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.

Wright Peak, Mt. Konocti

I was always interested in this mountain as a volcano. Years ago I was quite interested in the idea that the Sutter Buttes were in fact the southernmost Cascade - either way they're anomalous in their own right, but part of my argument was that they were close to, or not far south from, the Mendocino Triple Junction where the North American Plate, the Pacific Plate, and the Juan de Fuca (or at its southern extent, Gorda) Plate, the latter of which is a subducting rather than transverse plate associated with Cascade volcanism. These are the remnants of the Farallon Plate which once subducted under North America all the way to the Rockies.



Plates are physical objects, less abstract than you might think; the JDF for example can be measured as bending 60-80 degrees downward as it melts into the mantle about 200 miles inland (DiPietro, 2018.) The map above comes from a 1997 USGS report, "Tectonic Controls on Magmatism and Geothermal Resources in the Geysters-Clear Lake Region, California: Integration of New Geological, Earthquake Tomography, Seismicity, Gravity, and Magnetotelluric Data", and you can see the Triple Junction is actually about a hundred miles north of Konocti, and the Buttes are about 15 miles north of Konocti, over in the Central Valley. Some Tahoe-worthy views there, consistent with the elevation difference of 3,000' from lake to summit.







Of course, there are several volcanoes around here (St. Helena, Hood, Geyser Peak) and a) it's never that simple, plus b) what does it mean to talk about something being a "Cascade" or not? Case in point, there are flat fields of lava from just the last few thousand years around southern Oregon directly between Cascades - no one would argue that these flows resulted from the same process that created e.g. the Sisters, but is it a "Cascade"? This region has to do with more recent volcanism (~2 million years ago) resulting from a gap created by the San Andreas meeting the Triple Junction. The prominent dark colored rock you see in one of the photos below is actually sedimentary rock uplifted during the volcano's formation, not basalt.

Other notes: the oldest site of human habitation is at adjacent Borax Lake, one of several smallers lakes now separated by volcanic deposits. Clovis points dating from 12,000 years ago have been found there, with their age initially doubted but later confirmed by other means. Unless you have DNA, it is always both highly speculative and politically charged to try to determine if the people then make up a large part of the ancestry of the people who lived there at the time of contact with Europeans - case in point, Pomo people speak a language in the Hokan family and can be found as far south as San Diego County, and probably preceded Ohlone speakers (in the Penutian language family; at nearby Olompali, there was a turnover in the archaeological record about 4,000 years ago possibly corresponding to the arrival of proto-Miwoks who occupied it when they were trading with Russians and Mexicans.) The fire tower is from 1889, which surprised me (I would've placed it in the WPA era), and was being actively used by a lookout the day I was up there - and he was quite busy. It's been a bad fire seeason, and you can see the smoke layer in some of the pictures of the Glass Fire to the south, still not fully contained. The mountain was a healing place for the Pomo and boy did I need that yesterday. If you're interested in this stuff, there's a California State Parks report here, and another USGS report on the geological history of the Clear Lakes region.

Willow Creek Preserve, Pacific Union College Forest, and Sept 27-69 - 6:30. by knife

First, and let me be very clear about this, Han Bul is a better restaurant than Soban. If you disagree then I guess you don't really understand authentic Korean food. This means you SS. ZING, HEY-O! (rimshot) (In all seriousness everyone, it's not yet safe to sit in a restaurant - but do support them. Consider getting takeout, or getting a gift card that you redeem later.)

First I stumbled on Willow Creek Preserve by noticing some trails marked on Google Maps that were outside of the (also awesome) Pomo Canyon. I noticed cars parked in a trailhead-like way along Coleman Valley Road and I KNEW you guys were holding out on me, and sure enough I found it.







I'm always struck by the convergent evolution of sorrel and clover, at least in terms of gross anatomy. The former is in the buckwheat family, the latter in the pea family. Per Timetree, their most recent common ancestor was likely 117 million years ago. (For comparison, humans and whales diverged only 96 million years ago.) Sorrel does not fix nitrogen like clover (I assumed there was a symbiosis) but does have a nifty rapid (fast enough to see it move) closure response to direct sunlight, which it's not used to, growing in redwood forests as it does. It's obvious enough why sharks, whales and mosasaurs would evolve convergently, but redwood sorrel is found in the deep shade of redwood forests and clovers in open fields, so this remains a mystery for some keen-minded botanist to solve.

