Cute to a Fault: Teaching Kindergarten on the San Andreas Trace, Part I

One of my more interesting experiences since coming to the Golden State was teaching Kindergarten. For the school year 2007-2008, I accepted a Kindergarten assignment at San Juan School in the beautiful town of San Juan Bautista.  Located on Nyland Drive, San Juan is a K-8 school and is part of the Aromas-San Juan Unified School District.  This particular assignment was only my second full-time year, and in the end proved one of the most exhausting years of my professional experience.  For one thing, I was living in Merced at the time so I had a one-way commute of almost two hours (admittedly, the commute was via CA 152 through Pacheco Pass, so as someone interested in geology I couldn’t complain too loudly; not everyone gets the pleasure of a daily drive that includes numerous road cuts through a Mesozoic subduction zone); there were times when that extra three or four hours added to my work day was unwelcome.  For another thing, teaching Kindergarten-aged kids is the most energy-intensive activity in the teaching profession bar none, and even though being around them was emotionally refreshing, it was physically exhausting.  They were a really cute bunch and they caught my heart on a daily basis, but you have to be “on” every second you are around them, and their 10-second attention-spans left my head spinning by the end of the day.  By the end of the year, I knew Kindergarten was too young an age group for me in terms of future assignments; my current grade ranges are anywhere from Sixth through Ninth.

The coolest thing about the year, however, was that my classroom, Room 28, was about one hundred meters west of the main trace of the San Andreas Fault.

My classroom is circled in blue (photo courtesy of Geology Cafe.com)

I spent nine months working forty-hour work weeks practically on top of one of the most famous and most studied geological features on the planet.  In the words of my current group of students, it was “hella sick.”  Needless to say, I did not neglect the opportunity to become more familiar with the Fault and with some of the geology of the surrounding region during my time there; several free afternoons meant for “prep time” were spent exploring, especially in the early autumn and spring when the days were fair.  When weighing “Zoophonics” against tectonics, the outcome was never in doubt. 

The first avenue of exploration was of the fault trace, itself.   As the photo above shows, the fault trace forms the eastern/northeastern border of the town proper, beyond which lies the cultivated flatland of the San Juan Valley.  And it is really flat; about 240,000 years ago, massive landslides caused by movement along the Fault blocked drainage of both the San Benito and Pajaro Rivers into Monterey Bay.  The resultant Lake San Benito (as well as a later, smaller, longer-lived lake, Lake San Juan) flooded the San Juan Valley, and although its waters eventually drained away it left a thick, even layer of alluvium that buried the valley’s original features and made some of the richest farmland in the world.  And that illustrates one of the central facts of the San Andreas Fault: it is not the actual physical traces of the fault, itself, that are impressive (with rare exceptions, they almost never are), it is the impact it has on its surrounding topography that is profound.

When the Franciscans founded the mission of San Juan Bautista, they chose the flat surface at the top of a gentle slope as the site upon which to build their church and other mission structures, giving them as it did a view over the flat of the valley.  Unfortunately, what they could not have known was the gentle slope was a fault scarp; they were building their mission right on top of the main trace of what would later be named the San Andreas Fault. 

This has had some unfortunate consequences over the last two centuries---founded in 1797, the original church was heavily damaged by earthquakes in both 1798 and 1803, after which a new church was planned.  The new church was designed to be stronger and heartier to prevent earthquake casualties and damage, something which was subsequently forgotten in California until after the hard lessons of 1906 were learned.  Even with the “earthquake engineering,” the church was damaged (but survived) strong earthquakes in 1836, 1838, and 1868.  It was heavily damaged in 1906 (but rebuilt), and retrofitting enabled it to ride out the 1989 Loma Prieta quake with minimal damage. 

Because of its location along the Fault and its tendency to experience quakes, and because the study of quakes and faulting really took off after the 1906 disaster and subsequent Lawson report, the USGS chose San Juan Bautista to place a monument commemorating its centenary in 1979. 

