Join the Geotrippers! British Columbia, the Channeled Scablands, the Olympic Peninsula and the North Cascades, June 26-July 10, 2019

(This was posted in January, but is re-posted in preparation for a second organizational meeting on March 19)

What are you going to do this summer? Are there places in the world that you've thought of visiting but never made a plan? Maybe we can be of assistance in fulfilling your dreams! The geology and anthropology departments at Modesto Junior College will be conducting a field course dyad that will explore Washington and British Columbia on June 26-July 10, 2019. Anyone with an interest in geology or anthropology is encouraged to join us (if you want to skip the reading and get to the details, scroll down to the bottom of this post).

Our journey will begin in the Seattle area where we'll get our rental vans (yes, you'll need to find your way to Seattle). We'll then head out to the Olympic Peninsula where we'll explore Olympic National Park (including the iconic view from Hurricane Ridge, above). There will be an opportunity to explore some of the rainforest. Cape Flattery and the Makah Nation will be the anthropology focus on one day.

We'll then take the ferry across the Strait of Georgia to the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island. "Island" barely describes a landmass three hundred miles long. It has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years, and we'll be looking for petroglyphs and other archaeological evidence as we explore the south shore and then work our way north through Duncan to Nanaimo.

From Nanaimo, we'll take a ferry back to the North America mainland at Howe Sound. We will spend several days in the Vancouver area, exploring both the coastal mountains and Fraser River delta, and also the extensive museums in the city.

We'll travel the Sea to the Sky Highway, a spectacular route that leads from Vancouver to Whistler and Pemberton, site of the 2010 Winter Olympics. We'll have a chance to observe active glaciers and potentially active volcanoes, including Mt. Garibaldi and the Black Tusk.

You'll have a chance to figure out how this landscape happened...(below).

 We'll return to the United States by way of the Okanogan Valley and we'll then explore one of the strangest landscapes on Earth, the Grand Coulees and Channeled Scablands. The discovery of evidence for the incredible Spokane Floods of the ice ages is one of the great stories of geology.

We'll wrap up the trip by passing over the Cascade Range at North Cascades National Park with a stop along the potentially active Mt. Baker volcano.

This trip is just the latest of MJC’s unique collaboration of field studies in geology and anthropology, taught by anthropology professor Susan Kerr and geology professor Garry Hayes.

When and How? The group will come together in Renton, Washington (near SeaTac Airport and Seattle) on June 26 and will return to SeaTac mid-day on July 10. We will travel in rental vans, and stay in hotels.

Costs: The trip will cost $1,600, which includes transportation, admission fees, accommodations, and teaching materials. Students will be responsible for getting to and from Seattle, and for meals (many of the hotels offer free breakfasts, and some rooms will have microwaves). There will be the tuition costs for six units of semester credit, and the fees for getting or renewing a passport.

Accommodations: We are staying in a variety of motels and hotels. We are assuming double occupancy for married couples, and double to triple occupancy for singles. We will try to accommodate requests for single rooms for a surcharge, but cannot guarantee it. (The earlier your request, the better the chance for getting extra rooms).

Academics: The field courses are worth three semester units each (total of six). Participants will be expected to keep field notes and to complete worksheets and quizzes during the trip.

There will be an informational meeting on Tuesday, March 19 at 5:00 PM in CAT Building 201 on the East Campus of MJC. Contact the professors if you cannot attend (hayesg - at - Yosemite.edu or kerrs - at -Yosemite.edu). If you attended the first organization meeting in January, you don't need to attend the coming meeting.

For up-to-date announcements, check out the trip Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1920712791360611/ and the MJC Geology information page at http://hayesg.faculty.mjc.edu/GeologyPacificNorthwest.html

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.

