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.

What's the Most Alien Landscape You've Ever Explored? Here's a Candidate

What is the strangest landscape you've ever explored? That is, the kind of place that makes you think that this just isn't part of planet Earth. I got to experience one of those places last week during our field studies trip to Death Valley National Park.

Only this bizarre landscape is not in Death Valley National Park. It's part of the California desert southwest of Death Valley in the Searles Lake valley. It's not part of any national or state park. It's administered by the Bureau of Land Management as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern and more recently as part of the California Desert Conservation Area.

The Bureau of Land Management has always had an uncomfortable fit with land use priorities in the American West. The Bureau began as a land disposal operation under the direction of the Homestead Act back in the latter part of the 1800s. The land that was not selected by settlers from the east was seen as sort of a wasteland of little interest to most people. But land ethics change and by the 1970s many people began to recognize that many BLM lands were every bit as precious as the adjacent national parks and monuments. This is one of those landscapes. They're called the Trona Pinnacles, and I saw them up close for the first time in my life last week.

When one realizes the richness of Death Valley National Park and all of the strange and wonderful features within, one can almost understand why I haven't been to the Trona Pinnacles before. By the time we arrive in their vicinity, we've already seen four days full of strange landscapes and on the last day we have two important geological localities and then a six-hour drive home. There just hasn't been enough time.

This year was different. We arrived at the park in midst of one of the most intense storm events of the year. Record snow and rain was falling in the coastal regions and the Sierra Nevada, but we had mostly benign conditions during our journey. But the storms caused the closure of the road that we needed to access Aguereberry Point, and construction had closed the access to Mosaic Canyon. We needed a last geological stop and I remembered how we often could see the pinnacles in the distance as we headed home. Why not see if we could get there? We headed south on the five-mile gravel road outside of Trona and had little problem reaching the pinnacles. We started exploring. I was awe-struck.

There are 500 of these pinnacles in three groups. They range in size from a few feet to more than 140 feet high, with an average of around 40 to 50 feet. They occur in three groups (the north, central, and south groups). We were exploring the north group, consisting of some 200 pinnacles. But how did they form? Are they volcanic? Are they alien landing beacons? According to the Star Trek canon, that might be the answer...in what is widely regarded as the worst Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier, the pinnacles formed the setting of the final confrontation of Captain Kirk and the "God" who needed a starship to escape his planetary prison ("What does God need with a starship").

So what really happened?

Today the bottom of the Searles Valley is a sun-blasted dry lake full of salts and other soluble chemicals that are mined on a large-scale basis. But between 12,000 and 25,000 years ago the landscape was much different. The last of the major ice ages, the Tioga, produced extensive glaciers throughout the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra rain shadow prevented many glaciers from forming in the mountains to the east, but glacial meltwater filled the basins. One by one they spilled over into the adjacent valley forming a series of large lakes: Mono, Owens, China, Searles, Panamint, and ultimately Manly in the bottom of Death Valley. These are called pluvial lakes. The surrounding valley floors sported grassy prairies and the hills had forests of trees like pinyon, juniper and at higher elevations, firs. The prairies were grazed by bison, horses, camels, and mammoths. They were hunted by Dire Wolves and Saber-tooth Cats and other fearsome carnivores.

The towers are composed of calcium carbonate, which is the mineral calcite. The porous form of calcite is called tufa. The tufa formed when calcite-rich freshwater springs on the lakebed interacted with the alkaline water of the lake. The location of the springs seems to have been guided by faults running through the area. The towers could only have formed when covered with water, so the pinnacles have been exposed to the elements for more than 10,000 years.

More recently formed towers are visible at Mono Lake near Lee Vining and Tioga Pass in the Sierra Nevada. They were still forming when Los Angeles diverted the water from streams flowing into Mono Lake in 1940. The lake began to dry, exposing the tufa towers.

The snowcapped peak in the picture above and below is Telescope Peak, the highest point in Death Valley National Park at 11,043 feet, more than 9,000 feet above the floor of Searles Lake. Such are the extremes of this fascinating landscape.

There was a lot to see in Death Valley and the surrounding region during our journey last week. More blogs will follow! And while you are waiting for the next entry, tell me about the most alien landscape you've ever seen...

Home From Back of Beyond: Images of a Harsh Country, Part Three

This first photo may recall the disasters unfolding in the American West and Hawai'i with out-of-control wildfires and volcanic eruptions, but in this case it is no disaster. It is was the sunset on the tenth day of our recent exploration of the Colorado Plateau. We had finished our explorations of Arches and Canyonlands National Park and were headed west, towards home. It's funny, the emotions that can arise on a long journey. It felt like we were nearing the end of the trip yet we still had five days and four nights to go, and there were still four national parks on the itinerary. I've put together two previous posts of my favorite shots from the trip, and this is the third and final chapter.

