New Book out on Yosemite Geology!

When I'm not doing other things, most of you know that I love hanging out in Yosemite National Park. I'm happy to report a great new book is out from Mountain Press Publishing Company called Geology Underfoot in Yosemite National Park, by fellow Pomona College alumni Allen Glazner and Yosemite Park geologist Greg Stock. Just got a copy, and I am most impressed. It has been quite a few years now since N. King Huber's book on Yosemite geology was published (the mid 1980's), and Yosemite Underfoot is a great update, and far more comprehensive. It is a series of vignettes of significant geologic spots in the park, but also in the surrounding region, is well-illustrated (in color), and is rich with locality maps and diagrams.

If you are the least bit interested in geology, pick up the book. If you are not interested in geology (which begs the question of why you are reading this) pick up the book anyway. You will become interested in the geology!

Yosemite Falls: The Spectacle that Almost Wasn't

Look at Yosemite Falls from another angle: in this case I was perched atop Taft Point, which is reached by trail from the Glacier Point Road. Like a number of other geological mysteries over the years something bothered me, but never to the point that I solved it with insight and creativity. Other people had to do it for me, in this case N. King Huber. It had to do with the strange cleft of rock to the left of the falls. The trail to the top of the falls follows this declivity, but why is it there? And ask yourself: shouldn't Yosemite Creek be following that canyon? If it did, it would be no more remarkable than the practically unknown Lehamite Falls described in the previous post.

Huber passed away recently, after a long career with the USGS, and later as a populizer of geology for the Yosemite Association. His final book, Geological Ramblings in Yosemite (http://www.yosemitestore.com/Templates/frmTemplateP1.asp?SubFolderID=114&SearchYN=N&t=9&p=3) is a delightful collection of essays culled and adapted from articles he did for the Yosemite Association Magazine. In one of them, he explains the mystery. Yosemite Creek did follow the cleft! And probably for a very long time. But, during one of the last glaciations, a lateral moraine blocked the old waterway, and forced Yosemite Creek over the brink of the sheer cliff where it now flows. The old waterway seems more obvious in a picture where the falls are dry, such as the photo below, taken in October.

I appreciate the insight of geologists like Huber, and of the way they make the information accessible to the lay population.