Harbingers of Spring at the Red Hills Area of Critical Environmental Concern

It used to be a "junk" landscape...the kind of place where locals dumped their garbage and shot up old cars. Off-road vehicles ran roughshod over the relatively barren slopes. It wasn't private property. It was owned by the federal government, specifically the Bureau of Land Management, whose original goal was to give the land away, but in the end no one wanted it. The land, with poor soils nearly useless for agriculture, languished.

But times and attitudes change. There was a reason for the poor nutrient levels in the soils, and why grass, that would have at least allowed for grazing, failed to thrive. The underlying bedrock was composed of ultramafic rocks like serpentine, dunite and peridotite. The rocks are rich in iron and magnesium, with significant amounts of toxic elements like nickel or chrome. Only the hardiest of plants can tolerate these chemical conditions, although there are a few that can thrive in this harsh environment. When the ultramafic rocks are weathered, the iron is released to react with oxygen in the atmosphere to form natural rust minerals like hematite and limonite. The brightly colored soils earned the locality its name, the Red Hills. They form the ridges west of Chinese Camp in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode between Highways 108 and 132.

By the 1990s public efforts to protect and preserve the unique biology and geology of the region succeeded when the BLM declared 7,100 acres of the region (about 11 square miles) an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. Trash and garbage were removed, trails were laid out, and a parking area constructed. Regulations limited off-road use and target shooting. The region finally received the recognition it needed.

The "park" includes seven very rare species of plants, including two endemics, species found nowhere else in the world (the Red Hills Vervain, and the Red Hills Ragwort). The unique nature of the flora is immediately apparent when approaching the area from the west. The environment of scattered oaks and widespread grasslands gives way abruptly to Buckbrush and Gray Pines. Grass is practically non-existent, unable to thrive on the poor soils. The region has a decidedly barren look.

But then the rains arrive. In the late winter and early spring, the wildflowers burst forth in a display of bright colors. Wildflowers in other parts of the Mother Lode are often hidden by the high-growing grasses. With grass a much diminished species, the wildflowers blaze forth.

We went up into the Red Hills today to see how things have progressed now that we've had a wet year. It's a bit early, but a fair number of flowers were visible on the slopes, including Monkey Flower, Golden Poppy, Brodiaea, and Five-spot. The lichens provided even more color.

The intermittent creek running along the main road through the park sported a healthy flow of water allowing us a chance to see the other unique species in the ACEC: the Red Hills Roach (Lavinia symmetricus), which is a fish, not a bug.

The Red Hills Roach is a subspecies of the California Roach, a member of the minnow family. It's only found in a few drainages within the ACEC and nowhere else in the world. The streams run dry for much of the year, but small seeps and springs maintain permanent pools where a few fish can survive. There were serious concerns about whether the fish would be able to survive the horrific drought of the last decade, but they managed as they have through time.

I got a poor picture of one of the roaches, but a teaching colleague of mine, Ryan Hollister, has posted some underwater shots of the fish on the move.


The Red Hills are wet from months of above-average rainfall, and the plants are growing fast, and will be blooming in profusion in the next few weeks. If you can spare a moment, head into the hills and give the ACEC a chance to impress. It is a truly unique environment found nowhere else in the world.

Bizarro Rocks Day and a Roadrunner

We were on the road this weekend, attending the fall meeting of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. When geologist-teachers get together, we may talk about teaching, but we make sure our activities revolve around geology. We explore.

The sponsor of our meeting was Copper Mountain College, which serves the towns of Yucca Valley and Twentynine Palms. The towns are right next to Joshua Tree National Park which sits astride the boundary between the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts in Southern California. One group explored the scarps produced by the 1992 Landers Earthquake, a 7.6 temblor that produced a prominent scarp that is still visible today. The other trip was a tour of a park named for an odd tree, but whose other distinction is the bizarro rocks it has. Joshua Tree is a showcase for plutonic processes, with thousands of acres of weirdly weathered granitic boulders.

This is a brief post before I hit the long road home, but here are a smattering of photos of my favorite outcrops. They include the very colorful lichens I found in sheltered spots. Lichens are an entire ecosystem of lifeforms in miniature, a symbiotic relationship between algae and fungi.

