Some Volcanoes in Northern California

(You should read about the more mature and seasoned volcanoes of Pennsylvania here.)

MOUNT LASSEN

Mt. Lassen National Park and volcanic far-northern California is a part of the country most people don't think about - even most people in the rest of California. California is big. It has a whole top half that people forget about. From the Golden Gate Bridge it's 340 miles to the Oregon border.



Lassen is in the Cascades, not the Sierras. The Sierras extend north to about Susanville (the border is the red line on the map - border zones of any kind are always interesting in their own right.) The Cascades begin there and go northward just barely into British Columbia, a product of the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate (red arrow pointing at the submarine ridge marking the southern plate boundary.) Our first stop on this trip (the middle circle on the map) was therefore the the southernmost Cascade. I used to argue that the often-overlooked Sutter Buttes in California's Central Valley (the southernmost circle) were the southernmost Cascade, but among geologists (see here for Hausback et al's article) this seems to be more of a settled matter today so I must defer to the experts.[1]

The area has more geologic and cultural history than any such empty quarter has a right to. Lassen last erupted in 1916, and Ishi was the last uncontacted Native American, a story that's really worth reading, both fascinating and of course sad.



Recent eruptions aside, Mt. Lassen is a good volcano for families. I've literally lost count of the number of times I've been at the top, but it's also a hike, not a climb, and it's not a death march by mountain hiking standards. That said, it's 2.5 miles to the top of average 15% slope, starting at 8,500' ending in at 10,500', so it can be annoying.


As you can see above from my awesome mountaineering moves (I call this the reverse glissade) the top is cool and all (there's usually a lot of snow algae) and there are steam vents but the best part of the park is Bumpass Hell, a steaming, boiling, sulfurous, Io-like bubbling volcanic waste in the middle of the park, down the slope of the mountain.












(More here.) They close the trail to it for much of the year because of snow and ice hazards, because they don't want MORE people falling into the boiling acidic mud and cooking their leg (seriously. That's what happened to the eponymous Mr. Bumpass. If you thought "Bumpass Hell" wasn't family friendly, would you prefer "Cooked Human Leg Thermal Area"?) And the rangers REALLY get sick of people asking when the trail will open, so to prevent this they put the data from past years right on the website. I knew we would be going the first weekend of August. Through July, the trail remained closed. I was getting nervous. So I did what any family man would do, which is plug the opening-date data into a linear regression:

The black circle is where the regression predicted the trail would open this year, with a snow depth of 217 inches on April 1st.[2] The red circle is when we would be attempting the hike. I recognized that the rangers were probably not going there every day to stare at the snow, and it's probably at most once a week that they inspected and announced the trail opening (or not), introducing some noise into the data. So the graph did little to address my nerves. Thus, imagine my joy when I checked the National Park website the day before the trip, and it was open! The regression did its job, and it was only off by 4 days, within the noise introduced by weekly checks! Needless to say, I claim credit for not only predicting the future, but controlling both weather, and volcanoes. It's only fair.


BURNEY FALLS

I don't know how I missed these after 25 years living in this state. First, maybe not a necessary point for anyone else besides me: they are NOT McCloud Falls, with which I often confused them in days past. You can swim and wade in McCloud Falls if you can tolerate cold water, but Burney Falls is colder still, remaining at a toasty 42 to 48 degrees Fahrenheit. As we descended into the valley the temperature dropped by at least 20F in 0.3 miles. I was trying to figure out on the map what stream or river the falls were on, and the answer is - they are the beginning of a river. If you look at the top of the falls, you can see the water is coming directly out of the ground. Definitely the most unique and I think most esthetically pleasing falls I've ever seen.






Below: it's good to see that visitors to the park are so considerate that they risk a fine for vandalism by carving an underline into the sign, emphasizing the strength of the waterfall, so as to warn would-be swimmers of the danger.







THE LAVA BEDS

Lava Beds National Park is the greatest national park you've never heard of. Great for families, full of "actionable" geology, native history, and two of the less-proud chapters of American history. The Lava Beds and neighboring Tulelake really are smack up against the Oregon border. It's inland high desert, so it doesn't look much like what people expect the area would. (You want redwood trees? Go to the coast. Redwood National Park is a mere jaunt of 286 miles to the west.)

