Hoping All a Peaceful Christmas and a Better New Year

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all! As is my (sometimes neglected) tradition, I offer up a very big Christmas tree, the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon National Park. The tree is so large (268 feet high, 40 feet across at the base) that it took three pictures for me to capture it.

I don't have a shot of the General Grant all dressed in snow, so here is another Sequoia after a surprise storm during an April trip some years ago.

The tree was declared by Calvin Coolidge in 1926 to be the nation's Christmas Tree. At an early ceremony, park superintendent Colonel John White said ""We are gathered here around a tree that is worthy of representing the spirit of America on Christmas Day. That spirit is best expressed in the plain things of life, the love of the family circle, the simple life of the out-of-doors. The tree is a pillar that is a testimony that things of the spirit transcend those of the flesh." 

Individual trees can live for several thousand years, but the genus has existed since the time of the dinosaurs. They once grew across the northern hemisphere until they were done in by the Ice Ages. They survive today in several dozen groves scattered across the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.

It has really been a tough couple of years with droughts and other natural disasters. I am especially mourning the loss of so many Sequoia trees to wildfires. In the last two years, some 20 percent of all the Sequoia trees on this planet were destroyed. As we celebrate the beauty of these wonderful trees, we must acknowledge our role in their destruction, through climate change and misguided management of the groves. A horrible loss but the trees persist through it all.

It's odd to write of loss and tragedy in a post about a "happy" holiday season, but this holiday season has that sense of gloom and loss as well. I'm seeing people I've not seen in a long time, but we've had to be very careful, and the potential for tragedy continues in the form of a tiny but virulent virus that is surging for a fourth time. There is loss, but there is resilience as well, and that is my hope for all of you that you'll discover joy despite the losses we have all experienced.

I wish a wondrous season to you all!

What was the Greatest Adventure You Ever Had? Dreams, Hopes, and Memories in Pandemic Times

 

The first moment of the greatest adventure of my life

What's the greatest adventure you've ever had? And as you consider your future, what is the greatest adventure you ever hope to have?

I've been thinking about that this week, as we possibly, hopefully, approach the end of the pandemic that has caused so much tragedy and heartbreak. I'm teaching a "summer" class that actually ends four days before the official first day of summer, and in the new world of remote teaching, I've had my students submit an occasional online response to geology-related questions. Sometimes my questions deviate a bit from geology though, and this week I asked them what "adventure" means to them, and to recount the greatest adventure they've ever had. And realizing that some may not have had any identifiable adventures, I ask what adventure they would like to have someday.

Redwall Cavern, deep in the Grand Canyon. It is said that 5,000 people could fit in here.

I get lots of interesting answers, because a community college class roster is filled with people of many diverse ages and background. Sometimes they describe a hike in the local mountains, or a walk along the coast. Others describe some harrowing and dangerous life experiences related to the Peace Corps or military service. Because it is an online discussion, the give and take makes for fascinating reading.

Much of my motive in asking such questions is to help them realize that geology, in a way unlike many other disciplines, is an adventure in and of itself. The experience of finding a gemstone in the rough, uncovering a dinosaur bone, feeling an earthquake, encountering a flash flood, or witnessing a volcanic eruption are unforgettable adventures, even if there are negative consequences and dangers. That, after all, is part of what makes an experience into a true adventure.

Standing waves at Hermit Creek Rapids

Some people are content to live lives without 'adventure'. They are happy enough to find a career that satisfies, and prefer to spend their free time at home reading and gardening and the like. Who needs the stress and high blood pressure after all? I understand that perfectly well, but it sure didn't feel very good to have that life imposed on us by a global pandemic. It's the season when I would normally be preparing to take my students on some real adventures, across the southwestern states and the Colorado Plateau, or up north to the Cascades, Glacier and Yellowstone. Some years we explore Hawaii or Canada, or Australia. Instead, I am giving zoom presentations and grading online submissions, and dreaming of being outside.

I got a message from a friend that unleashed a flood of memories of the greatest adventure I ever had. It was innocuous enough: she asked if I had a recording of a community lecture I gave a few years ago about rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I didn't actually remember if a recording existed, but I found it online and had a look. In a short moment I was transported back to the time eight years ago when my brother and his family invited me to join them on the 17-day adventure. I was 56 years old at the time, and was at one of those middle-age moments when one begins to wonder if the big adventures are coming to an end. It turned out that the answer was a firm 'no'. 

