One of Those Precious Days, Seeing Half Dome from the Great Valley

Sometimes, it is the context that makes something precious. A drink of water on a hot day in the desert, for instance. A few drops of rain in a crippling drought. In our valley, a clear day is a precious thing. The Great Valley of California is surrounded by mountains. The Sierra Nevada rises to an elevation of nearly three miles on the east side, while the Coast Ranges to the west approach a mile in height. The air in the valley quite often is stagnant, and fills with pollution, agricultural dust, and often a great deal of fog during the winter months. Inversion layers can trap the bad air for weeks at a time. The cities of the south valley, Bakersfield, Fresno, and Visalia, regularly make the top ten lists of most polluted areas in the United States. It's only when storms blow through that the polluted air is pushed to different places.

So that's what made today one of those precious moments. We had our first really intense storm of the year this week. We got an inch or more of rain in the valley (that's nearly 10% of the year's normal precipitation). The Sierra got a good dusting of snow, with almost two feet in a few places. And the wind has been blowing. I walked out this morning to the Tuolumne River Parkway to check on the progress of trail construction (they expect to finish in a month or so). Part of the trail climbs to the top of the river bluffs to avoid the city's water treatment plant, and that portion offers a nice panorama of the Tuolumne River floodplain, and on clear days like today, the Sierra Nevada and Coast Ranges.

Later in the day, I was driving south on my way to teach my night class. The road passes one of the very few spots on the floor of the Great Valley where Half Dome is visible. It's been nearly a year since it's been clear enough for me to spy the iconic dome. It's visible in this spot only because Yosemite Valley is oriented southwest towards my vantage point near the corner of Keyes and Hickman Roads near Denair and Turlock. The dome is nearly 70 miles away as the crow flies. In the photo below, it's just a bit left of center.

I really enjoy these crystal-clear days. They don't happen often enough around here.

More Days Like This Please

Sierra Nevada looking east from the Great Valley. The mountains are in the southern part of Yosemite National Park.

I live in one of the most polluted valleys in the United States. The Great Valley of California is a 400 mile long enclosed basin, with the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west. The rivers that flow into the valley exit in only one place, the Sacramento Delta and Carquinez Straits. Some of the rivers never even reach the sea; the Kern, Tulare and Kings Rivers historically ended in vast lakes on the valley floor, but irrigation diversions caused the lakes to dry up, and now the valley floor is covered with agricultural fields instead.

Sierra Nevada looking east from the Great Valley. The mountains are in the southern part of Yosemite National Park.

The mountains surrounding the valley have created a reservoir of air. Our weather tends to be benign most of the time, with low winds, and only a few storms a year to displace the air in the valley. So pollution tends to persist, and to build up over time. It's nothing like conditions in China these days, or like Los Angeles in the 1960s, but it's unhealthy, and for most of the year it is easy to forget that I live next to one of the world's great mountain ranges. I can't see the mountains most of the time because of the air that gets in the way...

Tuolumne River in the Great Valley near the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Except for today. We had a record-setting December in a good way, 7-8 inches of rain, when 1.5 inches is expected. It looked like maybe we could make headway against the worst California drought in recorded history. And then January. Not a drop. Nada. The prospect of a fourth year of drought seems more real than ever. Today a storm blew in. It didn't drop as much as we hoped in our area, but it looks like the rest of the north state got a pretty good soaking.

Tuolumne River at the edge of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

And there was wind. The wind blew out the dust and pollutants, and I had a fine view of the mountains that rise above Yosemite Valley. I could even make out Half Dome. I walked out to the Tuolumne River to check out the proposed river park and trail. It was nice to imagine the river walk that should be constructed here soon. It's close to several local schools, so I am imagining a great outdoor laboratory within walking distance of the classroom. And the view is nice, especially on days like this one.

We need a few more like this, please.

And don't worry, part two of the Long Valley/Mammoth Lakes saga will be posted tomorrow!

Half Dome from the corner of Keyes Road and Hickman Road. It's in the dead center of the picture.