It’s a charmingly understated monument to an organization that has monitoring stations, laboratories, and staff that has contributed to understanding of the Earth and its processes to such a large degree in its short life span. 

The Earthquake Walk not only follows the old El Camino Real as it passes the Mission, it lies on the fault scarp.  The stairs in the photograph descend the scarp, itself, and stepping down them and walking the path allows you to experience treading on a strike-slip fault with three different directions of movement relative to each other.  On the top of the slope before descending, the movement is to the north and west relative to the Valley floor at the base of the slope.  There is also vertical movement; the hilltop where the Mission is perched is over 70 ft. above the surface of the Valley it was once level with (vertical displacement was documented here after the 1906 rupture).  Of course, it hasn’t gained that much displacement in historical time; it accumulated over the last 20,000 years or so.  Still, it’s a pretty impressive impact over what (in terms of geological time) amounts to the blink of an eye.

Other than the Walk there are other traces to be found in San Juan Bautista but they are very subtle, and as is to be expected the damage of previous fault ruptures has been repaired in subsequent years.  The people of the town are not unaware of the significance of their location; there is a restaurant right on the scarp called The Fault Line, and the town boasts a first-class mineral shop called TOPS/Jan’s Rock Shop which hosts Fault Walks.  Even without such obvious clues, it is impossible for the town’s population to ignore the temblors the town experiences.  Indeed, one afternoon while sitting at my desk doing class prep after the kids had gone home, I experienced one such that was at least 3.5 on the Modified Mercalli Scale.  While it was not my first quake experience, it was my strongest and coolest to date and I enjoyed it thoroughly. 

Sources

Jenkins, Olaf P. Plesitocene Lake San Benito. California Geology, vol. 26, No. 7, July, 1973. 

Thick as a Brick

Sometimes items of geological and historical interest can be as close as our own back yard.

When Karen and I bought our Gustine home back in 2015, there was a pile of old, used bricks left in a corner of the back yard.  When our late neighbor Brad saw them, he saw potential walkways and borders for our yard as well as potential handyman income for himself.  An arrangement was made, and we now have some charming brickwork in our front yard that was not there before and memories of a good guy who we were privileged to know for the last year of his truncated life.

 

Not all of the pile was suitable for use, though.  There were many fragments and cracked bricks in the pile that ended up being discarded, among them the hoary sample pictured above.  It caught my eye since it is not often one sees bricks with very prominent maker’s marks on them, especially ones that give you a clue as to their location.  With my fondness for the unusual, I kept it around and used it as a doorstop in my shop area for the last few years, always intending to look up its “Livermore” markings when time allowed.  I finally got around to it last week and made an interesting discovery.

The Livermore Fire Brick Company began production in 1910 in Livermore, CA, using clay imported from the Sierra Nevada range until a more local source could be found.  Fire bricks are used to line fireplaces, brick ovens, industrial boilers and the like, the clay being chosen for high heat-resistance and reflectivity.  Financing and construction of the plant had begun in 1908 using funds from subscription by local Livermore businessmen as well as some remaining monies from the town’s ‘Earthquake Relief Fund’ that had been given the town after damage in 1906.  Getting the place built was very much a community effort, being Livermore’s first major non-agricultural commercial enterprise.  The company operated until 1947 with a fair degree of success, although it had some rocky moments; one of its ongoing expenses was that a local source for clay was never found, although the company did open its own clay mine in Calaveras County.  After closing in 1947, it never reopened and was demolished.  The site is now a shopping center called The Brickyard, and there is a memorial plaque on site surrounded by bricks made at the plant.