Scouting Lava Falls, the worst or second-worst rapid on the river depending on the flow. Yes, I capsized and rode it all in the water. Check my blog series below for the You-Tube of the moment.

I wrote an extensive blog series about the trip called "Into the Great Unknown" that will give you a sense of what it is like to explore one of the largest remaining wilderness lands left on our continent, and what it is like to face your own mortality and fears (there were indeed a few terrifying moments in an otherwise glorious time). But if you want a short and quick visual exploration, you can see my community lecture at this link: https://share.yosemite.edu/go=1EVB. I recall it was the most fun I've had giving a public lecture.

And just for the fun of it, here is the video of the final musical moments of our 17-day journey. We had to delay our landing at Diamond Creek because other rafters were getting on the river and space was limited.

So, as the pandemic begins to fade (if people don't get stupid when we are so close), what adventures will you seek? What are the places you want to see? What do you want to experience? What's on your bucket list, and what are doing to make it happen? And what was the greatest adventure you ever had? There is lots of room in the comments section to share your memories or dreams for the future.

The Equinox of the Fall

I haven't been blogging much lately. It's probably not hard to guess why: I've been working harder than at any time aside from those crazy first semesters back in 1988 and 1989. From the sudden transition in less than a week back in the spring semester, intense training throughout the summer, and the onset of a new fall semester completely online pretty much explains the lack of leisure time for writing. But I was out yesterday evening on one of the myriad east-west roads that cross our valley, and I realized it was only one more day before the equinox. I stopped and photographed the setting of the sun.

We were in a similar situation six months ago, and I posted The First Day of an Uncertain Spring: This Too Shall Pass. I wrote at the time "Spring was always seen as a time of renewal when the cold winter is ending and the green shoots of new life are coming from the ground. Of course we know that it is a different situation as the world faces an invisible foe that brings sickness and death, and it's been many decades that we've needed to make sacrifices to fight it."

What a different and unpredictable time this turned out to be. Last March around 35,000 Americans had contracted the disease, and around 500 people had died. The death toll today is more than 200,000 Americans, and nearly a million around the world. 31 million have caught the disease, and around 23 million have recovered, but for many there will be health challenges for the the rest of their lives. The saddest part of this tragedy is that we could have prevented many tens of thousands of these deaths had there been a quick and orderly national response to the pandemic. This did not happen, and instead there were good responses in some states, and criminally negligent responses in others. As one state would seem to gain control, others lost control. We reached a peak and started to decline, but then it started to rise again. It's plateaued in the last few weeks, but there is no continued decline.

Who knew that an entire subset of the population would actively fight the restrictions needed to defeat the virus and prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans? I understand the impatience and frustration of wearing a mask in public places and maintaining distance and not gathering in crowds. But to subvert these easy guidelines and to even deny that the disease exists? I cannot even begin to comprehend this mindset, the one that would sacrifice not only strangers, but one's own family members and friends.

In this national tragedy, I've lost two treasured people, my grandmother and my sister-in-law (not to covid, not that it matters). I had to watch one funeral over a phone, and the memorial service on zoom. It is hard beyond words to have to say good-bye in this way. I loved them both so much. This is the real tragedy. We can't come together and hold each other in the way that humans need to in times of great loss. We need to fight this thing with a united front and put it away for good. We need to do it together.

The sun set in a pall of smoke from the hundreds of fires blazing in California right now. We've lost so much, not just from a pandemic, but from changes in our climate that were predicted three decades ago, and are manifesting themselves on an accelerated time scale. Six months ago I wrote "this too shall pass", but some things will not pass without being inalterably changed. The changes are permanent and we have to prepare.

The sense of loss in my family this week has been sharp and painful, but it was compounded by the loss of some of my treasured places to the fires that have destroyed so much already.

So I mark the passage of another equinox. This moment of the year has had a magic quality for humans for thousands of years, for better or worse. Spring has been the time of birth and hope, and the fall is the time of death and consuming darkness. I can only repeat my words from six months ago: 

"Whatever takes place in the coming weeks and months, please be kind to one another. Look out for your neighbor, and remember that whatever you have, someone else has far less. Be generous as you are able, and remember that with all things, this too shall pass."

