During my time at Piute Meadows, my brother would usually come up for a visit in the fall. Steve, my only sibling (older by three and a half years), also happens to be my naturalist-mentor. He had a “thing” for the feathered-kind at a very tender age and by the time he was eight was a serious and pretty accomplished junior birder. By the time I got to be that age, Steve’s interests had expanded considerably into other areas of natural history. We both became devotees of the natural world, with somewhat different areas of expertise.◦◦◦◦◦I was often well-behind in my daily log entries (it was a constant struggle to keep up) and would stage marathon writing sessions in an effort to catch up on a week or more’s worth of days. I typically wrote these post-dated entries to make them read as if they were composed more or less in the present and tried to maintain a consistent “tone.” But it’s fairly obvious that there was a less-than-spontaneous narrative being recorded.◦◦◦◦◦Also worth noting: it was only later in my “career” that I decided, in the interest of honesty and authenticity, to cop to my varying moods. In truth, I was prone to depression during times of love problems and chronic health issues. In the case of this particular entry, I appear to have been in a reflective, somber mood because this one has an unusually philosophical, even pensive character that sounds a bit out of the ordinary. Also, it’s obvious that I’d pulled out my well-worn copy of Mary Hill’s “Geology of the Sierra Nevada” and done a little research; I was learning about such things as I went along and certainly didn’t know about Miocene geology off the top of my head.
14 Oct (Fri) Cold again (20°) with a high cloud layer. When I got up to feed the equine-kind the pygmy owl was hooting and I whistled it up—it came to the edge of the yard and perched in the top of a tall snagtop lodgepole. [Pygmy owls are known for readily responding to a crude imitation of their simple call.] ◦◦◦◦◦ Today was the day for a long walk—we can’t just sit in the cabin all day burning firewood. So we walked back up the Long Lakes trail with an objective: I wanted to show Steve a unique geological feature, a thing I’ve visited only once before, myself. (It’s off the trail aways and kinda hard to get to.) We walked to the PCT metal bridge, skirted Walker Meadows visiting old sheepherder camps and found a sheepherder carving that I’d never seen before—a neat one, right off the trail. Also we found a dead pygmy owl right by the PCT, pretty much decomposed but still partially feathered. ◦◦◦◦◦ At Kennedy Creek it started to snow. (More like a sleety rain at first.) Leaving the trail, we climbed up the hillside to the north and along the way ran into a stunning juniper I’d never seen, a tree only fifty feet tall but with a massive trunk—much of it without bark and all furrowed—an honest ten feet in diameter from one aspect. It was very symmetrical and pleasing to the eye, surely at least a thousand years old. (And I don’t toss that figure out lightly.) We were both overcome with admiration for this patriarch—really, one of the very most impressive trees I’ve seen up here, period. ◦◦◦◦◦ Headed straight up the slope, close to the route I’ve taken on horseback to get up to Ski Lake. In my customary kinda sneaky fashion under such circumstances, I planned our route so we’d step around a corner and arrive right on top of the “feature.” When we got to the place I said, “Let’s head over here—there’s a good viewpoint and we can rest before the final climb.” Steve was huffing and puffing and wasn’t terribly keen on climbing higher in the falling snow. We stood there for a few minutes while I waited for him to notice the unusual topography but he was concerned by the deteriorating weather and wasn’t focusing on our surroundings. Finally spilled the beans: “Umm…actually…this is it.” ◦◦◦◦◦ We were standing on an outcropping of the brown volcanic rock that covers much of the Sonora Pass region. The technical term for this stuff is “lahar,” an Indonesian word for hot volcanic rock mixed with water, mud, and other rock that actually flows—sometimes at tremendous speeds. (As opposed to true lava.) My book says that this stuff all belongs to the “Relief Peak Formation,” an andesitic mud-flow dating from various stages of the Miocene Epoch. It covers literally thousands of square miles of the northern Sierra region. The “andesite-breccia” (breccia = broken rock) on this slope is studded with granite boulders and cobbles. Some of the biggest boulders are six feet