My particular brick is a Livermore Star, which were produced between 1910-1917.  It is a very light salmon in color with very prominent fragments of quartz and plagioclase feldspar in evidence without

a hand lens.  The clay is a very coarse blend when compared to a brick I would find, say, at Home Depot if I went there this afternoon; I like it.  To find out more, I went to the exhaustive website of Dr. Dan Mosier, a California geologist with a love of history who has spent his life combining both.  Dr. Mosier has been collecting, studying, and researching bricks and brickmakers since the 1970s and maintains a large database of California brickmakers and their products (https://calbricks.netfirms.com/index.html).  Although the photographs I found under Livermore Fire Brick Company were not an exact match with mine, I found enough to tentatively identify it. 

For confirmation, I sent an email to Dr. Mosier including photographs who wrote that it was, indeed, a Livermore Star.  When I commented that such an artifact would now have an honored place on my rock display shelves, he replied that to him, there is no difference between bricks and rocks except that one is man-made.  And, of course, he is correct.  Bricks are clay; clay is rock.  After thousands of years of human history, we are still making our structures of sticks and stones.  The used bricks in my backyard pile, wherever they may have come from, were repurposed in walkways and borders, just as the Earth constantly reconstitutes and reuses the rocks and minerals which constitute our environment.  In our own stumbling way, we ape the geological processes around us, perhaps in unconscious recognition of our place in the system. 

Sources

Drummond, Gary.  History of the Livermore Fire Brick Company.  Retrieved 10/5/17 from http://www.elivermore.com/photos/Hist_lvr_brickyard.htm

Mosier, Dan. Livermore Fire Brick Company.  Retrieved 10/5/17 from https://calbricks.netfirms.com/brick.livermorefbco.html.

Mosier, Dan.  Personal communication 10/9/17.  

Mine Shafts and Memories: Lead Mining in Bonne Terre, Missouri

Since my hiking boots surrendered to the inflexible nature of sandstone two weeks ago and since, in the meantime, one of the two steel water heaters in our home succumbed to the effects of oxidation, the chances of me getting out in the field on a georun are slim for a while due to “budgetary constraints.”  That being the case, I’m falling back on some other topics I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while, including the following bit of family history and its interweaving with the story of lead mining in the Midwest.

Bonne Terre, Missouri, was a “company town” from the start and remained so until the early 1960s.  The French settlers of the area discovered the lead deposits of what is now St. Francois County early on, beginning early surface digging by the mid-1700s. Shallow surface mining continued until the end of the Civil War, after which the lead deposits began to be developed in earnest.  In 1864, the St. Joseph Lead Co. was incorporated and began operations, almost exclusively surface mining until the invention of the diamond drill in 1869.  The new drills allowing hard-rock mining at depth, and between 1869 and 1900 St. Joseph expanded their holdings by developing new tracts and buying up smaller extent mines. With the completion of the Mississippi River and Bonne Terre Railroad in 1890 and a link to a new company smelter at Herculaneum 30 miles away, Bonne Terre became a new shipping and processing hub for a host of mines in the region now known as the Old Lead Belt.  By the turn of the century, they were the largest lead producers in southeastern Missouri, with company headquarters in Bonne Terre.  As the mines, mills, and support industries grew, so did the population; a company history cites a population of over five thousand by 1904.

(Image courtesy Missouri Geological Survey)

    

According to a 2008 USGS report on the Southeast Missouri Lead District, the ore which gave the Old Lead Belt its name was found primarily between 100-300 feet below the surface in the heavily dolomitic Bonneterre Formation and the upper layers of the underlying Lamotte Sandstone. The orebodies, themselves, were often spread laterally for hundreds of feet and vertically up to two hundred feet.  The primary ore was galena (PbS, lead (II) sulfide), a beautiful, dense ore some samples of which helped foster in me an early sense of wonder at what the Earth produces.  The galena deposits of southeastern Missouri are still the greatest concentration known and are still being mined, although the deposits in the “Old” Lead Belt (including Bonne Terre) are long since “played out” in terms of commercial production.  Now the action is to the southwest in the Viburnum Trend, or “New Lead Belt,” and what remains in towns like Bonne Terre, Flat River, Desloge, and Park Hills are museums and fading memories. 

