Early Snow in the Sierra Nevada! During a field trip, of course.

Snow-capped peaks above Hope Valley

What a difference a week can make! Seven days ago I was in the Owens Valley and eastern Sierra Nevada, and though we got a bit of inclement weather, it was a warm storm, and we were barely inconvenienced. The pictures (here and here) show little in the way of new snow or ice. But then there was this last weekend. I was leading a short tour of Lake Tahoe for conferees at the SciX conference in Reno, Nevada, and from the moment we arrived at the lake on Friday to this afternoon, it was raining and snowing.

Fall colors and snow at Carson Pass

Lake Tahoe may have received on the order of two inches of rain, and a fair mantle of snow could be seen on the peaks above 8,000-9,000 feet. The white snow combined with the just-beginning fall colors was a beautiful sight. It kind of wreaked havoc with our field trip though. The rain was constant and the temperature never rose above 43 degrees or so. It was snowing on us at Mt. Rose Summit. Our only comfortable discussion took place inside the visitor center at Sand Harbor near Incline Village.

Lake Tahoe near Cave Rock on Saturday

Just the same, I wouldn't have changed a thing. California is in the midst of a horrific drought of epic proportions. The situation is growing desperate in California and other parts of the American Southwest and it will take several years of normal and above-normal precipitation to make up the steep deficit. An early snowfall is a good sign and hopeful beginning to the new water year.

On Highway 88 below Cook's Station

As we were coming home this evening we were treated to a wonderful sky show as the storm began breaking up. At times the cumulus clouds looked like volcanic eruptions or nuclear bombs in the distance.

Oaks and cumulus clouds near Mokelumne Hill and Valley Springs

The storm had petered out by the time we reached our prairie-lands around Milton and Oakdale. We were treated to a colorful sunset.

TV Theme Songs that Evoke a Sense of Place: A Top 10 List...(Part 1)

A song lingered in my head for a few hours the other day, and I found myself wandering like an ethereal spirit someplace different, specifically on a beach in Hawaii. It was quite literally like an out-of-body experience. I could feel the warm air, the bright sun, the light sea breeze...I could even hear the waves crashing, and after a moment I realized that Steve McGarrett just might walk through the door into the computer lab where I was struggling to finish a long program review document.
That's what music can do for you, especially when it is tied to powerful visual images, and to a great extent, youthful memories. It got me thinking about TV theme songs and how they sometimes evoke a sense of place as much as they evoke characters, dramas, and comedies. It didn't take me too long to come up with my personal top 10 themes. It took quite a bit longer to find them all, but here they are:

These are not in any particular order, but the first two probably represent the top of my list. Hawaii Five O has the most unforgettable opening theme of any television show in history. Composed by Morton Stevens and performed by the Ventures, it is one of the few songs that can stick in my head all day and not drive me up the wall. You may or may not know that there is a new Hawaii Five O on CBS right now. It's ok, and I tune in to see the scenery backdrop, but I was upset that they took the opening theme and cut it half! The first night the show was on, I actually went online just to bring up the old theme and play it all the way through.

The show itself hasn't aged so well though. The plots were more sophisticated in my memories than in fact, and the actor's behaviour at a crime scene was appalling. Acting was stiff and wooden; watch an old episode some time and notice that whenever there is an office discussion of the case, everyone but McGarrett stands with their hands firmly at their sides, never moving. Any plot that required hippies or protesters was, um, clumsy and stereotypical. Still it was one of my favorite shows of all time.

I read somewhere that when Hawaii Five-O went off the air in 1979, after twelve seasons, there was an entire institution of studios and film crews left in Hawaii who had nothing to do anymore, so they more or less invented a new series. It was about some happy-go-lucky private investigator who lived in Hawaii who was named, um, something like Remington, or Colt, or Magnum, or something like that.

Oh, it was Magnum, and the opening theme is second on my list! The show, half comedy and half drama is one of my enduring favorites, and now that the DVDs are out, I realize the show has weathered the years quite well. They made great use of the landscape in most episodes, especially since a helicopter flight with the character T.C. was often an important plot point. One got a real sense of the geography of the islands, especially Oahu.

If you are only marginally familiar with the series, you may not know that the whole first season of episodes had a totally different theme song. It wasn't very good at all (check it out below).

Third on the list is one of those songs that will, in fact, drive you nuts in a few minutes if it gets stuck in your head, but it evokes a sense of place as sure as any other song on this list: The Gilligan's Island theme. Although the specific locality of the "island" is never mentioned, it existed on a studio lot in Hollywood. But the pilot for the series was shot on the Hawaiian island of Kaua'i, and I've been there. I've been to the real Gilligan's Island!

So my question is, instead of trying to get off their island, why didn't they just go up the beach to the housing development?

For your listening pleasure, I found three links, the first of which is the version everyone remembers:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2315010/gilligans_island_opening_theme_in_color/

And then there is a second, earlier version, in which the Professor and Maryanne get no billing. Really! I, like many others, liked Maryanne better than Ginger, and the Professor was one of my life role models. According to Wikipedia, Russell Johnson, the actor who played the professor, insisted that any science statements he made on the show had to be accurate:

http://youtu.be/cfR7qxtgCgY

Trivia question of the day: What was the Professor's name (the character, not the actor)?

I always assumed the castaways were traveling from a Hawaiian port, but listening to the original theme music, one would have to assume they were in the Caribbean:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvslFMAaew

Theme number four evokes a sense of place, but it evokes a place nowhere near Earth...Star Trek.