We had been out for a long time, so we gave the students half a day of free time in Moab, Utah to do laundry, shower, and peruse the rock shops. But first we had one other major archaeological stop to make. The sandstone walls of the Colorado River gorge downstream of Moab contain some fascinating petroglyphs. They are cleverly hidden behind a big highway sign that says "Indian Writings".

Having signs pointing to fragile petroglyphs along a busy highway might not seem to be a good preservation strategy, but in this the highway construction itself provided the protection. There was very little space along the river for road construction, so the crews removed many tons of fallen debris to make room, the same debris the original artists stood on to chip out their art. Many of the petroglyphs are now inaccessible, fifteen or twenty feet above the roadway. One of the most unique is the bear, surrounded by hunters with bows and arrows (I think the artist was bragging).

In the afternoon we headed west and south across the barren lands around Green River. The small village is the final settlement for a hundred miles west along Interstate 70. The only settlement to the south is Hanksville, around fifty miles away. We were in one of the most isolated regions of the lower 48 states. Our destination for the night was Goblin Valley State Park on the San Rafael Swell. The sunset was glorious (the first picture of today's post was also taken there).

In Jurassic time an ocean embayment extended south from Canada into the Colorado Plateau region. Called the Sundance Sea, it left behind all manner of tidal flats, delta deposits, and coastal dunes. The Entrada Sandstone displays many of these environments, and erosion has carved the rock into a variety of fascinating shapes. For one, most of the arches of Arches National Park occur in the Entrada. At Goblin Valley, the rocks were more thinly-bedded and produced small mushroom-shaped spires that gave the valley its name. If you are a fan of sci-fi flicks, you may recognize Goblin Valley as the setting for some scenes from Galaxy Quest (the one with the little purple aliens and the rock monster).

Looking south from Goblin Valley we could see the high peaks of the Henry Mountains, often described as the last mountain range in the United States to be discovered and explored (in the 1870s). Like the La Sal Mountains described in the last post, they are laccoliths, mushroom-shaped intrusions of magma. It was at the Henry Mountains that the term laccolith was first proposed by Grove Karl Gilbert, a pioneering American geologist.

Stars. Night after night of the most starlit skies I can remember. We were in the darkest corner of the continent, and our nights for the entire trip had been free of moonlight, but the following day the thinnest crescent moon I could remember ever seeing was setting in the west. I noticed later that this first appearance of the moon on June 14 was the ending of the month of Ramadan.

Our destination the following morning was Bryce Canyon National Park. The Colorado Plateau is a remarkable region because for close to a billion years it had been remarkably stable, remaining at or close to sea level throughout Paleozoic and Mesozoic time. But in the Cenozoic this began to change as the land rose above sea level for the last time. During the early Cenozoic Era (60-40 million years ago) the region around Bryce Canyon was a huge freshwater lake. The resulting pink siltstone an limestone layer is called the Claron Formation.

The rocks of the Claron Formation are cut by vertical fractures called joints, and these fractures allow water and ice to widen the cracks and forming the spires of Bryce Canyon. The rock towers are called hoodoos. Sometimes arches and natural bridges will form during this process (natural bridges cover a watercourse while arches do not). Does anyone want to guess what kind of opening this is in the picture below? (Hint: It's named Natural Bridge)

Bryce Canyon is an exceedingly popular national park. Besides the spectacular scenery, it lies in close proximity to Zion and Grand Canyon National Parks and thus makes a "grand triangle" of a tour so beloved by bus companies and tourists on a time budget. The popularity combined with the rush that most people are in to get to the most possible localities means that certain parts of the park are more impacted than others. The free trams go to the most crowded parking lots, and the entire south end of the park tends to be far less crowded and hectic (at least in my experience). If you ever visit, make every effort to go beyond Inspiration Point and see Rainbow Point and the many other pullouts. It will take you no longer to see them than it will to wait for a parking spot to open up at the more popular viewpoints.