Trapeze mining in the Bonne Terre mine, 1917. (Photo courtesy of Rootsweb)

About the year 1897 a young man of mixed stock was born to an impoverished family near Flat River, Missouri.  At a young age, he was “farmed out” to neighbors to work for his food and lodging which kept him alive until his mid-teens, when he strode into the Bonne Terre offices of the St. Joseph Lead Company and signed on to work the mines.  He would spend the next 40 years of his life doing so, seeing in the meantime the transition from mule-power to electric trams, the coming of the “St. Joe Shovel,” and all manner of other changes.  His name was Edgar Lindsey, and he was my great-grandfather, a hard, taciturn man who led a hard life tearing ore out of the ground. 

 

I grew up on the edge of Pennsylvania’s great anthracite fields, so images and stories out of the mines were always part of the history of my region.  Lead mining is done under different conditions and requires different skills, but looking at the photos from the Bonne Terre mine under operation I have no doubt it produced a similar breed of man.  One of the few stories that came down from Edgar was an account of a common amusement among the miners: it seems that the mules which pulled the ore-carts were often very flatulent due to the hay which formed the backbone of their diet.  The miners often enjoyed holding a match behind their backsides when they cut loose, sending a brief gout of flame behind---Edgar once related that he singed off his own eyebrows during a particularly explosive episode. 

Mule-towed ore cart in the Bonne Terre mine (Photo courtesy of Rootsweb)

Although Edgar died in 1976 when I was but ten years old, he left a minor legacy which is now in my possession, and which is quite valuable to me.  Below is a section of core sample which he carried out of the mine with him.  

I believe this sample to be of the Bonneterre Formation, but it is impossible to be more precise without damaging the sample and I am unwilling to do that.

The second of Edgar’s legacies is these beautiful samples of galena which he, himself, brought up out of the mine during its operating years.  

 

These things are small enough, perhaps, but as a student of geology I find them priceless in their own way, especially since I know their provenance and the family history behind them.  Galena was one of the first minerals to draw my attention to rocks and their formation, and given the history of my family it’s not surprising.

 

I remember many things about Bonne Terre from when I was growing up in the 1970s.  Although I was born and raised in eastern Pennsylvania, I spent a number of summers in Missouri when my parents would head back there for a number of reasons, not the least of which was family.  I remember it chiefly as a small, hot, dry town filled with decaying remnants of its mining heyday which, as a kid, seem to have had a peculiar draw for me.  My maternal grandparents had a house on Oak St. which had a covered mine vent shaft in the vacant lot between it and the now-relict Turkey Creek.  I was always told to keep well-clear of such things which, of course, only increased my interest.  A few hundred yards away was the empty and unused depot of the Mississippi River and Bonne Terre Railroad, a beautiful building even in its dotage; in the other direction was a small lake formed from water pumped out of the mines during its operating days and which still served as the town’s water supply. Across the street from Edgar’s house was a tall, rusting steel vent pipe erupting from the pavement of the walkway, and dominating the town skyline from any direction was the huge “chat dump” of coarse sand tailings, along with the foundations of the conveyor system which once fed it. 

Post-card view of the chat dump, c. 1932. Note the conveyor system on the left side.

My mother and father both met and went to school in the old Bonne Terre High School which rested in the shadow of the dump, and on at least two occasions that I remember my sister and I scaled it with parental supervision (I also learned a hard and valuable lesson on the instability of sand dunes when a minor slide dropped me about ten feet, knocking the wind out of me).   