 

A Day on the California Prairie: Finding the Precious Places Near Home

Yosemite National Park is closed. The coastline is closed. The state parks are closed. Am I complaining? Not in the least. We are facing an unprecedented threat, so we must curtail our freedoms a bit until the scientists and the doctors (and all of their heroic support staff from nurses to foodworkers to custodians) can do their work protecting us. And we must continue to do our part, isolating ourselves from each other, and from the virus itself. I pray that you are able to stay healthy and safe, and if tragedy strikes, that you find peace in some way.

In the meantime, there are a few legal ways to maintain sanity. Exercising in isolation from others near home is one way. If the city parks are crowded, find a deserted road on the edge of town to walk along. It is a way that we can find the precious and undiscovered treasures that have always been just outside our towns. As it turns out, some treasures are ephemeral, lasting only a few weeks.

My town lies on the edge on one of the few remaining largely untouched prairies left in California. These prairies used to extend across the entire Great Valley, but agricultural development has displaced 95% of the grasslands. There are a series of wildlife refuges up and down the valley that protect some of the remaining wildlands or rehabilitated farmlands. The rest of the prairie tends to be found on the margins, in the foothills of the surrounding mountains where the soils are too thin to support agricultural development.

The rainfall this year has been perilously low, with not a drop in the entire month of February. But March and April saw a resurgence in precipitation and the drying sprouts reawakened, and flowers have appeared in abundance throughout the Sierra Nevada foothills.

We took a drive through the prairie that remains between the Tuolumne and Stanislaus Rivers, and were treated with an explosion of color. I'd love to say I was an expert botanist and tell you all the species, but beyond lupines and poppies, my knowledge of flowers is sadly lacking. What I enjoyed today was the profusion of color.

We are living in one of the most challenging times many of us will ever experience short of all-out war. Natural disasters horribly affect particular regions, but there is always help from elsewhere, and there are places of retreat and refuge if an earthquake or hurricane strikes. But this one is a worldwide viral attack, and all we can do is shelter in place until it passes. It's scary, it's dangerous, and many are suffering. I hope there are a few moments of peace and serenity to be found here in these little treasures close to home.

Punctuated Equilibrium and the New Academic World That We Live In (along with the rest of society)

Catastrophe

Three weeks ago I was lecturing and running labs like a regular professor. I had never gotten around to learning Canvas or Blackboard, because my Excel program was working just fine for recording and posting grades. I never had use for Zoom, since all my classes were face-to-face in a physical classroom. Things were fine and there didn't seem to be any compelling reasons to spend weeks in training for something I wasn't planning on using.

I knew about online courses of course, and two decades ago I even taught some, after a fashion. At the time they were called telecourses, and they left me suspicious of the academic value of online instruction. In essence the students watched canned videos on geology, and needed to learn the geology for themselves by reading the textbook and answering review questions. It was very low-tech, and most students didn't retain much information in the particular learning environment. There were innovative people on our campus who were working hard to improve the process, but before the innovations could really improve that particular form of instruction, the recession put an end to all of the telecourses and I never really looked back. In the end, classes had met a need for certain students with special needs, such as lack of day-care, or medical issues that prevented them from coming on campus. But it didn't really help most of them.

Something doesn't feel right here...

Two weeks ago everything changed. As part of our state effort to control the COVID-19 pandemic we went remote. In an instant. I had my entire load, five classes and three labs, switched over to online  instruction. It's now what I do, using Canvas, Blackboard, and Zoom after a steep learning curve over the course of just a few days. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm grateful to be working. I just can't believe how completely life changed, how the academic landscape was suddenly transformed. I'm functioning and the classes are continuing, but it wasn't a pretty process. There are lots of glitches, but it is happening.

Something about the process made me think about life. Not my life, or the lives of those around me, but the whole adventure of life on our planet. There was something familiar in the way events unfolded around me. And then it hit me: we had just survived a punctuated equilibrium evolutionary catastrophe. And I'm sure that requires a bit of explanation.