By the time we left Bryce that afternoon we were making serious mileage towards home. We crossed the deserts of western Utah and arrived at one of my favorite national parks of all: Great Basin. The park is not a basin, it's a mountain range, the Snake Range. It was established in 1986, although a small portion, Lehman Caves, was made a national monument in 1922. The political journey leading to the establishment of the park was different than most. As I came to understand it (and please, provide some insight in the comments if I have this wrong), there was a desire to have a national park representing the best of the Basin and Range geologic province, but promoters were split between three possible locales! There was the Toiyabe Range in central Nevada, the Ruby Range/East Humboldt Range in the northwest part of the state, and the Snake Range, which got the eventual nod. Purists supported the Toiyabe Range because it best exemplified the unique ecosystems of the Great Basin whereas the other two showed more affinities for Rocky Mountain flora. It was an interesting problem because the Ruby Mountains and Snake Range offered more "normal" mountain scenery along with glacial lakes. They really are a bit more like the Rockies. I suspect that the Snake Range got the nod because it already had the infrastructure for a national park (an extant visitor center, for instance), it had Lehman Cave as a centerpiece, but it also had Nevada's only glacier, and a forest of Bristlecone Pines, the oldest living organisms on the planet.

The park also protects Wheeler Peak (13,063 feet), which is the highest peak entirely within the boundaries of the state of Nevada (the actual high point, Boundary Peak, is a spur on the ridge of a higher peak in California, and it is only about 50 feet higher than Wheeler). There is a spectacular ridge-hugging paved road that reaches the main trailheads at over 10,000 feet.

Great Basin is one of my favorites because it still retains the character of what most national parks once were: havens of serenity and wilderness. The park is generally uncrowded (except for the lines at the visitor center for cavern tour tickets), and mostly undeveloped. There are roads and campgrounds, for instance, but many of the roads are unpaved, and the campgrounds are old style: vault toilets, and no hook-ups. The last time I checked, the campfire programs were actually done around campfires, without screens and PowerPoint presentations. I hesitate to even tell you about this because you might want to go and see it, and it will get crowded like all the rest. Just kidding, go see it. It's beautiful, and the caverns are wonderful too.

The next day was a long drive across Nevada, and we had one more night, staying at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. It's a fascinating place and I would describe it in detail, but I took few pictures, and this post is all about my favorite shots from the trip (you can read some details in this post from a previous trip). The next morning we were homebound and quickly crossed the western desert hills of Nevada. We crossed Anchorite Pass and rolled into our home state of California  In a matter of minutes Mono Lake came into view. We took a break at the Interagency Visitor Center at Lee Vining.

Mono Lake is a singular ecosystem in California, like no other place in the state. It occupies a large tectonic basin, meaning it has no (current) natural outlet. Lots of water flows into the lake via streams from the adjacent Sierra Nevada, but the only way water can leave is by way of evaporation. Because of this, the salt content of the lake is three times that of seawater. Few organisms can survive such conditions, so the ecosystem is pretty straightforward: some algae, trillions of brine shrimp, trillions of brine flies, and millions of migratory and resident bird species. Mono Lake is one of the most important stops on the Pacific migratory flyway.

Unfortunately humans always find a way to muck things up, and Los Angeles worked really hard to mess up this system. It involved building a 200 mile-long aqueduct and an eleven mile-long tunnel under a series of volcanoes to siphon off water from the tributaries that drain into Mono Lake. When the city closed off the streams in 1941 Mono Lake began drying up and lost 45 feet of elevation. The salinity drastically increased, threatening to kill off the shrimp. Lawsuits dragged on for years, but now an agreement is in place to raise the lake to a sustainable level. If only the California drought would cooperate...

The day we arrived the lake was (for me) an unusual shade of turquoise. The clouds were a sight as well. There had been not a great many clouds during our trip. The lack of rain was nice, but the entire route of our trip has been in the grip of an exceptionally severe drought. We wouldn't have minded a drencher if it could have helped.

Our final national park of the trip was in some ways the most familiar, but we didn't see it from a normal angle. Something like 90% of the people who visit Yosemite National Park go to the iconic valley, but the valley makes up only 7 square miles of a 1,000 square mile park. We entered the park at Tioga Pass (9,945 feet) and drove through the alpine meadows of the upper Tuolumne River. After more than 3,000 miles of barren desert environments, the greenery was stunning. We made a final lecture stop at Olmsted Point, which provided a unique view of Half Dome, from upstream.

But that was it. Once everyone realized that we had crossed the headwaters of the river that flows through our community, there was no slowing down. Homesickness is a powerful emotion and it was almost as if our vans took on a life of their own as we rolled down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada to the end of our journey. Like crazed tourists, we had visited 10 national parks, 9 national monuments and recreation areas, and maybe a dozen state parks. We had traversed a geological history encompassing 1.7 billion years of geological events and thousands of years of human history. All it took was 15 days, 3,700 miles, and a great group of students and volunteers!

Come join us some time in the future. We're headed to the Cascades this fall with a five day trip to Mt. Shasta, Lava Beds National Monument, Lassen Volcanic National Park, and McArthur-Burney Falls State Park. Contact me for details...