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Chasing Volcanoes and Overthrusts: Exploring the Pacific Northwest and the...
Mt. Shasta from Interstate 5 in the vicinity of Red Bluff and CorningA few weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a field trip on Kilauea volcano on the Big Island with Don Swanson and Tina Neal of...
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Invaders on the Tuolumne River!
I know I seem easily distracted. I'm working on two blog series at the moment, my explorations in Hawai'i, and our recently completed journey through the Pacific Northwest. But that's the joy of...
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Just How Big is Mt. Shasta in Northern California? Getting a sense of scale...
Mt. Shasta is a big mountain. It becomes visible from upwards of a hundred miles away. Topping out at 14,180 feet (4,322 m), it has the greatest volume of any Cascades stratovolcano at around a hundred...
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Would You Go? The Pit Craters of Kilauea Volcano
Eddie Aikau is a Hawai'i legend. Born in 1946, he was an ancestor of Hawaiian kings, who in antiquity were the only ones allowed to surf. Eddie trained himself to become one of the great surfers of his...
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Red Fox on the Tuolumne River
After traveling several thousand miles through half a dozen national parks, you'd think I would be tired of watching for wild animals, but no, that never happens. It was a nice surprise this morning to...
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California's (not) Biggest, (not) Most Recently Active, and (not) Most...
Photo by Mrs. GeotripperMt. Shasta is no doubt the most dominating volcano in all of California. It's huge, topping out at well above 14,000 feet, and is visible from over a hundred miles in a number...
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Wild Horses at Home on the Range in Eastern California
I've been on the road again, this time for a short trip through Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Wi-Fi has been rare, so I'm only just beginning to catch up with things. Our route took us into the wildlands...
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How Foolish Can These People Be? The Treasure of our National Monuments
Let's make something very clear: these lands belong to the American people. They have always belonged to the American people, dating back to the time of statehood. There were attempts at times to give...
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What the Heck is a Superelevated Lava Flow Anyway? 1974 Basalt Flow near...
Talk about catnip for a geologist... "Do Not Enter", "Stop Here", "Go no closer to the eruption", and "Roads and Trails Closed Beyond This Point". How could any self-respecting geologist ignore such...
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Walking on Broken Glass, Literally: And what is slabby pahoehoe?
Some places on our planet are just not like anywhere else.Kilauea, on the Big Island of Hawai'i is one of the most volcanically active places on Earth, and very few parts of its surface are older than...
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But Wait! THIS Summer isn't even over yet! Explore the Colorado Plateau, June...
North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park (yes, Gaelyn, we'll be on the North Rim, hope to see you there!)"Wait!", you are saying, "it's still the summer of 2017! Why are you talking about the summer of...
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Liveblogging the Deluge: Is the Big-Boned Lady Singing? The Aftermath of the...
The Tuolumne in August of 2015. This was a sick river overgrown with invasive hyacinth. Flow is about 200 cfs.Goodness sakes, are we still talking about that flood? Well, yes we are. It isn't quite...
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Dealing with the Dangerous Rays of Death: Singular Solar Events I've Seen
Do you ever look at the sun?Some advice: DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN! You can destroy your eyes!Good, now that we have that out of the way, what is this post all about? The sun has been on my mind the last...
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When Life Gives You a Single Point of View, Milk it For All it's Worth:...
It never fails. I secretly control the incidences of drought and flooding in the western United States. How? By scheduling our summer field studies a full year in advance. The proof? Every time I...
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What Could be Worse than the Crater Lake Eruption? A look at Smith Rock State...
Standing on the rim of the Crater Lake caldera, as we did in our last post, it is hard to imagine the scale of the catastrophe. In that event just 7,700 years ago, 15 cubic miles of ash was blown into...
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After the Disasters that Formed the Crater Lake and Crooked River Calderas,...
Yup, perspective is everything. I've been going on for several posts about prehistoric volcanic eruptions that were pretty much unimaginable in their violence and destructiveness. The Crater Lake...
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What do Bears Do in the Redwood Forest? They Eat Apples...
California is the only state whose state designated mammal is extinct. The last California Grizzly Bear died in the 1920s. But we do have bears, but they just aren't quite as terrifying as an angry...
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Notes From the Eclipse Trail (with apologies to Ken Burns)
{Note: This may not work right unless as you read you hear the voices narrating a Ken Burns documentary, like the Civil War, or Baseball...}Dearest Ones...It is August 20, 2017. I pray that our missive...
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Just Barely Through the Fog Banks: The Eclipse from Ground Zero, the Oregon...
Yeah, I was really taking a chance, choosing to stay on the Oregon Coast for the 2017 eclipse. The reason? The fog. And there was a lot of it. To make the long story short, it never really lifted, but...
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The Amazing Disappearing (and Very Dangerous) Mountain: Mt. Rainier
Yes, disappearing. In two senses, one rather personal. Mt. Rainier is actually one of the most obvious, most visible mountains on planet Earth. At 14,411 feet (4,392 meters), it towers over western...
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