Finally, there was the mine, itself, now relegated to museum status complete with tours, although all but the uppermost level was long since flooded by a water-table which would not be denied. Twice in my memory I went down into the mine as a tourist, once in the mid-70s and once again in 1982 or so.  By the early 80s, the mine had been “discovered” by mine divers and makeshift platforms had been set up to accommodate them; sometime during that period even Jacques Cousteau and his team made a visit and dived it.  In the mid-70s, however, the mine was still just an old hole in the ground full of memories and rusting equipment, and the tour guides were all men who had worked the rock when it was still operating.  I have never had the heart of a spelunker, finding nothing but dark foreboding in the quiet, lightless spaces within the Earth, and touring the mine was no different.  Even in a “developed” space like a historic mine, I find the space geologically fascinating but also disquieting.  Nevertheless, it was quite an experience to go down into that mine knowing that my great-grandfather had spent most of his adult life there, and I came out with impressions and images that would stay with me.  The mine is now a world-class mine-diving site.

(Photo courtesy Bonne Terre Mine)

The great Bonne Terre chat dump survived into the new century, but dune migration and the EPA decided its fate; it was removed as a threat to property and a lead-contaminated environmental hazard by 2004.

 

The beautiful train depot was bought, lovingly restored, and now serves as a bed-and-breakfast.

My grandparents' house on Oak St. still stands, although the landscape of that whole neighborhood is radically altered.  I do not know if Edgar’s house still stands, but Edgar, his sons and his grandsons have all passed, some of them resting in the soil above the mine he once worked.

As for my family, a few distant members of the Lindsey side still reside in the Lead Belt.

Sources

“The History of St. Joe Lead Company”. St. Joe Headframe, Special Edition, Fall 1970.  St. Joe Minerals Corporation, Bonne Terre, MO. Retrieved 9/29/17 from http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mostfran/mine_history/stjoe_history.htm

Blackwell, Robert M.  Bonne Terre: The First Hundred Years.  Bonne Terre, MO: Bonne Terre Centennial Corporation, 1964

.

Seeger, Cheryl M., History of Mining in the Southeast Missouri Lead District and Description of Mine Processes, Regulatory Controls, Environmental Effects, and Mine Facilities in the Viburnum Trend Subdistrict in Kleeschulte, M.J., ed., 2008, Hydrologic investigations concerning lead mining issues in southeastern Missouri: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2008–5140, Chapter 1

Orestimba Rocks (9/10/17)

In the afternoon we went forward in the same direction, downstream, and after a league we got to the arroyo of Orestimac [Orestimba Creek], opposite the Apalamenes, the allies of the Tatives when the latter fought us.  This creek, which comes from the hills, is not flowing nor does it contain water, but it is known that in the rainy season it fills up and even overflows.  This spot is the least bad on this whole side of the river but even so it would not be suitable for a mission.  It has only firewood, river water, and much good fish. --- Second Expedition of Fr. Jose Viader and Second Lieutenant Gabriel Moraga, October, 1810

Orestimba Rocks from the north

Needless to say, much has changed since Fr. Viader rode through my neighborhood scouting the land and looking for runaway acolytes.  While the Padres weren’t particularly interested in the land along Orestimba Creek many others were; long before Spanish colonization, the bands of the Northern Yokuts understood the area’s value, and the earliest records of several missions mention the native rancheria of “Orestimac” as being a place of meeting for the native peoples. (Unfortunately, within a decade of Viader’s account the West Valley was effectively denuded of its native population largely through total destabilization of their lifestyle by Spanish incursions.) One of the things that has not changed, however, is the presence of the Orestimba Rocks, a large mass of stone that stands in silent testimony to the presence of the Yokuts and serves as a reminder of processes that make short work of the span of human history. While I found a bit of general stuff available on the Rocks as a cultural site, I had not been able to find any examination of them as a geological curiosity.  Since I had known of them for a while but had never investigated, it was time for a georun to see for myself.