One of the greatest advances in biology and paleontology was the result of research by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace into evolutionary processes. Darwin is better known for describing the theory of natural selection, but Wallace had come to much the same conclusions from his independent research in Indonesia, and it is proper that both men be given equal credit. One of the expectations of the model is that evolution was a gradual process, and that eventually the fossil record would fill with all kinds of transitional species. This has come to be called phyletic gradualism. The problem is that as the decades rolled on, transitional species were found but not in the large numbers predicted by the theory. Most species just simply appear in the rocks as fully-formed separate species. It bothered many paleontologists.

Alfred Wallace (1823-1913)

In 1972, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed an alternative hypothesis that could explain the 'sudden' appearance of new species in the fossil record. Termed punctuated equilibrium, the model suggested that evolved species did not change much as long as the environment they inhabited didn't change either (stasis). But in the event of a catastrophe like an asteroid impact, or unusually intense period of volcanism, or the onset of an ice age, the environment would be severely impacted, and the species would have to change as well, or go extinct. This could involve a higher rate of evolution, but it could also involve long-term changes in peripheral isolates, organisms living at the edge of their environmental tolerances.

Think of coyotes, a widespread species across North America. Most live somewhere in the 'average' climate of the region, not too hot or cold, not too dry or humid. But to the north, there would be populations living in very cold environments at the edge of their tolerances. Over time natural selection would produce individuals with heavier coats of fur, and perhaps the ability to store more energy in the form of fat stores. They might not be numerous, and it would be unlikely that many of them would ever become part of the fossil record. But they could be considered a different species, especially if their range no longer merged with the average coyote. They are the fat furry coyotes.

But then a series of intense volcanic eruptions blocks out sunlight for several decades, and a climate feedback loop causes an ice age. In the suddenly cold conditions, the 'average' coyotes can't adapt, and they disappear. The fat furry coyotes from the far north are able to thrive and spread quickly into the former range of the 'average' coyotes. Much later on, the fossil record would then be filled with 'average' coyotes through many feet of sediments, but then they would appear to have been suddenly replaced by a new species, the fat, furry coyote. But in reality the fat-furrys were 'pre-adapted'.

So what happened to us?

It's the old pre-catastrophe environment! The Paleozoic classroom.

We've been in a period of stasis for a long time. Professors professed. Classes passively took notes. There have been gradual transitions in teaching style; slide projectors have been replaced by PowerPoint presentations. Passive listening has often been replaced by group problem-solving. Note-taking has been replaced by voice-recording. But by and large, students work in the presence of a professor, and no one had any reason to think it would ever really change.

But out there in the periphery, some changes were taking place. Some teachers and administrators thought the technology had brought us to a place where teachers didn't have to be in the physical presence of their students. They trained for and taught courses remotely. Most acknowledged that remotely-taught courses provided valuable benefits for some students, but only a few underwent the rather rigorous training required to teach remote classes in an effective manner.

But then the catastrophe occurred. We've had catastrophes before on our campus. We shut down for two weeks a year or two ago because our wildfires had polluted the air far, far beyond healthy levels. But we didn't change anything. When the air cleared, we went back to our old ways. But almost no one was thinking of the possibility of a world-wide catastrophe that would require that nearly all human beings would need to isolate themselves for weeks and months at a time. It was inconceivable.

But it happened. And in the new academic environment, conditions dictated that the only form of instruction left to us was remote online education. In this new environment, the pre-adapted, the online instructors, thrived and flourished. The rest of us learned something else. Evolution is chaotic and imperfect.

Most species have organs and structural features that they don't really need or use. Humans have a tail. Many whale species have useless femurs embedded deep within their bodies. Embryonic birds often have teeth that disappear before hatching. They are deeply imperfect organisms, but they have enough adaptations in their genetic make-up that they are able to survive. This produces cobbled-together organisms with quirks and modifications that give them just enough of an edge to survive in their habitat. And sometimes those useless bits and pieces end up being an adaptation that allows survival after all. It gives us Duck-billed Platypuses, animals with a 'bird'-like beak which lay eggs like a reptile, but have hair like a mammal. And they get by.

Source: World Wildlife Fund

That's me right now. A duck-billed platypus. I have just enough of a skill in understanding computer key-boards that I was able to cobble together enough presentations and online quizzes and labs that we only lost a week or so instruction. And I'm learning to comb my hair and put on pants before sitting down for a zoom session with my students. And in a week I am taking 17 students to Yosemite National Park...in virtual reality.

