Posts treating: "Great Valley"
Tuesday, 12 February 2019
It doesn't happen often. I usually pass the right intersection once or maybe twice a week, but the most important factor is the air quality. It's almost always poor. Dust and smoke in the summer, fog and clouds in winter. There is a spot on the floor of the Great Valley (some call it merely the Central Valley) where one can see Half Dome and the other peaks around Yosemite Valley in the
It doesn't happen for me all that often, maybe because of air pollution, or the fact that I characteristically drive past the spot only once a week, but I can occasionally spot Half Dome in Yosemite Valley from the floor of the Great Valley (some people call it the Central Valley, but we know better). There's a narrow line of sight that passes through Denair and Turlock where the iconic
It's been a long time coming, but it looks like the Tuolumne River Parkway trail in Waterford will be completed soon. There will be a Grand Opening celebration on May 21 at 10 AM at the parking area at the end of S. Reinway Avenue. I hate to say it, but I can't be there, but I hope that many of you will stop by, or give the trail a look soon. I've been writing about the trail for many
I've been meaning to get to this for awhile. I had the privilege a few weeks ago of attending the 2016 Gala fundraiser for our local treasure, the Great Valley Museum of Natural History at Modesto Junior College in California's Central Valley. The museum building is new, having opened only two years ago, but the museum has existed for more than thirty years in less than favorable quarters.
The Wasco 4.9 earthquake, as recorded at Modesto Junior College
California has been shaken by another near-magnitude 5 earthquake, and this one is a bit odd. It hit in the Great Valley, one of the few places in California NOT known for having faults and earthquakes. It occurred near the south valley town of Wasco, and had a magnitude of 4.9, along with a couple of aftershocks as high
Standing on a barren hillside east of Bakersfield, one looks over a dry landscape peppered here and there with oil drilling rigs. Because of the recent rains, the grass is green, but roasted brown is normal for these badlands. It's hard, standing in this desert, to visualize that this was once a shallow sea, a sea that was filled with life. 15-16 million years ago, there were ancient species
Beauty and ugliness...
A Meadowlark is singing in the breeze...it's early February in California which actually means that spring is practically here. In other places, biplanes are spraying pesticides and fungicides, beekeepers are setting out hives in the almond groves, and fields are being plowed and readied for planting. About 95% of the floor of the California's Great Valley is
A field in the Central Valley!
Living in California's Great Valley has moments. Some good, some bad. It's really flat, and that isn't of much interest to a geologist (except the drilling kind). But on some days, when the storms have blown through, and the wind has pushed all of the smog and dust to other places, the valley is beautiful. The best days are when the snow-covered Sierra Nevada
It might be heresy for me to say it, but there are some places where the geology appears to be kind of...monotonous. Flatlands covered by soils are sometimes not all that interesting. I can even be accused of thinking this way about my very own home valley, the Great Valley of California. I've spent a long time teaching my students that our valley isn't actually boring at all. It's just
Okay, not really to the center, but deeper than any drill or mine shaft ever went. Del Puerto Canyon in the California Coast Ranges provides a window into the Earth's mantle, while passing through more than ten miles of crustal material. Allow me to explain! We were there last weekend, a group of our students gathered together after finals to explore the canyon.
The Great Valley began as
Red-shouldered Hawk at entrance to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge
Every so often, I remember what an extraordinary place I live in. It's sometimes easy to forget while dealing with the air pollution, the lingering drought, and the seemingly non-ending recession, but California's Great Valley is one of the most important provinces in the United States. It provides something like
I've been providing occasional updates on the progress of the Tuolumne River Parkway trail that is being constructed in Waterford, California, where the river leaves the Sierra Nevada behind and flows into the Great Valley. It's been a source of some community pride that the city has finally come to realize the value of the river. It used to be a dumping ground. Now it will become a
Sometimes, it is the context that makes something precious. A drink of water on a hot day in the desert, for instance. A few drops of rain in a crippling drought. In our valley, a clear day is a precious thing. The Great Valley of California is surrounded by mountains. The Sierra Nevada rises to an elevation of nearly three miles on the east side, while the Coast Ranges to the west approach
I live in California's Great Valley, also known as the Central Valley. It's one of the most important agricultural regions on Earth, in that it produces around a quarter of the nation's produce. It's an extraordinary geological province, 400 miles of almost perfect flatness. When I moved to the valley nearly thirty years ago, I thought I was moving to a boring place, featureless, and
Sometimes there are just unusual things. I was driving into work early this morning just before the sun broke out over the Sierra Nevada. From my vantage point on the floor of the Great Valley, the rays of the sun were casting shadows on some of the smoke from the horrific wildfires that have afflicted our state in the past few weeks. The sight stopped me in my tracks. The ridge line looks
Can you see it? Look carefully, it's easy to miss...
We have a drainage pond on our west campus at the edge of town. It's been a mostly neglected corner of the campus, used occasionally to graze sheep from our agricultural unit. I've been exploring it for the last two years looking to photograph birds (forty species and counting). It's not far from our Science Community Center and Great
Tell me this isn't one of the stranger looking skies you've ever seen. I would have been rather freaked seeing this without having known the origin. It's not clouds.
We were driving home after our latest journey, and could see a wildfire burning on the west side of the Great Valley north of Sacramento. We couldn't get details until we got home, but it turns out to be burning in the
An Egret and Tule Elk at the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge near Los Banos
The Great Valley began as a shallow sea (a forearc basin) between the Mesozoic subduction zone and the Ancestral Sierra Nevada volcanic arc. As noted in the previous post, the sea filled with thousands of feet of sediments, and as the subduction zone transitioned to a transform boundary, the sea gave way to
The strange alien terrane bursts out of the core of the Diablo Range!
The next stage of our journey through the most dangerous plate boundary on the planet takes us across the Coast Ranges from the Bay Area to the Great Valley. There are freeways that make the trip easy, but they don't go through the interesting parts. Traveling Interstate 580 at 65mph, one mostly just sees grassy
One of California's precious landscapes is being lost, again. The state once had a vast prairie extending for 400 miles from Redding to Bakersfield. The grasslands were of course put to the plow, and agriculture rules the environment today. Less than 5% of the original grasslands of the Great Valley remain, and they've been under renewed assault in just the past few years.
The problem