the wonders of the planet with people far beyond the confines of my college. I never dreamed I would still be doing it twelve years (and more than 2,100 posts) later. I have always appreciated those who have read and responded over the years.

Yosemite Falls, the 5th or 7th highest waterfall in the world.

In any case, this post is sort of a year-end gift of images from the journeys this year of myself, Mrs. Geotripper, and my wonderful students. If you live in California, a lot of these places are within a day's drive. I took students to Death Valley National Park in February, and Mrs. Geotripper and I made another trip there in March to seek out flowers.

"Mirror" Lake, a seasonal pond on Tenaya Creek in Yosemite Valley. Mt. Washburn in the distance.

Yosemite is close enough to Modesto for a day trip, and I managed to get there on four different occasions this year, mainly in the fall and in the spring. It's a different place with every visit, with new discoveries to be made every time.

The Gateway in Yosemite Valley, with El Capitan on the left and the Cathedral Rocks on the right.

We had the occasion of my grandmother's 100th birthday as a reason to spend a few days camping in the Coast Redwoods of Northern California

Humboldt Redwoods State Park in Northern California

Our summer field studies class gave us the chance to explore the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Use the search engine at the top left to check out "Travels in Cascadia" for the detailed stories of the places in the pictures that follow.

Mt. Shasta, the largest (but only second highest) stratovolcano in the lower 48 states.

Cape Flattery, the northwesternmost point of the lower 48 states, near Neah Bay, Washington

The Olympic Mountains from Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park

Lupines in Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, Washington

The upper end of Howe Sound, the southernmost glacial fjord on the west coast of North America, British Columbia from near the summit of Stawamus Chief near Squamish

Black Bear in Whistler, British Columbia in Canada

Rainy Lake near North Cascades National Park in Washington

North Cascades National Park in Washington

In September, we carried on an exploration of the eastern Sierra Nevada, traveling over Sonora Pass. We base-camped in Bishop for three days while we explored the High Sierra near Mammoth and June Lake, Mono Lake, and the White Mountains.

Sunrise out of Bishop, California, east of the Sierra Nevada

The White Mountains are an immense range reaching more than 14,000 feet, and containing one of the most unusual forests on the planet: the Bristlecone Pines. The trees live where almost nothing else can thrive, and they live for incredible lengths of time, as much as 5,000 years. From the Bristlecone Forest, one can take in more than a hundred miles of the Sierra Nevada crest, from Mt. Whitney to the Mammoth Lakes area.

The Sierra Nevada crest as seen from the White Mountains

The eastern Sierra Nevada is also a land of volcanism. We explored Devils Postpile, the Long Valley Caldera, the Bishop Tuff, and other features of recent volcanic activity.

Devils Postpile in the central Sierra Nevada

The Sierra Nevada is also one of the finest places in the world to study the effects of the Pleistocene glaciations. The June Lake Loop is an awesome valley that also serves as a gateway to the higher alpine parts of the Sierra.

Silver Lake on the June Lake Loop of the Eastern Sierra Nevada

Mono Lake is an enclosed basin filled by a saline inland sea. It is one of the most important stops on the migratory bird flyway, and the story of its preservation from the schemes of the LA Department of Water and Power is a rare (but still ongoing) environmental victory.

Mono Lake, near Lee Vining, California, east of the Sierra Nevada

Our journey home took us over Tioga Pass and through the high country of Yosemite National Park including Tuolumne Meadows and Tenaya Lake.

Tenaya Lake in Yosemite National Park

Our journeys weren't always on the surface. An October field studies class took us underground at Black Chasm Caves in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode. There are more than a thousand limestone and marble caverns in California!

Black Chasm Cavern near Jackson, California in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode

Our last journey of the year took us north to visit family in Oregon and Washington. The weather was not optimal, but I had a brief view of Mt. Rainier from the shores of Lake Washington one morning. The mountain looms over the Pacific Northwest in more than one way. The volcano is close enough to threaten urban areas on the Puget Sound.

Mt. Rainier from Lake Washington, near Seattle.

But in the end, don't forget about the most important place of all: home. There is a bit of nature hanging on anywhere you might live, even in the midst of the biggest cities on Earth. Find that place you can get to without too much trouble and expense, and get to know it well, maybe know it better than anyone else. Learn the birds, the mammals, the bugs, the reptiles. Get to know the rocks and plants. Watch them change over the course of the year. Your life will be richer for it.

The Tuolumne River in Waterford California, my home place

I wish for you the most wonderful of new years and new beginnings, even with the challenges that face us all. Thanks for reading!

The Tuolumne River in Waterford, California.