It's been upsetting, and has required long hours to achieve any kind of success. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear. But we ARE adapting to the new normal that has been imposed on us, and I have to say I am really proud of my students. They are a bit more pre-adapted than I am to this learning style, and they have stepped up admirably to the new reality.

And I am an old platypus learning to fly...

To all my teaching friends: take care of your students, they're depending on you, but care of yourselves too. And to all the students: hang in there. We'll get through all this together. Stay healthy and safe. And to those who face true catastrophe in the coming weeks and months because of the corona virus, may you find hope and peace in tragedy.

Its Really Been That Long? 30th Anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake on Thursday

It's Earth Science Week, and "Geoscience is for Everyone" is the theme for this year. Geoscience IS for everyone, because geology dominates the lives of everyone. No one can escape it, for better or worse. Better, when we find inspiration in the awesome forces that have made our planet, and worse for the geologic hazards that exist everywhere on the planet in one form or another. Here in California, one of the premier hazards are the earthquakes that occur here with disturbing irregularity (it would be so much nicer if they followed schedules so we could prepare). I'm writing about the anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake a few days early, but we had two moderate earthquakes in less than 24 hours in Northern California (magnitude 4.5 and 4.7), so seismic things are on my mind.

Two good-sized earthquakes as recorded at Modesto Junior College

We can only share our stories to keep that knowledge at the forefront that will allow us to survive and recover from the major earthquakes to come. Here's my story from 1989, when my teaching career was just beginning.

No, this isn't what happens (credit: A. June)

On October 17th, 1989 at 5:04 PM, my physical geology laboratory had just finished and almost everyone had gone home to watch the World Series. A couple of students were helping me (it was Maureen and Sonny; funny how I remember the names of the first students I had better than the ones I had last semester). We were 100 kilometers from the epicenter, so when the seismic waves started to shake our building, the movement was a strong rolling motion instead of sharp vibrations. We looked at swaying TV monitors, and commented that it was an earthquake. It was a most scholarly discussion, actually. We realized the shaking was not stopping, and we thought we could sense the direction of the quake as well. We started to guess where it might be happening, but when the shaking reached the 40 second mark (the energy was spreading out, it lasted only 10 seconds or so near the epicenter), we realized it was a major event, and that fatalities were probably occurring (and unfortunately we were right). The deodar trees out the window were whipping back and forth as if they were in a high wind. The strangest part for me was the unconscious decision I was making as the shaking progressed. Despite having a quiet scholarly discussion, my body was moving from the front of the podium to the back, where there was a nice solid space to hide under. I would have dived under if the quake had lasted any longer.

Well, this can happen, but most people survive, even in the worst of quakes (credit: A. June)

In hindsight, I should have been a bit more aggressive about taking shelter under the desk. An analysis of our building a year or two later revealed an architectural weakness that suggested the building could collapse if the seismic waves hit it from a particular direction. A seismic retrofit a decade later included some massive shear walls in the lab I taught in.

Meanwhile, at the city library, my children were making me proud. At the time of the quake, there were huge sailing ship models on display, in some cases right on top of the book stacks. The stacks were not reinforced or braced, so there was a real potential for injuries if the quake was strong enough to knock those stacks over. I was told that most people were just standing there watching the bookstacks swaying, but my kids, my well-trained and intelligent kids were the only people in the room to take shelter under the sturdy study tables. Luckily, as I said before, we were on the fringes of the effects of the earthquake and no one was hurt.

The double-decker freeway in Oakland. It was not designed for the amount of shaking that occurred.

The Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 event at a depth of 11 miles, was a tragedy: 63 people died, and 3,700 were injured. If the World Series game between the A's and the Giants hadn't been about to start, the death toll would have been much higher. Traffic was stunningly light that afternoon. Despite this, the Bay Area was in chaos for days, and months passed before life got back to normal. We were on the fringes, so instead of pain and suffering, we had a profound learning experience that was remembered by my students for the next decade and a half. But it has been 30 years now, and many of my students weren't born when the quake happened. Few of them have felt a quake at all. The large quakes like Loma Prieta and Northridge are ancient history, and there is less of that innate knowledge of what they should do when one hits. Few admit to having any kind of emergency kits at home, and they have no plan for what to do when the next big one hits.