And then there was the Triassic megacrystic Twentynine Palms quartz monzonite. I've seen plenty of porphyritic granitic rocks before, but a canyon filled with giant boulders of this stuff was just extraordinary.

I could swear I heard a little "beep-beep", and there it was, a little roadrunner wondering what we were up to. More pics later!

Garry Gazes at Granite, a prequel to "Horton Hears a Who"

"What color are rocks?" I ask my students, with the intention of highlighting stereotypes about geology. "Gray" is the inevitable answer. I then have them look around the lab, with the many rock samples strewn about, and they immediately realize that rocks occur in many shades. But why is gray always the answer?

I usually assume that it is because granite is made of light and dark colored minerals that appear sort of gray at a distance, and granite is the rock that my students are most likely to see in streambeds around our area, but I have come to realize that this doesn't fully explain things. Most casual visitors to Yosemite and other Sierra Nevada destinations rarely actually see granite (or granitic rocks; there are many kinds). Look at the boulder in the picture of Ribbon Falls above. It's a big chunk of El Capitan granite that should be nearly white in color (see the last picture in yesterday's post). Why isn't it? It's covered with...life! Gray life, and lots of other colors too!

My students must have been amused to see me on my knees, hunched over like a bar denizen who's had a bit too much to drink. I was grabbing some pictures of the complex miniature ecosystem that exists on every boulder and rock in Yosemite (and pretty much everywhere else). There are the "trees" of this little environment, the mosses (below). I assume they are 'rooted' in the weathered clay, or in the damp spaces left by departed mica grains;

On a finer scale, there is the 'underbrush', the lichens, the symbiotically joined fungi, algae and cyanobacteria that often coat the rock surfaces. They are a colorful addition to the landscape.

It's intriguing how many complex relationships exist on literally every rock littering the surface of Yosemite. It took me only a few moments of crawling to find numerous colorful examples.

Through a macro setting, the bizarre microworld becomes even more complex (click in the picture to enlarge). "Horton Hears a Who"? I could almost imagine the even smaller creatures living in the small openings! They didn't speak to me today, so you don't need to lock me up... just yet.

Yosemite National Park has undertaken an assessment of lichens in the park, with more than a hundred species cataloged, and an estimated 500 kinds yet to be discovered. Besides being interesting in and of themselves, the lichens also serve as a way of assessing air pollution damage in the park. Because they are slow-growing, they also serve as a method of dating the surfaces of glacial moraines in Yosemite and other alpine regions.

Yosemite is not the only place where numerous lichens can be found; the picture below (from a previous post on lichens in the foothills) shows a veritable palette of colorful lichens in Mojave National Scenic Area. It's one of my favorite photos.

Liken' Lichens a Lot Lately...Fall Report from the Sierra Foothills

It was a beautiful sparkling clear day following yesterday's storm that dumped 3-4 inches of rain on many parts of Central and Northern California, so we decided to do our first fall reconnaissance in the Sierra Nevada foothills. We drove up Marshes Flat Road between LaGrange and Moccasin and found that fall really hasn't arrived yet at the lower elevations, just a bit of yellowing among the sycamores.
We did stop for a few moments to look over a rejuvenated brook, and I took a closer look at the rock surfaces, which consisted mostly of metamorphic greenstone and ultramafic serpentinite. My attention was drawn to the lichens on the rock surface, and I took some macro images. The lichens occupy a strange world we don't see all that often. They live on a different scale at the interface between rock and atmosphere. The acids they produce are one of the elements in the weathering and chemical breakdown of exposed bedrock.

Lichens are a complex symbiosis of algae and fungi. There are probably 500 different species in nearby Yosemite National Park, though only 100 have been so far cataloged. I have really only just begun to study these fascinating life forms closely.

Marshes Flat Road is a nice quiet avenue that crosses the high ridge east of Highway 49 between Coulterville and Chineses Camp. Paved, but mostly 1 1/2 lanes, it offers some nice views and excellent wildflower displays in the springtime.

It's an entirely different region, but I am also offering my favorite shot of a lichen, a display from a basalt boulder in the Mojave Desert Scenic Preserve in southern California. The colors are stunning to me. Lichens survive in a lot of tough environments!