Escape to Kings Canyon, part 1: fault creep, batholith, sequoia, sarcodes

This post is the first of a series. To see the gallery, click here.

IN SMALL INCREMENTS

Gazing at passing scenery from the back of Bev’s RV, I found myself thinking: Time is frozen inside this vehicle. It was May 2014, and we were starting our annual voyage. Sundari was one of the voyaging party this year, the three of us united in mutual travel for the first time since 2012. On the highway leaving town those two years seemed to collapse into a much shorter time. For a little while it felt as if we’d gone to sleep at the end of our trip to Mexico and awakened just now to resume the same journey.

We left Santa Cruz in the morning, driving through Watsonville, Gilroy, San Juan Bautista, and Hollister. Not until we stopped in the parking lot of Paicines General Store to eat lunch did the differences between past and present came rushing in on me in the form of a hundred tiny details. I was forced to admit that even within this seemingly static space, change was unstoppable. It was happening in small increments before my eyes. And of course it had been happening in large increments all year. It was only the familiar vantage point in the back of the RV that had temporarily deceived me.

Had we turned south on Highway 25 from Paicines, we would’ve ended up at Pinnacles National Park, site of our 2011 trip. This year we turned east instead, onto County Road J-1. We would cross Little Panoche Valley, then Panoche Valley and the Coast Ranges, and finally the Great Central Valley. From there it wouldn’t be very far to our ultimate destination: Kings Canyon National Park, in the southern part of the Sierra Nevada range. I was eager to get there. Change was unnerving, but mountains and trees would reassure me.

PROCESSES MANIFESTED

County Road J-1 was rich in bumps and potholes, a teeth-rattling ride. I bounced around in the back and thought some more about the passage of time and how my approach to photography had changed. Seven years had now elapsed since my first RV trip with Bev (my grandma) and Sundari (my aunt) to Yosemite National Park, another famed Sierra Nevada locale. I’d barely thought about California’s history and geology on that trip, but now things were different. Over seven years the context of my photos had become more important, and I’d been reading books to prepare for visiting the Sierras this time, some scientific and others not. Now I watched the terrain eagerly, looking for manifestations of the processes I’d studied.

Things got geologically interesting long before we were within view of Kings Canyon. On J-1 we rode near the San Andreas fault zone, the same network of faults that accounts for the unusual location of the Pinnacles. In this part of the San Andreas fault zone, near the Hayward and Calaveras faults, tectonic motion is subtle. Plates move constantly against each other in a steady pressure-relieving kind of movement called fault creep. Everywhere I looked I saw signs of this creeping tectonic movement. Fault scarps – those things that look like steps in the land, where movement has happened along a fault – showed up regularly among the creeks and ravines. We’d passed a sag pond when we’d turned onto this bumpy road, created when fault activity formed a depression that filled with water. Had we lingered in Hollister, we could have seen fault creep's disruption of sidewalks and retaining walls.

This winding country road was taking us over a landscape which constantly changed, a little bit here and a little bit there. Lurking underneath the surface of the earth was the potential for dramatic and sudden movement. It’s true of our lives too, I said to myself, then decided not to carry that line of thought any further. Fault creep was a more comfortable topic to contemplate than earthquakes. I committed myself to observation and research and the suspension of worry, at least for the next few days.

DISTANT ECHOES OF BIGGER MOVEMENTS

California’s geology is the result of the intricate interactions between three tectonic plates. When the Pacific Plate collided with the North American Plate, the bottom of the ocean folded. Layers of rock were tilted and pushed upward, then rounded into hills by erosion from weather. These events took place over millennia and brought together rocks you’d never expect to see in close proximity. I’d witnessed examples of this at the Pinnacles and at Limekiln State Park; now I saw it in Panoche Valley, as I photographed colorful hills that were once oceanfloor sediment on the Pacific Plate.

On J-1 we were surrounded by these hills. They looked for the most part like dull brownish mounds, but fascinating interiors were exposed in some places by roadcuts and previous tectonic events. I saw streaks of blue and other colors in distant ridges: blueschist and other minerals, all part of the chaotic Franciscan Complex, many millions of years old. Research had given me a sense of the vast timescale involved in creating this landscape. In the back of the RV alone with my camera I felt as if our lives were distant echoes of bigger movements in the earth.