 

The Orestimba Rocks are about 8km west of Newman, CA, at the very eastward edge of the Diablo Range along Orestimba Creek.  They are not difficult to find nor to approach, but they are on private grazing land so care must be taken to respect that.  My wife Karen decided to go with me on this one, so I threw my gear and some water-bottles in the Green Hornet and we set off.  Driving out Orestimba Rd., we crossed under I-5 and parked next to the east bank of the California Aqueduct (don’t block the service gates).  From here, it was an easy 1.12 km walk southwards along a paved (!) service road to reach the Rocks. 

The Rocks are pretty impressive, even from a distance.  There is nothing similar in the region around them, and nothing as eye-catching for some distance further west into the Coastal Range.  They are a large, seemingly-continuous mass of rock stretching along a low ridgeline, obviously more resistant to erosion than the material around it.  Using Google Map’s satellite function as my tool, they measure over 357m lengthwise, and are over 80m at their widest point and 64m at their narrowest.  Being on grazing land, they are also surrounded by three-strand barbed cattle fencing.  I had observed that the property was not posted as “No Trespassing,” so I assumed that trespass was tolerated at the Rocks so long as the cattle were not disturbed and nothing was left or damaged at the site.  At one point on the fence, a stile was constructed of two stout cargo pallets which enables the careful to cross the wires without injury or damage to the fencing, and as they appeared to have been there awhile it again implied a certain tolerance for respectful trespass, so I crossed the wires and began photographing and scouting for a way up the Rocks.  Karen, being somewhat less intrepid about such things (and also being leery of meeting Our Friend the Western Diamondback) chose to wait on the road. 

Erosion and weathering in various forms are present all over the Rocks

Given their location I had assumed that the Rocks were some variety of sandstone, and the signs and forms of erosion and weathering I observed as I approached the mass (including some shallow tafoni) confirmed this.  Unlike the majority of the sandstone rocks to be found in the immediate area, however, the stone of the Rocks is coarse, with generally light-colored grains easily discernable with the naked eye.  I was guessing arkose, but since my current hand lens is pathetic a good, close look would have to wait for the stereomicroscope when I got home; my Boreal is one of my favorite toys.

Much of the face of the Rocks is either very steep or sheer, with a way up to the top being only for those who enjoy mountain-goating on hot rocks a lot more than I do.  Although I neglected to take height measurements, I’m guessing an average of between 10-20m. Fortunately I found a V-shaped notch in the formation not far from where I crossed the fence, using it to ascend to the top with only minor difficulty.  It was well worth the effort. 

Looking north from the top of the Rocks.  In the distance can be seen the "grove of sycamores" along Orestimba Creek mentioned in mission records.  To the upper left can be seen the California Aqueduct.

The top of the formation is roughly flat, providing easy walking over most of its length, and there is much to see.  Here I found evidence of the presence of the Yokuts: mortar holes, used for grinding food, most likely acorns from the oaks that are prevalent in the Coastal Range.  I found four of them in a group, but there may be more elsewhere on the Rocks.

I also found many more examples of weathering and erosion, a surprising array of both dormant and active plant life, variations in color of the arkose and substantial bedding in the formation.

 Unfortunately for me, at this point my explorations of the Rocks were cut short when my thick-soled, “value-priced” hiking boots decided to morph into thin-soled moccasins.  Although they had given me good service for several years of low-pressure trail hiking, they couldn’t handle the rock; the rubber soles briefly flapped around like a trout out of water, then sloughed off altogether.  I was not happy, especially since picking my way back down off the rock and walking over a kilometer back to the car on soles of Thinsulate and surplus military boot sock did not appeal to me; a kilometer seems a far greater distance when you can feel every pebble under your feet.  In any case, I clambered back down off the Rocks and as I neared the wire I picked up some fragments of rock for examination later.

   

So ended my first georun to Orestimba Rocks.  Examination of the specimens under the Boreal back home appears to support my initial identification: the Rocks are a mass of arkose, most likely of the arkose-rich Great Valley sequence. There was far too much feldspar in the rock for standard sandstone; my unscientific “eyeball” count would say between 30-40%.  There was also quite a bit of calcite, as well as a smattering of other materials.