The Other Snowstorm in California Right Now, and a Water Problem of a Different Kind

The Sierra Nevada and Cascades are buried under record amounts of snow right now, but that's not the only "snow" falling in the state just now. More than a million acres of the state are covered in a blizzard of flower petals from blooming almond trees. The vast blanket of snow is a measure of the health of the water supply in California, but in a way, so is the blizzard of almond blossoms.

Almonds have become one of the leading cash crops in the state of California, which produces around 80% of the world supply. When world prices for almonds jumped a few years ago, agribusiness responded by putting in hundreds of thousands of acres of almond orchards, sometimes replacing other kinds of crops, and sometimes breaking new ground in less productive soils around the margins of the Great Valley. 25 years ago 400,000 acres were planted in almonds. Today it's 1.3 million acres, about 2,000 square miles. The problem is that almonds require a lot of water, around three to four feet per year. The new orchards in my county, several tens of thousands of acres, are getting their water from underground aquifers. The water they are tapping into will not be easy to replace.

I'm not sure we've adequately considered the conflicts of water use and almond expansion. People were paying a lot of attention during California's crippling drought of a few years ago, but those voices have quieted after a few wet years. The thing is, the trees in an orchard must have a fixed amount of water. One can't let a field lie fallow if water is in short supply like one can do with annual crops. The vast increase in almond orchards is adding to the "structural drought" in California, a situation in which even years of "normal" precipitation don't provide enough water to meet the minimum needs. Increasing temperatures related to global climate change will exacerbate the problem as we roll into the future. But as always, money talks.

Unfortunately, I don't see a good end to the haphazard and poorly planned expansion of almond orchards into the prairies of the Sierra Nevada foothills. The blooming trees that look so beautiful today may be abandoned snags before too long. The water is an intractable problem that will not be solved by the building of new dams. There aren't many good places left to put them, and there has to be enough precipitation to fill the dams and that's not assured in our changing climate.

But those trees are really beautiful right now!

POSTSCRIPT: I went up into the foothills today to do some birding and got some pictures of the almond groves covering many hillsides. It's shocking to me that the trees are planted in straight rows that have furrows leading downslope. It's an open invitation for very serious soil erosion, a lesson I thought we learned in the Dustbowl years.

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...

There's a Giant Atmospheric River Storm Pummeling California...So of course I'm Headed to Death Valley to Experience it...

So we here in California are experiencing one of those very intense atmospheric river storms generated when a highly active jet stream dips far to the south and starts to draw up very moist tropical air from the Pacific Ocean. The storms pound the state like a fire hose, dipping to the north and then to the south, and back again. In once sense, such storms are a godsend because they provide the bulk of our water resources.

On the other hand, the timing is...great. We can't reschedule our president's holiday weekend field studies class, so we are headed out to experience the storm firsthand, out in the elements, facing down our fears and all that other character-building stuff. We are headed to Death Valley National Park. Our best hopes lie with the Sierra Nevada's rain-shadow effect on the nation's driest valley.

It's not the first time this has happened of course. In thirty years of field studies trips we've encountered fierce storms a number of times, and it's always...memorable. Such trips give us the best memories and the best stories to tell our children and grandchildren. And all kidding aside, it's awesome to see intense weather events take place in the desert environment.

So it's probably radio silence for the next few days unless you want to follow our travels on Twitter (@geotripper). If I get a phone signal, I will try to post a few pictures. In the meantime, stay dry!

It Was That Kind of Day: Half Dome from the Central Valley

Update: I've added an extra image at the end that shows the satellite imagery in the view from Keyes Road. 

It doesn't happen often. I usually pass the right intersection once or maybe twice a week, but the most important factor is the air quality. It's almost always poor. Dust and smoke in the summer, fog and clouds in winter. There is a spot on the floor of the Great Valley (some call it merely the Central Valley) where one can see Half Dome and the other peaks around Yosemite Valley in the Sierra Nevada.

Today was one of those days. I was going to take my customary walk on the Tuolumne River, but I could see that the air was extraordinarily clear, so I headed south to the intersection of Keyes Road and S. Hickman Road. I wasn't disappointed. I could be wrong, but I think these are the clearest views I've ever caught with a camera.