Fault studies across California make it clear that more big tremors are coming, almost surely within the next decade or two. We educators must keep these past events alive in the minds of our students so they will be ready for these events when they come.

This is an abridged version of a blogpost from 2009.

Anniversary of the Donnell Fire: Nothing in this World is Permanent, Except for Change

The Dardanelles Crest in 2006

On August 1, 2018, a fire started in the Stanislaus National Forest near Donnell Vista on Highway 108. It's not known how the fire started, but lightning was not the cause. It was clear that day. There wasn't much concern, it was confined at first to a few acres, but it blew out of control and started spreading. The so-called Donnell Fire ultimately burned 36,450 acres (57 sq. miles; 147.5 sq. km.) and destroyed 135 structures including the historic Dardanelles Resort. There were nine injuries, but thankfully nobody was killed.

The Dardanelles Crest, August 1, 2019

It was a coincidence, but exactly one year later to the day, we headed up Highway 108 to view the damage for the first time. It was sobering. The fire can't be compared to the devastating fires that ravaged Paradise and Redding last year or Sonoma County in 2017 when dozens of lives were lost and tens of thousands of homes burned. But still this fire was a tragedy. It burned memories and experiences. Like so many fires both in Southern California and in the Sierra Nevada, it took away landscapes that have shaped my life.

The Dardanelles in 2008

Fires have always been a player in the environment of California. A Mediterranean climate, with mild wet winters and long dry hot summers is an absolute guarantee that fires will burn. But we have entered into a new climate regime due to global warming that is deeply altering the patterns of fire in California and across the American West. Warmer average temperatures intensify the effects of droughts, causing greater evaporation and drier soils, so trees and shrubs are less able to deal with fires. The fires have increased in size to massive conflagrations, and burn more intensely, "crowning" more easily, and at times altering the soils so they are less able to absorb moisture when precipitation does come.

The Dardanelles on August 1, 2019

It was a relief to see that in many areas the fire took on a checkerboard aspect, missing some of the forest groves, which means that the forest can re-seed more readily. In other areas, the destruction was more complete, as in the slopes above the former Dardanelle Resort, seen in one of the pictures below. The recovery of that forest will take much, much longer.

Columns of the Giants, 2016

We stopped at a number of our favorite localities. Donnell Vista was not directly affected by the fire, but the viewpoint offered views of a major portion of the burned areas, including the slopes below the Dardanelles Crest, as seen in the first four pictures above. We also checked out Columns of the Giants, one of most awesome geological features along all of Highway 108. The trails and the bridge over the river were intact, but much of the forest and brush around the site were destroyed (see the pictures above and below for a comparison).

Columns of the Giants, August 1, 2019

The Dardanelle Resort was an especially sad sight. The historic old resort was obliterated, as were the slopes above. The resort had fallen into some disrepair over the years, but it had been purchased by new and ambitious owners only three months before the fire. They intend to rebuild, and a temporary trailer is already in place, serving as a temporary store.

The Dardanelle Resort 

Highway 108 near the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus River at the Old Dardanelle Bridge (which burned in the fire)

The historic 1933 Dardanelle Bridge was destroyed in the fire (photo below). It was apparently the last scissor truss-style bridge in the United States. It had been replaced by a more modern bridge around 1990 but was still maintained for walking. Ironically it was almost destroyed during the construction of the new bridge when some boulders from nearby blasting landed on the bridge, but it is unlikely to be replaced now.

The old abutments for the 1933 Dardanelle Bridge are left of the highway in the center of the photo

For all that was lost, much still remains. Highway 108 and other roads provided access for firefighters to battle the fire, so many sections of forest adjacent to the highway survived relatively unscathed. The firefighters were able in particular instances to set backfires just uphill from the highway that moved upslope, removing fuel for the oncoming main fire. In this way many of the cabins and developments were saved.

One of endangered developments was the High Sierra Institute at Baker Station. Originally a road maintenance facility, the cabins operate today as a research and educational center for the Yosemite Community College District which includes Columbia College, and my own institution, Modesto Junior College. Some trees on the property were lost, but the backfires preserved all of the buildings on the property.