The Lava Tubes, Cinder Cones, and Ice Caves

There are hundreds of lava tubes in the park, caves formed by the movement of lava underground. Some of them are big - you could drive a truck through them. Others are small and you spend most of your time inside crouching. There are some developed for tourism, many of them within 1/4-1/2 mile of the park. By "developed" I mean, one of them has lights, and others just have a ladder leading down into the darkness. The undeveloped ones are holes in the ground you crawl into. I thought this would be a tough sell for a young kid, but after initial hesitation, this was by far the favorite part of the trip. Sentinel Cave in particular was pretty cool. There are lava flows and cinder cones throughout the park as well. You don't have to be a geologist to see them and understand what formed them.




Credit above to NPS, and below to Grant Sinclair at wanderfilledlife.com.








Above: the interior of a cave without light (Duh. Although, it really is an actual photo.) Below: with light (Sentinel Cave.)




(Above: a collapsed cave.) We also visited a cave outside the park that has year-round ice in it (the aptly named Jot Dean Ice Cave) but it wasn't quite as nifty as I remembered - no River Alf, no floating hair, and not a flashing eye to be found. Maybe because I forgot to bring any milk of paradise, or honeydew to dine on. You can see a couple tubes just peeking above the surface in the pictures. I've read that just in the Lava Beds park proper they discover on average six new caves per year, and there are doubtless many more to be discovered in the surrounding national forest.


Above image inside the cave from Steven Johnson's Flickr page. Below, landscape around the cave, and below that, a very ominous sign. "Other occupants"?








Any trip that doesn't have a (positive) surprise is suboptimal, and for this one, it was the fantastic dark-sky talk given by a ranger at the Lava Beds. I really can't recommend it enough. Learning about the stories behind the constellations (not just the Greek ones), and seeing shooting stars and Milky Way so thick against the sky you imagine you can reach up and feel its texture.

The History - A Stolen Home, and an Unwanted Home

There are petroglyphs carved into the sandstone of a cliff face, dating from when there was a lake there. Of course we don't know what they all mean; you can imagine people fishing a thousand years ago, sitting on tule mats and making some of the dots to count up their catch, others to tell a story or protect against disease or snakes. Some of them are definitely snakes. Amazing to think of how different we are from the people who made these signs, and wonder whether in the distant future someone will try to understand what we write today.


Credit above to Sierra Nevada Geotourism, and below to Wiki.



And we are different from the people who made these symbols, because the Modoc people were removed from their land at gunpoint. Their first encounter with white people was with Fremont's men, marching south, who mistook them for their traditional enemies, the Klamath, who they'd split off from six hundred years prior. (Imagine aliens landed on Earth in Russia, the Russian army shot at them, the aliens took off and landed again in the U.S. and attacked us to get revenge. That's what it was like.) Twenty-five years later the army came to remove the Modoc, the Modoc realized the land they had been marched off to was terrible, escaped and went back to the Lava Beds - where they used collapsed, un-roofed caves as a place for trench warfare. Two hundred men, women and children held off two thousand Union troops for six months, at one point making the mistake of thinking if they killed the Union chief (General Canby) that the Union would withdraw. The Modoc War only ended when the Union cut off their water supply, beginning the process of draining most of the lake that their answers fished on and made petroglyphs next to. (First photo below of one of the trenches in Captain Jack's Stronghold credit tripadvisor.)






Just outside the park is the monument to Tulelake internment camp, where almost 30,000 Japanese-Americans - those considered "troublemakers" among interned citizens - were sent during World War II. George Takei was here as a boy. I'm torn about this. It should be recognized and we should remember it and teach our kids about it so we don't make the same mistakes in the future. But somehow, once something like this is cleaned up and formally recognized, there's an artifical safety and sterility to the place, like it's behind glass (e.g., see the better-known Manzanar internment camp in the eastern Sierra.) The first time I saw it, I only knew where to look by looking it up ahead of time, and it was just piles of cinder blocks and rusting barbed wire, with no interpretive plaques to filter and protect us from reality. Image credit to discovernikkei.org.



