What Defines a Wilderness? Is it the Barrenness or the Richness? The Joe Domecq Wilderness Area and Gold Dredging

A wilderness surprise: Joe Domecq Wilderness Park

Wilderness [wil′dər nis]:
1. A neglected or abandoned area of a garden or town.
2. An area essentially undisturbed by human activity together with its naturally developed life community.

Can these two meanings be reconciled? I'm used to the definition of wilderness as it was written into the 1964 Wilderness Act: a contiguous area of at least 5,000 acres (7.8 square miles) that is as close to a primeval natural state as is possible. The landscape where I live has precious little remaining wilderness: the Great Valley has less than 5% of its original ecosystem. The Sierra Nevada has more open space and wilderness, but mostly in the high country. The deep forests of the middle elevations have been extensively logged, while the foothills were upended in the search for gold. The rivers have been mostly dammed.

Gold dredge deposits near Merced Falls

The dredging of Sierra Nevada/Great Valley rivers for gold was a particularly destructive form of mining. Put into practice long after the famous Gold Rush of 1848-53, dredging was an example of business getting serious about their "business". A great deal of fine-grained gold was not being captured by the usual mining methods and was lost downstream. Around 1898 the first successful dredge was placed in operation. It was a floating factory with large shovels on one side and a conveyer belt on the other. The shovels dug up one end of the pond, processed the sediments through sieves and mercury-coated copper plates, and then dumped them out the other end. In this way, the dredge sailed across the landscape, "dragging" its pond along. It was horribly efficient, as the miners could profit when there was only 18 to 20 cents of worth of gold in a cubic yard of gravel.

Dredged floodplain on the Merced River near Snelling, CA. Courtesy of GoogleEarth

How was this destructive? The mining process destroyed the natural soil of the river floodplains and replaced it with barren piles of boulders and cobbles that were no longer useful for pretty much any other purpose. Especially the growing of crops. Many tens of thousands of acres of valley floor were permanently altered. A dredge field on the Merced River in my area is nine miles long and half a mile wide. Similar amounts of land were dredged on the Tuolumne River that flows by my home town.

So here is the source of my opening question. After fifty or sixty years of abandonment, the dredge fields are returning to nature, after a fashion. Cottonwood trees have taken root here and there, and the old dredge ponds have formed tule thickets and swamps. The other day we were visiting Turlock Lake State Recreational Area (the lake stores water for irrigation). We continued up the road and more or less by accident discovered that we had a "wilderness" area right in our own backyard: it's called the Joe Domecq Wilderness Area, and is part of the larger La Grange Regional Park administered by Stanislaus County. We were intrigued and walked in.

The wilderness preserves about 270 acres of dredged lands and includes a pond, swamps, cottonwood and eucalyptus woodlands, and grassy meadows. Despite the horrific damage done to the original landscape, the environment has now recovered enough to provide a rich habitat for birds and other creatures. The preserve is minimally developed (rough trails, two picnic tables, no bathrooms), but there is plenty of land to wander about, especially if one is interested in birds.

As we explored, the woods were alive with bird songs. We meant to have a brief look, and stayed for two hours. I got a number of bird pictures, including one or two that I haven't seen before.

Before returning home, I walked out onto Old Basso Bridge, the old Highway 132 crossing of the Tuolumne River. It's across the street from the wilderness area. It's been replaced by a modern bridge and is reserved for pedestrians now. This area around the riverbank provides one more piece of habitat for the local animal life, including salmon during the right season.

It was a pleasant discovery, and nice to find that the abandoned barren lands can be rejuvenated. If you would like to see some of the birds we saw, make the jump below for some pictures.

Giving Thanks for Beautiful Things: Dawson Lake

It's a strange feeling...NOT traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday. But it didn't keep us from taking a little excursion the other day. The Sierra Nevada foothills, which rise just a short distance east of my town, are one of the most utilized terrains in California. The land was pretty well overturned by the gold seekers in the 1850s: some parts were blasted with water cannons (hydraulic mining), while bottomlands near the Tuolumne River were dredged. The low hills were deemed a good spot to build reservoirs both small and large to harness the power of the river and to provide irrigation water for the valley below. The remaining open spaces were utilized by cattle ranchers for livestock grazing. And these days, fruit orchards are expanding eastward into the mountains.

One of the earliest dams was constructed on the Tuolumne River near La Grange. La Grange Dam was completed in 1892, and is used to divert some of the river into a series of canals and levees that allow the irrigation of tens of thousands of acres around Turlock and Modesto. One of the canals flows into a small reservoir called Dawson Lake. That's where we found ourselves as the sun was setting.

Sunsets have a way of taking mundane landscapes and turning them into something beautiful. The lake was nearly empty, but enough water remained to reflect the fiery skies. An egret was looking for the last few fish in the shallow ponds.

We took a brief look at Old Basso Bridge, which was built over the Tuolumne River about 1911, and was retired from service in 1986. It is preserved for pedestrian use these days (apparently one truck accident in the right spot could have collapsed the entire structure). It was a pretty afternoon, a release from a couple of stressful weeks.

I have lots of things to be thankful for. The land I live on is one of them.

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.