What Defines a Wilderness? Is it the Barrenness or the Richness? The Joe Domecq Wilderness Area and Gold Dredging

A wilderness surprise: Joe Domecq Wilderness Park

Wilderness [wil′dər nis]:
1. A neglected or abandoned area of a garden or town.
2. An area essentially undisturbed by human activity together with its naturally developed life community.

Can these two meanings be reconciled? I'm used to the definition of wilderness as it was written into the 1964 Wilderness Act: a contiguous area of at least 5,000 acres (7.8 square miles) that is as close to a primeval natural state as is possible. The landscape where I live has precious little remaining wilderness: the Great Valley has less than 5% of its original ecosystem. The Sierra Nevada has more open space and wilderness, but mostly in the high country. The deep forests of the middle elevations have been extensively logged, while the foothills were upended in the search for gold. The rivers have been mostly dammed.

Gold dredge deposits near Merced Falls

The dredging of Sierra Nevada/Great Valley rivers for gold was a particularly destructive form of mining. Put into practice long after the famous Gold Rush of 1848-53, dredging was an example of business getting serious about their "business". A great deal of fine-grained gold was not being captured by the usual mining methods and was lost downstream. Around 1898 the first successful dredge was placed in operation. It was a floating factory with large shovels on one side and a conveyer belt on the other. The shovels dug up one end of the pond, processed the sediments through sieves and mercury-coated copper plates, and then dumped them out the other end. In this way, the dredge sailed across the landscape, "dragging" its pond along. It was horribly efficient, as the miners could profit when there was only 18 to 20 cents of worth of gold in a cubic yard of gravel.

Dredged floodplain on the Merced River near Snelling, CA. Courtesy of GoogleEarth

How was this destructive? The mining process destroyed the natural soil of the river floodplains and replaced it with barren piles of boulders and cobbles that were no longer useful for pretty much any other purpose. Especially the growing of crops. Many tens of thousands of acres of valley floor were permanently altered. A dredge field on the Merced River in my area is nine miles long and half a mile wide. Similar amounts of land were dredged on the Tuolumne River that flows by my home town.

So here is the source of my opening question. After fifty or sixty years of abandonment, the dredge fields are returning to nature, after a fashion. Cottonwood trees have taken root here and there, and the old dredge ponds have formed tule thickets and swamps. The other day we were visiting Turlock Lake State Recreational Area (the lake stores water for irrigation). We continued up the road and more or less by accident discovered that we had a "wilderness" area right in our own backyard: it's called the Joe Domecq Wilderness Area, and is part of the larger La Grange Regional Park administered by Stanislaus County. We were intrigued and walked in.

The wilderness preserves about 270 acres of dredged lands and includes a pond, swamps, cottonwood and eucalyptus woodlands, and grassy meadows. Despite the horrific damage done to the original landscape, the environment has now recovered enough to provide a rich habitat for birds and other creatures. The preserve is minimally developed (rough trails, two picnic tables, no bathrooms), but there is plenty of land to wander about, especially if one is interested in birds.

As we explored, the woods were alive with bird songs. We meant to have a brief look, and stayed for two hours. I got a number of bird pictures, including one or two that I haven't seen before.

Before returning home, I walked out onto Old Basso Bridge, the old Highway 132 crossing of the Tuolumne River. It's across the street from the wilderness area. It's been replaced by a modern bridge and is reserved for pedestrians now. This area around the riverbank provides one more piece of habitat for the local animal life, including salmon during the right season.

It was a pleasant discovery, and nice to find that the abandoned barren lands can be rejuvenated. If you would like to see some of the birds we saw, make the jump below for some pictures.

Fall in the Sierra Foothills

It's California, so the season "fall" doesn't always have the same panache that it might in the northeastern states or northern Rocky Mountains. It also comes a lot later. Except for the (somewhat) unusual inch of rain we had last week, these days would be largely indistinguishable from summer. Dry, dusty, and only a little bit cooler (highs in the eighties are expected this week).

Still, it did rain last week, so the air was cooler today, and there was a freshness we haven't felt in months. We took a little picnic this afternoon up the Tuolumne River into the Sierra Nevada foothills. We stopped at Old Basso Bridge, a river crossing that was once the focus of some rather intense gold dredging. Numerous ponds from the mining days dot the landscape, filled with groundwater. Today they provide habitat for wildlife, and a nice recreational area for fishing and wildlife photography.

The old Basso Bridge was replaced with a sleek modern concrete edifice that dominates the view from the boat ramp, but a short walk provides a view downstream towards the old bridge (which is closed to autos, but available for pedestrian use).

The old dredge ponds provide a surprising sight for this time of year: lots of flowers. There were hundreds of what looked like Brown-Eyed Susans.

The other interesting sight at the park are the boulders they've used for rip rap to reinforce the base of the bridge. They are chunks of a deeply oxidized conglomerate that is found locally in a layer called the Ione formation. It formed in Paleogene time as rivers flowed over the not-quite risen Sierra Nevada. The rivers had their source in central Nevada or more distant regions, and flowed through a landscape much different than that of today.

The rivers ended in an estuary/delta complex along the Pacific Ocean (the Central Valley was a shallow sea at the time), and in a series of swamplands that later produced lignite coal that was utilized during the settlement of California after the Gold Rush. Fossils of palms and other warm weather vegetation indicate tropical conditions.

The conglomerates also contained significant amounts of gold (hence the local dredging activity). There were a couple of guys panning gold today, and they actually had come up with 20 or 30 pinhead-sized flakes.

Fall is just beginning. I'm looking forward to some color (of the leafy kind) in the next few weeks!