MCCLOUD FALLS

They were cold this year. There was a bit of wading. Definitely no swimming. You want to see people being happy swimming, check out the video. (Narrator: they were not happy.)






MOUNT SHASTA

Well there it is man! Looming over most of the proceedings, and especially impressive when approached from the east via Route 89 (image credit newsfromnativecalifornia.com.) Please also enjoy this historical image of of this dashing and, dare I say, rougueish fellow conquering the mountain ca. 2003.






Footnotes

[1] You might understand the attraction to the idea of the Sutter Buttes as the southernmost Cascade - if you look back up at the map, there's a smaller ridge parallel to the southern boundary of the modern JDF plate, south of it, that comes ashore at Point Arenas and would pass immediately underneath the Buttes on the way to the northwest corner of Lake Tahoe. The Sutter Buttes are about 1.5 MA old, newer than the Cascades, but about the same age as the coastal volcanoes like Mt. Konocti at Clearlake, and the volcanics NW of Tahoe like Granite Chief and Red Star Ridge along the Western States Trail.)

[2] It's actually kind of amazing there were only 217" there on April 1, given California's historic rain and snow year - although the further north you went, the less remarkable it got. People in Washington State we visited were surprised to hear how wet it had been.)

Colors of Marin Headlands Wildflowers in Sunlight and Shade

I took a lot of pictures of wildflowers in the Marin Headlands today, then used the good old MS-Paint color picker (eyedropper icon) to pull out a pure color from the petal where it's illuminated by the sun, and a where it's shaded.

I made this because

1. I am fascinated by attempts to distill things down to their essence.
2. It's amazing how we think of an object as a single color, and yet objectively it is multiple colors as the light is incident on our retina because of shading, and we still understand it as a single continuous object.
3. Wildflowers are pretty as hell bro.

I'm very much an amateur so if any of these are misidentified, I appreciate your correction in the comments. Also if you find the colors interesting please take them for your own purposes.

This is the full "spectrum" of colors I sampled shrunk down to see all at once.



The first three reds are Indian paintbrush species. There are 20+ species of Indian paintbrush and their ranges overlap significantly, so if you can distinguish and identify the paintbrush species, thanks in advance for doing so in the comments. The last one is live forever, an endangered Dudleya succulent species whose red leaftips are much more brilliant when "purified" by this sampling method. Protect our coastal succulents - they're targets of criminals that are digging them up on masse and destroying them (seriously, read that, it's unbelievable.) Also saw some Dudleya on the trail, which has red-tipped leaves (impressively red when directly sampled.)



The top orange one is a harlequin flower (sparaxis), a South African invasive, then sticky monkey flower, and finally you damn well better know our state flower.



Respectively, again the (center of the) harlequin flower, field chickweed, the yellow part of the Ferdinand iris petal, French broom (invasive - die), goldenfields, and blue-eyed grass (the second stupidest flower name in this post.) Centers of flowers are often yellow, I wonder why. Then again, we're probably missing the important part of the story - flowers are "designed" for bees who can see into the UV.



A nice green leaf, and then the stem of the goldenfields (a more minty green like sage) and the green part of the liver forever - again, amazingly yellower than it seems when seen in situ.



Hound's tongue (one of my favorite despite having the stupidest name ever - maybe they're hallucinogenic when ingested or something), then the sky just above the fog and then immediately overhead, and finallly ceanothus.



Lupine (my favorite, which smelled amazing in this warm day - I used to say they smell like mothballs, but they're actually awesome and much less purple and more blue when purified), blue eyed grass, and again Ferdinand's iris.



Pink is not a real color on the spectrum, but we'll pretend. Checkerbloom (I think), white bindweed, and checkerbloom again.



For white, yarrow, then the sky both in the fog and above it (in situ, seems gray, not blue). Then for black, I was wondering where I would get it from, and had resigned myself to just using the tiny black rim of the harlequin flower, but then as if reading my mind this fellow helpfully landed right in front of me near the trailhead and started cooperatively strutting back and forth. I happen to be fascinated with ravens and the Pacific Northwest art tradition around them.