 

At the beginning of all this I set out to find the answers to several questions, and one of them remains unanswered: why do the Rocks stand out so prominently from the landscape around them?  Presumably they are not the only mass of arkose in this area, and indeed they may just be the upper portion of a larger mass as yet unrevealed by erosion.  But, why here?  And why are there no other exposures nearby?

I have a feeling I’ll be heading over there again in the near future...after getting some new boots.

Requiesque in pace

Sources

Bartow, J. Alan and Nilsen, Tor H., 1990.   Review of the Great Valley sequence, eastern Diablo Range and northern San Joaquin Valley, central California.  Open-File Report 90-226: Dept. of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey.

Cook, S.F., 1960.  Colonial Expeditions to the Interior of California: Central Valley, 1800-1820.  Anthropological Records 16:6, p. 239-292. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 

Welcome

I grew up on the edge of the great anthracite fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, surrounded by a landscape scraped and shaped by Laurentian glaciers.  Within a mile of my childhood home were the shallow remains of open pits where men pried limonite from the ground, feeding the small foundries which formed the bedrock of Pennsylvania’s Industrial Revolution.  Within a few more miles’ radius were limestone quarries for serving agriculture.  Long before, the native Lenni Lenape had quarried and chipped the jasper common in our township for tools. 

My parents both grew up in a small Missouri town in the heart of the Lead Belt, where my paternal great-grandfather had worked the mines of the St. Joseph Lead Company since age fourteen.  I spent some childhood summer trips wandering around a town where rusting vent pipes rose out of the pavement, the town was dominated by the huge tailing sand pile at one end (the “chat dump”), and touring the now-inactive Bonne Terre Mine was the only reason anyone came to visit anymore.
 

Later, I spent some time in college near one of the huge inland seas left by the receding Ice Age, Lake Michigan.  I spent days exploring the Warren Dunes, huge deposits of glacial drift larger (and much younger) than the beach dunes of the Atlantic Coast I was used to.  Once again, I found myself in a landscape shaped by ancient glaciation.

 

Finally in 1997 I found myself arriving in California, settling on the boundary between two of the Earth’s great lithographic plates.  Technically, I am not on the boundary proper; I am actually some miles to the east of it in the great forearc basin known as the San Joaquin Valley.  I live in the small “West Valley” town of Gustine, teaching school in nearby Newman.  From both, I get a satisfying view of the Diablo Range to the west, part of the Southern Coast Range of young uplift mountains raised by the strain and movement of the San Andreas Fault System.  My short commute runs parallel to the chain and I never tire of seeing them in their different seasons.

 

It seems appropriate that, having spent my life around history and landscapes which periodically stimulated my interest in geology, I have finally settled in one of the most geologically fascinating places in the world.  California is a playground for those with an interest in the Earth sciences, and I for one plan on spending the rest of my adult life digging around in the sandbox.  Through this blog, I’ll share my experiences, information, and musings as I do so.

One disclaimer, though; I am not a professional geologist.  I teach Science, certainly (among other subjects), but when it comes to Geology I am entirely self-taught beyond a single survey course in college; if you come here expecting highly-detailed research material, you will be disappointed. Nor am I what is traditionally called a “rockhound”; ‘hounds are good people but their interests are primarily specimen collecting and/or lapidary, and although I often collect specimens as part of my explorations it is not my primary focus.  My interest lies with how the rocks and landforms came to be where they are, and why they are the way they are, and then going out into the field and seeing the process in full living color.  This leaves me in a strange position of, what?  “Enlightened amateur geological interest?” 

        Profs to the left of me,

        Rockhounds to the right,

       Here I am---stuck in the middle with you. 

Well, it works for me, and if you have enough interest to follow my peregrinations and observations then it might for you, as well.

Welcome to Life on a Plate Boundary.