I appreciate the original theme well enough, but I thought that the theme for "Star Trek: The Next Generation" caught the majesty of space a bit better than the original series. None of the other spinoff series ever came close, but I can listen to the movie soundtracks for hours. For the purists, I found a Youtube of the original series, shown below:

Number five on my list is a theme song that takes me to two places. The first is Lake Tahoe, one of my favorite local destinations, and the other is my youth. My grandparents NEVER missed "Bonanza", and so that music has the ability to turn me into a six-year-old child spending a night at the grandparent's ranch (the two acre ranch was in south Ontario, California; how many southern Californians can remember when Ontario had ranch properties?).

The map that burns up at the start of the theme song is actually oriented with North pointing to the left. Carson City and Virginia City are actually east of Lake Tahoe. Wow, if the family still owned that ranch, they would be billionaires....

That's it for Part one of this exploration of television theme songs that evoke a sense of place. We do have an extra bonus theme song for a place that you all thought didn't really exist at all: Bedrock!

Well, it does exist. I saw it this summer. It's in the extreme western end of Colorado, in the Paradox Valley. I did not see any dinosaurs, or Fred or Wilma. It is conceivable that some dinosaurs would be found nearby, entombed in the Mesozoic rocks that form the local cliffs.

Part 2 will be posted shortly. In the meantime, what shows would you add to this list?

Friday's Fun Fotos: the Fluvial Forest Discussed

I posted some pictures of a "fluvial forest" this morning (fluvial=river) asking for an explanation about how these trees came to exposed in the river channel, and in short order got three excellent answers. I've provided a larger format picture above to give some perspective on the setting (click on the image to see the bigger picture). This is the West Walker River, a few miles downstream from the junction of Highway 395 and Highway 108 from Sonora Pass in California's Sierra Nevada.

It's rather striking and strange to see so many trunks of mature trees sitting in the active channel, as Jeffrey pine really can't tolerate soaking for more than a few weeks a year. They otherwise do quite well on the shady slopes to the right in the picture above (and not so well on the dry slopes to the left). I have to admit that this was my thesis area, but I didn't really give the trees much thought 25 years ago, yet they reveal an interesting story.

Anne had a great idea, saying that mining wastes could have caused the filling of the channel, smothering the trees. This would be a great explanation, and such a thing indeed happened in the Sierra Nevada during the hydraulic mining era of the Gold Rush (I posted a picture of a tree trunk formed this way some time back). The problem is that no mines of any consequence were present in the area.

Rob provides a glacial explanation, in which glacial outwash buries a forest, and then a surging glacier planes off the trunks. This is an appealing explanation because this part of the canyon was very close to the terminus of the Tioga and Tahoe glaciers. Glaciers would explain it, except the age of the trees are wrong. One set of the trees in this fluvial forest grew between AD 900 and 1100, while another set grew between AD 1210 and 1350. Smaller glacial episodes in the last two thousand years never approached the area.

Lockwood comes the closest to explaining what happened here, suggesting that a debris flow filled part of the canyon, killing and burying the trees, and then the river exhumed the forest. But there is an interesting twist: the valley is really narrow here (look at the top photo; there is barely enough room for the river and the highway, and when the river floods, there is no room for the highway at all. It disappears and has to be rebuilt, most recently in 1997). The trees, and there are dozens of them, were pretty much filling the entire canyon bottom. There was almost no room for a river channel when these trees were growing. This suggests that the river was much smaller in the two time periods the trees represent. In other words there were two crippling droughts that lasted 200 and 140 years respectively. Once the droughts ended, the river filled the channel with sediment again, and debris flows, as Lockwood suggests, undoubtedly had a role. Outwash from the Matthes glaciation may have been a factor as well.

There is confirming evidence for such mega-droughts in other areas of the Sierra Nevada. Tenaya Lake, Lake Tahoe, and Fallen Leaf Lake all have submerged forests that grew to maturity during these periods when the lakes didn't have enough water to breach their outlets. Oral histories of California's Native Americans also hint at terrible droughts.

In human time frames, droughts are a fact of life here in California. We had extended droughts from 1928-1934, 1960-61, 1976-77, and 1988-92. We may or may not be ending a three year drought this year as well. Our population has grown so large that each drought becomes more problematic, and we muddle through on the strength of a few extraordinary precipitation years that fill reservoirs for a time. What would we do if another century-long drought were to come? And what role will anthropogenic global warming play? I, for one, wouldn't particularly care, because I will be dead, but my grandchildren might have a real struggle.

Stine, S., 1994. Extreme and persistent drought in California and Patagonia during mediaeval time. Nature 369:546-549. I can't find a copy of Stine's paper on the web, but Stine's findings are discussed briefly here (page 15-16), and here (page 296)

Geologists Travel...Part II

Continuing one geologist's travels in 2009...

Three weeks were spent on the Hawaiian Islands, an absolutely glorious journey with enough sights (and pictures) to last a lifetime. Here, Halemaumau crater on Kilauea is belching out tremendous amounts of sulfur dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. The eruption began only a year or so earlier, with a vent 300 feet across and 600 feet deep. Lava is bubbling inside.

A July trip to Balboa Beach in Southern California saw the arrival of unusually large waves from a tropical storm off Baja. A couple of people were actually killed by them.

July also saw a trip to Lake Tahoe, the giant subalpine lake (1,700 feet deep) formed as a huge fault valley (graben) was dammed by lava flows. Mount Tallac, on the skyline, is composed of metamorphic rocks intruded by Mesozoic granitic rocks.

September included a field studies journey to the Cascades of Northern California and southern Oregon. We toured Mt. Shasta, Crater Lake (above), Lava Beds, and Lassen Volcanic National Park.

October was a field studies trip to the central Mother Lode, including an exploration of Black Chasm cave.

November included a tour of Pinnacles National Monument (above), and a Geology Club tour of Natural Bridges near Columbia in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode.

And for December, a lot of family, and a quick look at the Grand Canyon!