Many potholes later, we reached the Central Valley, home of flat land and easy driving, and my companions let me take the wheel. I was forced out of my reverie for a while until we left Fresno and Bev began driving again. We took State Route 180 eastward, crossing the Kings River. I sat in the passenger seat, watching as new kinds of rocks appeared on either side of the road. Things were becoming delightfully scenic as we began the climb to higher elevations, with more trees appearing, more fields and groves below us on the right and the mountains rising up on our left.

I was nervous about the dropoff to the right, especially on some of the sharper curves. Good thing I’m not driving, I thought, it’s impossible not to look down into this valley. Bev seemed to feel no such qualms. My lens tapped against the glass again and again as I photographed the gradual change in size of objects below, and the mist that hung between the distant hills. We were traversing the western margin of the Sierra Nevada batholith now, a huge body of rock with a complex, fascinating origin. Here was more evidence of things that happened in secret darkness long ago.

INTRUSIONS FROM THE UNDERWORLD

The word batholith means deep rock, and this stuff has come from way down below the surface of the earth, prompted by the dramatic actions of tectonic plates I mentioned earlier. Before the Pacific Plate met the North American Plate, there was another player involved: the Farallon Plate, which got squeezed between the Pacific and North American Plates. Caught up in geological drama, it was eventually subducted beneath the North American Plate, where it sank down, down, down into the mantle of the Earth.

Conditions are hot down there, so the Farallon Plate released its ocean water, melting the mantle above it into liquid rock, which in turn melted continental crust above, forming more pockets of liquid rock. Some of this magma was ejected from the surface in the form of volcanoes (like the ones that created the Pinnacles), and other magma cooled underground into massive bodies of granitic rocks called plutons. That’s what the Sierra Nevada batholith is made of: enormous plutons, intrusions from the underworld, first formed starting about 100 million years ago.

It took many more years for these plutons to become exposed, to emerge from their underground chambers. About 10 million years ago (though there is debate about this timing), the block of continental crust of which the plutons were part began to tilt westward, raising the eastern side of the block higher. Rivers flowing westward to the Pacific Ocean began to cut deep valleys; the Sierra Nevada mountains as we know them were beginning to take shape. Then, 2.5 million years ago, temperatures dropped on Earth and glaciers formed. These further sculpted the peaks and canyons of the Sierras, eroding away the rock that had lay on top of the plutons and exposing the granitic rocks of the plutons.

It was exciting to glimpse new kinds of rock gradually appearing as we left the Central Valley and rode uphill, and gratifying to have some knowledge of what past events they signified. As I watched the stone surfaces exposed in roadcuts, I anticipated seeing vast expanses of rock when we finally got to Kings Canyon.

MORE TREES THAN CANYONS

Our entrance into Kings Canyon park did not immediately reveal the exciting views I’d been reading about. No canyon was visible. Our first night was spent at Azalea campground, where all I saw were trees and some boulders. We were in a smaller detached section of the park, at about 6,500 feet of elevation, within a mixed lower montane forest. This place is home to Douglas firs, sugar pines, ponderosa pines, cedars, and most notably, the giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, the cousin of the coastal redwoods in Santa Cruz.

I looked at a map of the park again and realized that this small section of Kings Canyon National Park is separated from the much larger backcountry section by miles of the Sequoia National Forest. That’s strange, I thought, I wonder why they set it up like that? I wouldn’t find out until later. I studied a brochure that told me Kings Canyon offered geological features similar to those of Yosemite, but with far fewer visitors. Those must be in the other part of the park, I thought. Maybe we’ll go there tomorrow.

But tomorrow had different plans for us. During the evening meal, the RV’s batteries were found to be defective. Somebody would have to go back to Fresno for replacements. Sundari and Bev volunteered to make the trip. “I’ll stay here,” I said, and my heart overflowed with gratitude when they concurred.

The next morning I woke up to the sweetest, most beautiful birdsong I’d ever heard. After a flurry of breakfast activity, my companions departed, leaving behind nothing but my tent and a few chairs. I stored my camera gear in the metal bear-proof container, laid out my mat in the now-empty parking space, and settled into the bliss that was yoga and coffee alone under huge trees I’d never seen before.

Mid-stretch, I realized I wasn’t truly alone. My yoga mat was invaded by a series of ants, burly specimens with important work to do. It seemed rude to block their path. I extricated myself from pigeon pose and sat in the lotus position while two of them maneuvered an iridescent beetle carcass across the width of my yoga mat and beyond. Something about their labors reminded me of the camera-lifting I’d be doing in this park. I jumped up from the mat, ready to take some pictures.