FIN

Zion, Monument Valley, Dineta, Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, Vegas

I went on a fantastical voyage of discovery, with wonder - and danger. Read on if you dare!

I wore an N95 in the plane, airport, rental car shuttle, and most of the time to stores and in the casino. Hardly anyone else was. Most people have resumed normal life, whether or not they decided that explicitly. I still feel guilty when I get on a plane or go to a restaurant, as if I'm taking an unnecessary risk for mere entertainment. The risk is still not zero and I really don't want long COVID.

Here's where we went:



You will notice it's a static image, because Google continues to fuck up and make their service less useful by not allowing the waypoints in the embedded map.


VALLEY OF FIRE

Years ago I used to travel frequently to St. George UT for work, always flying into Vegas and driving. Somehow I never stopped to check out Valley of Fire State Park, which has the Fire Wave, which is much better than the stupid old regular Wave in northern AZ. The sudden transitions in the rock between white and red had to do with whether it was being laid down in a reducing or oxidizing environment (swamp vs not at the time.) These are Jurassic but there are also Cretaceous red rock layers in the Southwest.








Above: a fellow hiker chased down and cornered Salacious Crumb in a rock formation.




Above: you can see how clean and rapid the transition is between red and white rock, reflecting a change in local water conditions at the time, possibly because of a change in a river flowing over the sand at the time. Sneaker for scale, and as you can see the effect of the rock is powerful, immediately turning shoes a featureless gray.


Above: sunset in the Valley of Fire. Below: very mellow bighorns. (Very little zoom used here, they were just hanging out and very cooperative when people wanted to stop for pictures.)






SOUTH UTAH AND ZION NATIONAL PARK

On the way to Zion you get off the 15 in St. George, and boy has St. George grown in the last 20 years, doubling in population! (I recommend Frostop Burgers, whose imitation fry sauce is indistinguishable from Arctic Circle's at least for this gentile.) The home prices in Springdale at the entrance to Zion in terms of price per unit area are comparable to some decent places in Sonoma County, a finding that I repeated at several other trendy growing outdoorsy towns on this trip. Zion was beautiful as always. We did Emerald Pools which was surprisingly crowded but people were nice. At this point in the trip we were still thrilled by the novelty of snow (visible in patches on the upper reaches of the canyon walls.) Flagstaff would cure us of this.










Above: I heard another hiker theorize that these smooth piles of snow near the misty bottoms of the several falls around Zion were the result of "natural snow maker" effects of the falls at sub zero temperatures. I think this is right because most high falls had one of these.



























Also pictured, Riverside Trail to the Narrows. Unsurprisingly this winter, the Virgin River was roaring, so no hiking up the Narrows (though honestly I've never done it and don't understand the appeal of hiking in water or rock hopping for ten miles.) Very proud of my daughter who kicked butt on both of these hikes. Although she was unsure of hiking to a place called the Temple of Sinawava became she said it sounded like a bad guy. In Springdale outside Zion, for dinner I highly recommend the Bit and Spur. Try the local gin (Madame Pattirini, named after Brigham Young's drag performer son - yes really, and yes he really performed for LDS elders with their full knowledge.)


When we left Zion we passed through the windowed tunnels, then went into the Belly of the Dragon cave (pictured below, credit visitsouthernutah.com



Sadly Moqui Cave was closed. Our original plan was to hike Buckskin Gulch but there were at least two deaths in the previous week and the people who didn't die, didn't have fun. We made it down the fairly washed out 7-mile BLM road but, as I consider among my strengths as a father and husband that I don't kill my family, I decided we wouldn't risk hiking into it. And it worked out - because if we hiked Buckskin, we probably wouldn't have stopped at the understated trailhead for Toadstools SP, which I had never been to before.




























Above: inside an amphitheater. Three pictures down you can see it from a distance.














This was one of the big surprises of the trip (and if you're not surprised by something new at some point on a trip - why did you go?) In the parking area we also had our first encounter with a native person, who sold us some jewelry (nice lady; we later saw her in Safeway at Page.)