Fires destroy, and fires renew. We live in a new climate regime, and we need to learn how to deal with this new world. Forests will regrow, but they will not be the forests that were lost. The ranges of the animals and plants are shifting northwards and upwards as the climate in California grows warmer and drier. Some organisms will be driven to extinction (the pika is in particular danger, as it lives at very high altitudes, and therefore has nowhere to retreat).

But there is also an emotional toll. We can't maintain the world as a museum where our favorite places remain, unaltered and unchanged by time. Change comes no matter what efforts we expend to preserve the past. Sometimes we can plan for the changes, such as developing master plans for parks and monuments, but wildfires are the bull in the china shop, causing destruction and change without pity or mercy. I grew up in Southern California and watched some of my favorite haunts in the San Gabriel Mountains disappear in wildfires. I moved to central California 30 years ago, and in that time have witnessed apocalyptic events like the Rim and Ferguson fires destroy large portions of the forests along and in the margins of Yosemite National Park.

As those of us who study geology know from our studies, there is nothing permanent about the world except for change. And sometimes the changes are tragic.

A Sense of "Wonder" and the Dreams of Avarice: The Keane Wonder Mine in Death Valley

This is a lonely place. Lonely and harsh. The names we give such places reflect our fundamental fear of such landscapes: Death Valley, Funeral Mountains, Furnace Creek, Badwater. The fact that we made this place a national park and brought in creature comforts and paved roads and golf courses only barely hides the fact that this is a land in which few people can survive without the veneer of technology. To have a breakdown with inadequate supplies and no working phone service is a situation that can quickly spiral into tragedy.

Air conditioning, paved roads, and full-service restaurants allow individuals to put aside fears for survival and replace them with a sort of higher level of perception, that of beauty and wonder. On those days when the wind is not blowing, this is a strikingly quiet land. Quiet enough sometimes that you can hear your own heart beating. And it is beautiful in its own stark way. Without the veneer of photosynthesizing greenery, the color of the rocks and sky blaze forth.

But what about a hundred years ago? In a time when there were no cars, paved roads, and very few amenities of any kind? What drove people to seek out this vast desert. The concept of a "national park" and of any kind of joy being found in nature was an utterly new idea, and it was understood by very few. But there was of course the great motive that unfortunately drives humans more than just about any other: the dreams of avarice. People knew that this unexplored land might contain untold riches in gold or silver or copper. So they came looking.

Gold was discovered here in the Funeral Mountains in the early 1900s. Jack Keene and Domingo Etcharren found a ledge of gold-bearing ore, and sold the rights to a number of investors, and mining commenced in 1906. The ores were more than 1,000 feet up the slope of the mountain, so the miners constructed a mile-long aerial tramway to bring the ores to the mill at the base of the mountain. The tramway became somewhat of an attraction of its own as miners and visitors would get a hair-raising ride up to the mine instead of walking the steep road. The rich ores declined with depth, and the mine closed in 1913, but in the end it was one of the few profitable mines within the confines of present-day Death Valley National Park. The owners made around a million dollars in 1910 dollars (taking inflation into account, this translates to $20 million or so).

We were able to visit the Keane Wonder Mine this year for the first time in more than a decade. The National Park Service closed the site down for a long time because of safety concerns. It reopened last year after many of the tunnels were gated or blocked. The host ore was a metamorphosed Proterozoic sedimentary rock that was once part of the Pahrump Group. The rocks include some beautiful schist samples, including some with chiastolite crystals. This was kind of a neat teaching moment because we would see the same rocks in an unmetamorphosed state the following day at the south end of the Black Mountains.

There are moments though, when you realize what beauty can be found in wildness. I in fact have a great many of those moments in my life. My moment that afternoon came when we were headed down the hill to leave, but I stopped and turned back for a moment...and saw the Moon rising over the Funeral Mountains.

There was great beauty in the sweeping vistas and in the rocks themselves, but I realize that this is not really a place for humans. In a few months the temperatures here will soar into the 120s and there is no water. It's a small version of hell on Earth. It's a place to visit and enjoy for the moment, but ultimately we humans will end up seeking the green hills and valleys of our homes.