SEQUOIADENDRON AND SARCODES

Near the visitor center was an ascending road and I began to hike it, wondering if I’d soon reach a point where I could see beyond the giant sequoias and firs. I wanted to get a sense of how far this forest went. The brochure about trees I carried in my hand compared the sequoias to the familiar coastal redwoods of Santa Cruz. These trees are related but there are some crucial differences. Coastal redwoods grow taller than giant sequoias, but the sequoias can get to be much more massive, their volume and girth exceeding that of the redwoods.

General Grant Grove, home of the second largest sequoia on earth, was just a few steps away from our campground. I hadn’t seen those sequoias yet. I was saving them for when my companions returned from Fresno. My brochure told me about the General Sherman tree in neighboring Sequoia National Park, which weighs 2.7 million pounds; it’s the largest sequoia, and the largest single stem plant, on earth.

Under the big trees I saw a few young snow plants, and remembered seeing similar ones at Yosemite years ago, weird waxy-looking beauties popping up out of the leaf litter. Its scientific name is Sarcodes sanguinea, derived from Greek and Latin words meaning blood-red flesh. This non-chlorophyll-producing plant is a parasite which feeds on soil fungi, which in turn get nutrients from the roots of chlorophyll plants such as trees. The trees and the fungi are in a symbiotic relationship, and the snow plant uses this relationship to its own advantage, getting sugars from the tree through the fungus.

Sarcodes seems to depend on these particular fungi and conifers not just for food but for germination of its seeds. That's why I've only found this plant at places like Yosemite and Kings Canyon. It is startling when one appears in a shaft of sunlight in a dark forest. 

A POINT NOT QUITE PANORAMIC (BUT CLOSE ENOUGH)

The day had grown hot, but under the trees the air was cool and rich with the scent of conifers. I was beginning to wonder if I’d get a chance to see beyond the forest on this walk. This road led to a trail to Panoramic Point, where a marvelous view can be obtained, but I didn’t have time to make it all the way there and back before my fellow travelers returned. Not at the slow rate I tend to travel, with my camera out all the time and so many stops to photograph things.

Several hours of walking and shooting had passed when I finally wandered off the road on a short side trail to a spot where the ranks of trees thinned, a lovely hillside place with bare white skeletons of plants and an intense smell of heat-baked pine needles. I couldn’t see as far as I would’ve at Panoramic Point, but I could get an idea of the lay of the land. This moment, when I was far from my fellow travelers and looking out over the valley, I got my first sense of the wildness and vastness of the Kings Canyon and Sequoia parks.

The day before we left town, I’d begun reading The Last Season, Eric Blehm’s excellent book about Randy Morgenson. Morgenson was a Kings Canyon park ranger who disappeared without a trace. His body wasn’t found until five years later, though I didn’t know that yet, not having reached that point in the book. As far as I knew at that moment on the hillside, Morgenson had never been found. Standing at my little lookout, staring at miles of trees and mountains, I began to understand how someone could disappear here. I imagined myself vanishing into the forest. It was an enjoyable daydream to have in the bright sunlight.

ALL THAT'S LEFT IS A HOLE IN THE GROUND

My daydream ended when it occurred to me that the RV’s battery problem had most likely been a quick fix in Fresno. My companions might already be back from their mission, wondering where I’d gone. Maybe I was thinking of search parties looking for Randy Morgenson when I started hurrying back down the road. Bev and Sundari were waiting at the campsite, with tales to tell of their adventures. We had brand new batteries and more food; we had comfort and camaraderie and better luck than we’d expected. We ate dinner and then I walked around with my camera, looking at sunset light on the trees.

Just when I was sure I wouldn’t see any more rock-related stuff, I ran across the bedrock mortars at the edge of the campground. These were flat slabs of granite with holes in them, used by native people long ago to grind acorns into flour. I thought of our well-stocked fridge, our many varieties of machine-produced crackers, and these bedrock mortars seemed surreal. Did that really happen here? I thought.

I found myself thinking nervously again of the small increments adding up to vast changes, and all the things lost in the process. The Farallon Plate got subducted; the people who made these holes moved away to avoid destructive white settlers. We were fortunate so far but we’d lose things too before it was all over, whenever that was. Night fell and I crawled into my sleeping bag still pondering change. But I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and soon consciousness, too, was lost.