Afterward we crossed the Glen Canyon Dam (holding back Lake Powell - Hoover Dam's younger brother.) I know someone who did their honeymoon on a houseboat exploring the side canyons of Lake Powell which sounds like a blast. Page is smaller than I thought; also more native, although I'm not sure why this suprised me given the proximity to Dineta (Navajo Nation.) The street of little motels in Page would be a fun place to stay for a little bit, but I'm not sure I'd want to live in hastily built cinder block proto-Googie architecture indefinitely (as some people do because some have been converted into homes). Navajo Mountain stuck out as always but I learned it's off-limits as a sacred mountain to Navajos (clearly doesn't stop people though.) Navajo Peak is an igneous intrusion in the Colorado Plateau (itself a block of crust pushed up during the Laramide orogeny.) We skipped Goosenecks because it was out of the way and Antelope Canyon because you have to schedule a guide and it's expensive.


THE NAVAJO NATION

From Page it was a long haul across the Dineta (not sure people realize it's big - bigger than West Virginia, more than 200 miles by 100 miles.) There were signs offering compensation for radiation exposure - there was uranium mining in the Dineta, which you can learn about in this brief video. One person working at the Monument Valley visitor center (which has its own exhibit on the history) told me she'd just watched it herself and this was a known problem during her grandparents' generation. (See also, the uranium mine at Joachimstahl in the Czech Republic in this post, where political prisoners in Warsaw Pact countries were sent during the Cold War.)



Why is this list posted in the Burger King in Kayenta, AZ? It's part of a WWII museum, which also includes captured Japanese guns and flagsThe Navajo Nation is justifiably proud of their role as code talkers. (Note, the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano, who is famous for his role as Genghis Khan in Mongol among others, is actually a quarter Navajo - has grandfather was a code talker who spent time in the Japanese home islands.) We stayed in Goulding, which had just as great a view of Monument Valley and unbelievably cheap dinners (great steak! Suer cheap!) I noticed that the room TV was tuned to the Sirius XM metal channel when qe got in, and later noticed obe of the house staff wearing a Behemoth T-shirt. (She admitted yes, she listens to metal while cleaning.) Keep on spreading the metal gospel sister! I have more/better pictures of Monument Valley and the materials at the Kayenta BK here (although the display is updated now.)









Next day, it was back across the Dineta to Moenkopi (Tuba City) to see some dinosaur tracks and buy some turquoise. Yes, they're real tracks, made during the early Jurassic. While we were there the wind blew harder and harder, until finally we could see a red cloud rolling toward us from the flat land to the south, and a sandstorm blew in (no these photos were not taken on Mars.) The woman we bought from told us March is usually bad and she advises against trying to drive in that area (one benefit, now I didn't feel so bad about taking my family the long way to Flagstaff instead of over Olympus Mons.) To get the sand out of our eyes and mouths we went into Basha's, an AZ grocery store chain which has a specialized chain in the Dineta. The main difference in products available inside the rez was that they had a LOT of lamb.


Yes those are all real tracks. I don't know how the Perseverance rover is missing all of this.




I'm going to submit this to the "cozy places" subreddit.









As noted before, the Dineta is big. In fact it's so big that it has other nations inside of it - namely, the Hopi, who live on the effectively named First, Second, and Third Mesas. The simplified history of the Southwest is that around AD 1000-1100, it was drying out and resources were getting scarcer because the population had grown (in some areas on the Colorado Plateau like SW Colorado, the population today is still substantially lower than it was at this time.) That's when the common ancestor of the Navajo and Apache arrived from the north where their relatives still live in pockets up the West Coast, and on much larger territories in western Canada and Alaska. This couldn't have helped things, and the appearance of easily-defended cliff-dwellings at that time suggest things weren't going great (and the fact that the people living in these abandoned dwellings are referred to today by the Navajo as Anasazi, meaning ancient enemies.) This is also consistent with the typical pattern in history, where more aggressive newcomers push the previous residents up into the highlands - it happened with Basques in the Pyrenees, the Polynesian-speakers in Madagascar when Bantu-speakers arrived, the Marquesan-descended menehune of Hawaii when the new Tahitian settlers arrived - and of course, to Native Americans as a whole when Europeans arrived. (See also: the region of Zomia in James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed.)