Then I had a little of the ol' patello-femoral recently from a minor acute injury going up stupid Collier Springs Trail in Marin County Watershed land, but still major enough that I don't want to exacerbate it. Was thinking of going up to Wright Peak at Clear Lake, but considering the trail is described as steep and loose, exactly the kind of terrain that caused the injury in the first place, I decided to check out Las Posadas State Forest. Well that's closed. BUT immediately adjacent, I stumbled across the quite-awesome Pacific Union College Forest, popular with bikers, through which the Bay Ridge Trail runs. Even on a holiday weekend-Friday it was still fairly light. It's amazing that I'd never even heard of this place a 45-minute drive from home and it's pretty sweet.







It's interesting to see how each valley over gets progressively drier (Santa Rosa plain, then Sonoma, then Napa, then Pope/Berryessa.) The redwoods and Douglas first more or less stop on the west side of Napa, the east side of Napa looks drier than the west, and once you've over that (into Pope and Berryessa Valley) it's mostly chaparral and a few ponderosa pines and much of it, especially the Blue Ridge on the east side (i.e., the last ridge before the Central Valley) the often eroded-looking dry sandy scrub could pass for SoCal.



After that I gave into my morbid side and found the island (above) where one of the Zodiac Killer's attacks happened. After the dry Mediterranean summer, peninsulas emerge connecting these islands to the shore, as was the case in September of 1969. To take away the fun of figuring it out on your own - it's on the west side of the lake, at the south end of the Oak Shores Day Use Area, near the Lake Berryessa Field Office; nearest mile marker 6.75 along Berryessa-Knoxville Road. It turns out the victims were PUC students as well (I'd never heard of PUC until I ran in their forest mere hours before.) Helpfully, the killer called the sheriff's office that night though boaters had already heard the victims' cries for help (they did not immediately perish) and to further clarify, the killer wrote in marker on the couple's car door "Vallejo 12-20-68, 7-4-69, Sept 27-69 - 6:30. by knife". I've visited the first two locations as well and barely remember what they look like - this one leaves much more of an impression.

International Space Station's View of the Susquehanna and Appalachian Ridges

From ninety miles up. For Penn Staters: on the left side of the image you can see the 322 bridge across the river at Duncannon, where it then starts following the Juniata. You can appreciate how what SEEM like conical mountains as you're driving along are revealed to be just the ends of ridges, dissected by one of the oldest rivers in the world. There is a mountain in central-western PA you can see from the turnpike - only westbound - which looks like a conical mountain that my family officially named "Tit Mountain", which turned out to be another ridge. (There are conical mountains in PA but they are very old and at this point very very worn-down, and they are indeed volcanoes - but there's really only one of them that you can notice as stand-alone.)

Geological Mystery Solved: Hotspots Move

The bend in the Hawaiian Islands was caused in part or whole by the hotspot moving, not the plate moving, and the pattern of mantle plumes dates back to the breakup of Pangea. Press release here, paper by Bono, Tarduno and Bunge here. (More on old volcanism in the Atlantic here.)

We Have a Better Idea Why St. Helens is Off-Trend, Relative to Other Cascades

A new study (Bedrosian et al 2018, in Nature Geoscience) maps the Earth's crust in the American Pacific Northwest, showing why Mt. St. Helens is so far west compared to the other Cascades. Bottom line, kilometers down, there's a large mass of older igneous rock blocking magma, so it has to move west before it comes to the surface.


Above: Hood, Adams, St. Helens ad Rainier in one picture. Obviously there's no straight line that connects the four. From Reddit.
I've long been obsessed with the Sutter Buttes for similar reasons, i.e. their isolation from other Cascades. The Buttes are the southernmost Cascade, isolated in California's Central Valley north of Sacramento, and part of the argument for why they are NOT Cascades (for those who hold such a view) is that they're off-trend. I expect this technique could tell us WHY they're off-trend, and why the Buttes came up as a ring of small volcanoes, rather than a shield or a single peak.

Pennsylvania Geology: Precambrian Rocks in the Reading Prong

(Dave Kline recently had a piece in the Reading Eagle about a Precambrian rock he found next to the Schuylkill, check it out here.)

I'd written before about the very early Jurassic igneous rocks on some of the small but steep hills in central-to-southeastern Berks (the Jacksonwald Outliers.) Here is a map of the rock in Berks showing that clearly in red, as well as the Precambrian age of South Mountain and the Reading Prong. South Mountain is the "front range" of the Appalachians until it kind of dies just before getting to the Susquehanna, as the Appalachians are making their turn to the east, and in Berks they're basically the hill that Galen Hall is on, as well as the hills in Spring and Cumru Townships, before rising again as Mount Penn Neversink and continuing east-northeast.

Original PDF is here but I've shrunk it to a graphic file. Red is Jurassic, green is Precambrian.