Travels in Cascadia: Threading the Needle on Hurricane Ridge

Leading a field studies trip is a stress-filled enterprise. There are the big things to worry about: auto accidents, injuries, conflicts with law enforcement, lost reservations, and those sorts of things. But those thankfully don't happen much. But weather does happen, and field studies trips tend to be tightly scripted affairs with not much room for weather-related complications. Yet they happen, especially on trips in the Pacific Northwest. We've had trips where we had just the one chance to see Mt. St. Helens, and it was completely fogged in. There was the one chance to see the Sea to Sky Highway in British Columbia, and it was raining the entire way. We've missed a lot.

This year was going to be different. We worked some flexibility into the schedule, spending two nights each at most of our localities, giving us the chance to postpone a particular plan for a day to allow the weather to clear up. But on our second day out, I was worried. Ever since the longest ten-day forecast, a storm was brewing out in the Pacific Ocean, one that was arriving in waves over several days. We had given ourselves two days on the Olympic Peninsula, and rain was falling on Hurricane Ridge the first day, so we elected to go to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery instead. But that left us just one more chance to have a clear view at Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. The sunrise (above) was not promising. According to the forecast, we would have a brief window of maybe three or four hours before the storm closed in, but we drove through light showers on the road up to the ridge.

My concern grew as we continued up the road, rising from sea level to over 5,000 feet. The far ridges would appear for a moment and then become obscured, and I didn't know until we reached the top ridge if we would actually see anything...

… but we did! And no matter how many times I've been on Hurricane Ridge, nothing quite prepares me for the view from the end of the paved road. It is simply astonishing. As we emerged from the vehicles I felt the stress falling away, like dropping a particularly heavy load from my shoulders. We gathered the group and said a few words about the geology. We would save the longer presentations for later in the day down the hill. With an impending storm, I didn't want our students to miss any of the dramatic scenery. And it is dramatic.

The Olympic Mountains rise from sea level to nearly 8,000 feet and are extremely rugged. They capture prodigious amounts of rain and snow on the western flanks, so much so that temperate rainforests coat the western slopes. It was a nightmare for geologists who were trying to unravel the geologic history.

The mountains exist because of subduction. For most of 200 million years a convergent boundary has been active in the region, as the crust of the Pacific Ocean basin has been sinking against the edge of the North American Continent. In some places, like California, the subduction zone has been replaced by a transform boundary (the San Andreas fault). But in Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and part of British Columbia, the subduction zone is still active, still producing earthquakes, and still raising mountains. It's called the Cascadia Subduction Zone (from hence comes the name of this series).

Source: Geological Society of America

In a "normal" subduction zone, there are four parts: the trench, an accretionary wedge, a forearc basin, and a magmatic arc. The trench is the deepest part of the ocean floor where the oceanic crust sinks back into the mantle. The accretionary wedge is a collection of seafloor sediments and crust that has been scraped off the subducting plate and added to the edge of the continent. The forearc basin is a shallow sea that may develop inland of the accretionary wedge (California's Great Valley originated in this fashion). The magmatic arc is a system of volcanoes and intrusive plutons resulting from the melting of rocks in the lower crust and upper mantle above the descending slab (water released from the slab lowers the melting point of the rock, leading to the formation of the molten rock).

Looking at the thickly forested slopes below Hurricane Ridge, I cannot envy the geologists who originally mapped the Olympic Mountains. Simply finding an exposure of rock must have been challenging at times. What these geologists did was to take the rare rock exposures and extrapolate them into a semi-coherent map that reveals the structure of the Olympic Mountains. They did the equivalent of taking a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, putting them in the right location relative to the others, and then drawing in the remainder of the puzzle from scratch. I've been way too spoiled by the naked rock exposures of places like Death Valley and the Mojave Desert!

The geologic map reveals the basic structure of the Olympics. A "horseshoe" of basalt and sedimentary rocks (the Peripheral Rocks, or Crescent Formation) partially surrounds the "Core Rocks", an assemblage of lightly metamorphosed sandstone and shale layers. The Core Rocks are characteristic of the types of deposits that form from underwater landslides ("turbidity currents") within the trench and accretionary wedge of a subduction zone. The fact that these rocks are now thousands of feet above sea level is the interesting conundrum. Accretionary wedges are generally below sea level, or exist as small islands. They can be pushed higher. For instance, the rocks of the Cascadia accretionary wedge are exposed in the Coast Ranges of  Washington, Oregon and California, but nowhere are the exposures as spectacular as the Olympic Mountains.

Convergent boundaries can be exceedingly complex places. Bits and pieces of continents and island arcs may randomly arrive at the subduction zone, mucking up the subduction process the way too many sheets of paper at once can muck up a paper-shredder. In the case of the Olympics, there was a mass of land north (Vancouver Island) and an accreted terrane to the south (the North Cascades), and a bend in the subduction zone itself. In essence, too much material was being stuffed into the subduction zone, so the excess material went the only way it could, which was up. The mountains have been rising for around 15 million years. They would be higher, but the incredible amount of precipitation tears the mountains down at a roughly equivalent rate.