It was a day like no other...and that's the problem

A thousand real estate agents abandoned the shopping malls, grabbed their cameras, and snapped pictures today in southern California. Why? Because it was a gorgeous clear day like no other...and that's the problem. If you sell property in SoCal, your pictures of houses for sale have big beautiful mountains in the background. Mountains that are commonly invisible when you actually live there. Given the all-too-common state of the air in the basin, this could be called false advertising.

In the first years of my youth, I lived in the Inland Empire, the citrus-growing region around Riverside, Upland and San Bernardino. There were smog problems back then, but most people accepted that as a fact of life, the cost of living in big cities. The ring of mountains surrounding our valley guaranteed that the poisoned air could not escape and be dispersed across the desert. In those days of the 1960's, no one could conceive that anything could be done about air pollution, much less that it should be. I grew up next to a steel refinery which, their media officials proudly pronounced, produced only 15% of all the smog in southern California. But dammit, they employed thousands, and even offered medical benefits (ever wonder where Kaiser Permanante came from?). Air pollution was the symbol of a booming economy, even if it was sickening and killing the people who had to live in it.

I have memories of the vast wall of yellow gunk streaming over the Chino Hills most afternoons, and after a time a smog alert would be issued and p.e. class would be canceled that day. It would physically hurt to take a deep breath. That was just the way things were, and there wasn't anything that could be done about it. There is still plenty of pollution, but for the actions we chose to take the Los Angeles basin and the Inland Empire would have ended up looking like the L.A. of the movie "Blade Runner".

The Clean Air Act made a difference. Even though the population has perhaps quadrupled since I lived there, pollution systems in cars and factories have improved air quality to a huge degree. It would never have happened without government intervention, and we are all the better for it. I think of the Clean Air Act and other landmark legislation that made life better for all of our population, not just a chosen few. Politics has always been about getting the advantage for those stand to make the most money, but once in a while we can force politicians to rise above their base instincts and really do something for the good of the country.

The ranges in these pictures are the mountains of my youth. I have stood on many of these summits, and explored many of the canyons hidden in the folds of the jagged rock. The first picture shows the rugged eastern end of the San Gabriel Mountains, the high ridges of Cucamonga Peak, Ontario Peak and Mt. San Antonio, ranging from 8,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation. They are composed of plutonic and metamorphic rocks ranging in age from Proterozoic to Mesozoic time. The mountains have risen rapidly in the last few million years, and have been described to me as statistically the steepest mountains on the planet. Indeed, the only places flat enough for developments in these mountains are on landslide deposits (Baldy Village and Crystal Lake, for instance). The town of Wrightwood, besides being sited on top of the San Andreas fault is also occasionally damaged by mudflows from the unstable slopes above.

The high ridges in the second picture are in the San Bernardino Mountains, the highest mountains in southern California. They are also composed of plutonic rocks, but also include Paleozoic metasedimentary rocks with affinities to those in the Mojave Desert. They are quite unlike the adjacent San Gabriel Mountains, which is hardly a surprise given that the San Andreas fault passes between them. The rocks of the San Gabriels originated far to the south, and have been carried north by lateral motion along the fault. The high ridges of San Bernardino Peak made an ideal location for the initial survey station for the township and range system of property boundaries across southern California. The primary east-west survey line is called a "baseline", and if you stand in the middle of Baseline Avenue as it runs through Claremont and Upland, you will see that it lines up exactly with San Bernardino Peak in the distance (you need a clear day, and watch out for traffic!).

I am trying trying to build a photographic record of some of the places I grew up in as part of my "Other California" series, so look for a few entries as I revisit the mountains of my youth. In the meantime, I recommend a wonderful book published by Stephens Press called "Call of the Mountains" by Ann and Farley Olander. It's a wonderful photo essay of the San Gabriels, the San Bernardinos, and the San Jacinto Mountains, the not-quite-fully appreciated jewels of the mountains of Southern California.