The Hopi were part of one of the few even partly-successful native revolts against the Spanish, and in the early twentieth century after American influence was penetrating the area in a way the Spanish never had, part of the Hopi chose to withdraw completely, Amish-style, and remain so today (in the village of Oraibi.) I had no desire to force myself into the village, but even in the theoretically modern towns nearby like Kykotsmovi, it's anything but clear that outsiders are welcome (hand-written signs warn against photography.) At one point I got off the main road and drove into Kykotsmovi proper, which was clearly much poorer than the towns was saw in the Dineta. For unclear reasons, they were also much more committed to wearing facemasks than the Dine. We went to the Hopi Cultural Center and got Hopi tacos with sliced beef; we would have gone to the Burping Coyote store just because of the name but sadly it was closed, possibly due to GI problems. I have to say the stretch from Second Mesa to Winslow seemed like the most desolate.

Below: yes, I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. This is not a growing town but they capitalize on what they have, and it's interesting to see that for the first time they have a native mayor. Below that is the entrance to a typical Route 66 trading post. One of the take-homes from this trip: kachinas have gotten popular and expensive. I mean, good for them, but they're cool and I want one, just not at the $500 level. Maybe time to make a Sonoma County style kachina.







OK, real mature, guys.






Above: from Chimayo Trading.



Just west of Winslow is Meteor Crater National Landmark. Incredibly windy that day (continuing the theme that I'm the only idiot who takes his family to Arizona to be cold.) The site is updated since I was last there 15 or so years ago, with information about the Chelyabinsk meteor from 2013. Image credit Planetary Society and Barringer Crater Landmark.






FLAGSTAFF

It was sleeting that night, and then the next morning I was awakened by the unbounded enthusiasm that can only be shown by a child waking up to snow. This was the last time any of us would be charmed by snow. Even the child. I should add: I grew up in the Northeast where it snows, every winter, at sea level. I have traveled quite a bit in the mountains of the Western US, including the Sierras and Cascades. Of the three scariest snow driving experiences in my life, two were in Flagstaff, one of which was during this trip. It snowed literally every day while we were there, regardless what the forecast said. One day we kind of escaped by driving east into the rain shadow of Mt. Humphreys (on which much of Flagstaff's inclement weather can be blamed). Possibly due to the weather, Flagstaff and Northern Arizona University reminded me quite a bit of State College, PA during this visit. It wasn't all bad - we had a couple days in which we were forced to relax (something many Americans are no longer good at, even on vacation) - bumming around the Airbnb as a family, playing board games, walking to dinner (in short, it was awesome). Two experiences that stuck with me: when grocery shopping I dropped something on the massive stack I was balancing to take to my car, and someone rushed to help me (wouldn't happen everywhere); and as I went for a walk, a Native guy was running around the street in the snow trying to be helpful and show people where to step to avoid getting soaked. He was pretty clearly intoxicated and noticing me doing my best to diplomatically refuse his attention, he turned and shuffled off, saying "We're not all bad people you know." I do know, but man that was a bummer.

The first two below: like the rest of the American west, Flagstaff has had a bad winter - with difficulty delivering mail and goods, and it showed on the produce shelves the night we arrived.






Above: see, I told you it was like State College. Below: a clever system at NiMarco's pizzeria, which I consider the analog business to the now-defunct Gumby's.






Flagstaff looks like it has some cool urban trails and the system connects to the Arizona Trail. The problem was, the trail was either under several inches of snow, or several feet of water. You can see the creeks which are dry for much of the year could barely handle the weather.





Then we headed off to Wupatki to see volcanic craters and ruins. Built by the Sinagua people (an exonym for the likely ancestors of the Hopi who abandoned the area around Flagstaff and went to the mesas shortly after the arrival of the Dene speaking Navajo). I always forget how volcanic the area north of Flagstaff is and I don't quite understand why there would be so much activity there but not as much in Nevada which has some of the thinnest crust on the planet. We got to the ruins but the family had clearly lost their patience with windy ancient things.