across and are perched atop columns of breccia (the boulders acting like umbrellas to preserve the columns under them from eroding away). And there are little bluffs that expose in cross-section a sort of mega-conglomerate made up of granite cobbles along with other volcanic and metamorphic rocks. The really striking thing is that the granite boulders are all rounded and polished in a way that can only have been achieved by being tumbled in the riverbed of a major river. Steve is also interested in geological matters and I wanted him to try and interpret this scene like I’d done a few years back. (When I met that geologist, Jack Quade, at Dorothy Lake this year he confirmed my theory.) ◦◦◦◦◦ It took a little prompting but Steve figured out the puzzle: we were standing on an ancient river bed that had been inundated by one of the lahar mudflows during the long period of volcanism in the Sierra that covered this country with that dark brown, fine-grained volcanic rock that’s so prominent in the Sonora Pass region. The lava slurry, full of angular chunks of parent rock, had coursed downslope into a flowing river and mixed with the giant cobbles in its bed. This one tiny remnant, perched on an obscure mountainside, overlying glacially carved granite bedrock, has survived multiple glaciations and is the chance remnant of a time long past; these granite cobbles used to be tumbled in flood-times by a long-gone river that flowed somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty million years ago!! There are glacial erratics dating from the Pleistocene all around the West Walker—right in the yard at the cabin a large boulder of Cathedral Peak granite, carried some miles from the crest, is lying atop far-older metamorphosed marine sediments on a small bluff of this truly ancient rock tilted 90° (its bedding layers evident). I’ve often been impressed thinking that this particular stone has sat there in place for at least ten thousand years without moving an inch. But the boulders on that hillside where we were standing, that look just like any other granite boulders at a casual glance, have also rested in place for a long time. In fact, they’ve been sitting there quietly for perhaps two thousand times longer than any of the local glacial erratics. ◦◦◦◦◦ Here’s further proof of the severe limitations of the human mind. We just don’t have the equipment available to perceive things on this scale; when we try, the red lights start to blink—TILT!—and we have to back off lest our brain cells burst from over-heating. Using my imagination I can dimly comprehend that the river cobbles above Kennedy Canyon are much “older” than the glacial erratics but, intellectually I fail—they look pretty much the same! Just granite…. ◦◦◦◦◦ I am humbled yet again and see all too clearly that my existence is exceedingly, tragically (for me) brief. I’m basically no different than an insect—here today and gone tomorrow, la la la. The sun rises and sets again and again, endlessly, and my place in this world is more or less irrelevant. I’ll be gone altogether too soon and not be missed by the trees and stones and crumbling, ephemeral mountains. The glaciers will come again to alter this ever-changing landscape. Amen. ◦◦◦◦◦ We walked home slowly, on human time. Took several more little cross-country detours to visit places I’ve not looked into yet. Stopped off where we’d found the dead pygmy owl this morning so I could lop its off head. (Used my Swiss army knife. I’ll boil it up to make a lovely little skull specimen.) And, in the vernacular of southern California, I “grossed Steve out” by pretending to lick the blade of my knife clean after the beheading. Well, he was pretty disgusted after that little joke when I licked my fingers and swiped the blade with them before wiping it on my filthy pants. ◦◦◦◦◦ From Walker Meadows we headed east and eventually hit the trail where it passes by Little Long Lake. At a point where he “knew where he was” I left Steve to walk at his own pace (at his request) and marched the last couple miles home alone. Back at the cabin, took a short stroll up-meadow with kitties for sunset views. ◦◦◦◦◦ After dinner, read aloud to Steve again—a couple of stories from climbing magazines, including a hilarious one by this well-known Everest climber who invited his Sherpa guide to the States and the comical things that the little man from Nepal encountered/endured.
→ 12 miles → 2 lbs trash → humilifying sights
©2018 by Tim Forsell 17 Nov 2018
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