The visibility of Half Dome from the valley floor has been kind of a contentious subject. There are plenty of people who think that it isn't possible, and there are some peaks that are mistaken for Half Dome off to the north. I was actually accused of photoshopping the pictures once, which if you know me is laughable (I don't do that kind of thing very well). The trick to seeing it is to know where to look (ENE from the Keyes/Hickman Road intersection), and to realize that while Half Dome is so prominent from the floor of Yosemite Valley, it is not even 9,000 feet above sea level. The peaks behind and around Half Dome are 12,000 to 13,000 feet high. Half Dome is most definitely not on the skyline. It's in the middle foreground.

The other thing to realize is that my pictures are highly zoomed images. The image below approximates what the scene looks like from just north of the intersection. Can you pick out Half Dome in the picture below? And if you know your Sierra Nevada geography, can you name the other peaks that are visible? See how you did below!

Here, courtesy of CalTopo.com is a guide to the peaks in the picture above.

POSTSCRIPT: Thank you for all the comments. Since there is still some controversy about whether this is Half Dome, it turns out that CalTopo also offers an image overlay on the viewfinder, so I have added it below. For those who feel the mountains in back are not "tall" enough, one needs to consider the curvature of the Earth over the 40-50 mile distance of the highest peaks in the view.

It's a River Again! Winter on the Tuolumne

All the pictures in this post are from the Tuolumne River Parkway Trail in Waterford.

All in all, it's been a good year (so far). One can judge the quality of a year on the basis of many things, and in this instance I'm talking about water. So much of the time, my part of California is at an extreme in one direction or another. Last year it was a drought up until some late storms in March that salvaged the water year. The year previous was one of floods and threatened floods, unlike anything seen in twenty years, but at least it filled the state's reservoirs after an astounding five-year drought. This year finds us in the sweet spot, kind of in-between, but a bit above average.

The rainy season started a bit slowly, just enough to make one worry a little bit about drought. No storms in September. A single small storm in October. But then in late November the pace picked up with just over 3 inches in my rain gauge, and December added more than 2 inches. The same with January, nearly 3 inches, and now February has already produced 2.5 inches with more storms coming this week. Of course my backyard is not the measure of water conditions in the state. The news reports are full of stories on the incredible snowpack that has built up in the Sierra Nevada in the last few weeks, with single storms producing six feet of snow or more.

The critical Sierra Nevada snowpack sits at between 109% and 135% of normal (measuring from north to south), with a statewide average of 123%. If no more snow fell, our season would end at 84% of normal. It's a comfortable place to be.

But no water planner is ever comfortable. With so much snow in the mountains, the reservoir water masters always have to worry about the possibility of a big atmospheric river storm, the kind that combines the extreme low pressure of an Arctic storm with a stream of extremely humid air out of the tropics. Like the one that could happen this week. In a worst case scenario, such a storm could cause rain at high elevations, melting much of the snowpack and raising the specter of flooding downstream.

And that is why the Tuolumne River came alive this week. For many months, the river has remained at an unnaturally low flow of about 200 cubic feet per second, a minimal amount. There are large reservoirs upstream, especially Hetch Hetchy and Don Pedro, and the operative mode is to save as much water as possible. During the recent storms, inflow to Don Pedro reached as high as 8,000 cubic feet per second, but outflow remained at 200 cfs.

Last week the river was dramatically higher, flowing at 2,000 cubic feet per second. The water masters are clearing out some storage space in Don Pedro in case of a flood emergency. It looks like they intend to go as high as 3,500 cfs in the next few days. Certainly not a flood (it would have to reach 9,000 cubic feet per second for that), but enough to clear the channel of invasive water hyacinth, and enough to make one feel the river is closer to a natural seasonal condition.

It's a nice time of year to walk the Tuolumne.