Pillow basalt from the subducted oceanic crust is exposed along the Hurricane Ridge Road and along trails near the viewpoint. When we went down the road later on, we found that a small rockfall had dumped some of the pillows onto our highway. So, as it turned out, we managed to miss having rocks fall on our vans, i.e., one of the hazards I mentioned at the start of the post!

We could easily observe the glaciers that scour the upper reaches of the mountains. Glaciers technically shouldn't exist here. Although we were at a high enough latitude, the nearby Pacific Ocean moderates the climate, keeping things warmer than they would otherwise be (the Olympics are at the same latitude as Great Falls, Montana, or St. Paul, Minnesota). But temperature isn't the only factor in glacier development. The sheer amount of snowfall in combination with temperatures that are just cold enough allows glaciers to exist at these unusually low elevations.

We had a good introduction to the basic features of alpine glaciation as we gazed across the valley to Mt. Olympus. There were horns, aretes, and cirques as well. Glaciers were going to be a big part of the story of British Columbia, and Hurricane Ridge provided a spectacular setting for the first discussion of how they worked.

It was nearly noon and the storm clouds were building. We were rained on as we descended back down to the lowlands. It was time to prepare for the ferry ride across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island.

Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: The Diverse Landscapes of Olympic National Park

We continued north and east from the Hoh Rainforest on our vagabonding journey through the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Mountains have been raised along the entire convergent boundary, but the ranges on the Olympic Peninsula are in a class by themselves. They are high enough to support glaciers, which means that Olympic National Park is one of the few parks in the country where one can explore a glacier, a rainforest, lakes, and ocean shorelines. The diversity of the landscape is incredible.

Lake Crescent is a beautiful body of water on the north side of the Olympic Peninsula. Lakes are not a common feature of Olympic National Park. Aside from Crescent, there are a few small glacial lakes in the alpine zone, but not much else. Lake Crescent stands out, both for size and depth, and also for low elevation. It's eleven miles long, more than two miles wide, and 600-700 feet in depth, one of the deepest lakes in Washington. We had a few moments to stop along the lakeshore to look around.

The lake is glacial in origin, filling a hollow where the ice scooped out softer rock. The lake once drained to the east into Indian Creek, but a gigantic landslide about 8,000 years ago split the lake (Lake Sutherland is the other part). As Lake Crescent filled deeper and deeper, the water spilled over into a different drainage, the Lyre River, which flows northwest. Isolation of the lake by Lyre Falls has resulted in the evolution of two subspecies of fish, the Beardslee Trout, and the Crescenti Cutthroat Trout.

The Olympic Mountains are extraordinary. They are an anomaly, both in their height, and in their geography. On the map they look like a gigantic horseshoe.

A geologic sketch map reveals the basic structure of the range. The "horseshoe" of basalt and sedimentary rocks (the Peripheral Rocks, or Crescent Formation) partially surrounds the "Core Rocks", an assemblage of slightly altered sandstone and shale layers. The Core Rocks accumulated from underwater landslides ("turbidity currents") within the trench and accretionary wedge of the subduction zone. The fact that these rocks are now thousands of feet above sea level is the interesting puzzle. This happened because bits and pieces of continents and island arcs randomly arrived at the subduction zone, mucking up the subduction process the way too many sheets of paper at once can muck up a paper-shredder. In the case of the Olympics, there was a mass of land north (Vancouver Island) and an accreted terrane to the south (the North Cascades), and a bend in the subduction zone itself. In essence, too much material was being stuffed into the subduction zone, so the excess material went the only way it could, which was up (I discussed this in a bit more detail last year in this post).

Not that it was any great surprise, but the weather was overcast and drizzly when we arrived at Port Angeles. We had given a bit of thought to heading up to Hurricane Ridge, but it was apparent that nothing would be visible, so we got onto the ferry to Vancouver Island instead. I couldn't pass up the chance to show a few shots from our visit to the ridge last year. The view is simply stunning, at least when conditions are clear!

I'm pretty sure there was a great deal less snow on the high peaks this year. As noted in the previous post on the Hoh Rainforest, the snowpack last winter was in the 10% range or less, and the peak runoff was in February. Many of the rivers are getting their main flows from glacial melt rather than snowmelt, and that's not good for the rivers or the glaciers.

The glaciers of Olympic National Park are especially sensitive to climate change. The climate is not as cold as areas farther inland, so the glaciers have to depend on intense levels of precipitation to maintain the levels of ice. They have been shrinking precipitously over the last century, and dozens have melted completely. Rivers that used to flow throughout the year might dry up in the summer or fall as more ice disappears, which will be bad news for aquatic life in those areas.

We ran out of U.S. states to explore, but the convergent boundary continued across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We took the ferry into Canada, on our way to Victoria and ultimately to the northernmost volcanoes of the Cascades. Luckily, we remembered our passports!