h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We left Caltech at 8:30 AM on Saturday and drove west along the south
face of the San Gabriels (the mountains north of campus), past the
endpoint of the LA aquifer where it feeds into the LA water system.
We then drove through a pass in the mountains to get to where we made
our first stop, the Vasquez rocks. They were apparently laid down by
a fast-flowing stream in the mountains a few million years ago; since
then, wind erosion has shaped them into some fantastic shapes.
Apparently they're often used in TV shows and movies. The assignment
was to try to figure out how they'd formed. We then drove the west of
the way across the San Gabriels and stopped at their north face to see
the California Aqueduct (which brings water from the San Joaquin River
in Northern California to the Pasadena area) and the San Andreas
Fault, which it runs right along. At the place where we stopped,
there was a lake along the fault, apparently because fault motion had
produced a low spot there. It was amazing how many huge,
expensive-looking houses had been built along the fault. We then
drove north across the Mojave Desert, which didn't look like what I'd
expect a desert to look like--no sand dunes and a lot of sagebrush and
similar vegetation. The cool part of the Mojave was that we stopped
to eat lunch at a McDonalds in the city of Mojave, which is where
Space Ship One and the Voyager plane that flew around the world were
built. They had a lot of cool space-related stuff on the walls of the
McDonalds.

At the north side of the Mojave, we stopped at a rock formation called
Red Rock Canyon. The cliffs there were incredibly beautiful--they
were striped red and white (apparently a function of how much biomass
there was in the water when the volcanic ash they were made of was
laid down in a lakebed) and fluted (apparently because they'd been
eroded by a waterfall. It's amazing how much water erosion we saw in
places that are now incredibly dry. We then entered Owens Valley and
almost immediately stopped at a place called Fossil Falls. First we
visited a region with a few small cinder cones, apparently produced by
explosive eruptions that shot lava into the air where it solidified
before hitting the ground, as well as some basalt dikes produced by
lave flows that had come up through cracks in the loose basalt
produced by the explosive eruptions, which had now eroded away. We
then went to another part of the Fossil Falls area and saw some fresh
(thousands, not millions, of years old) basalt flows and the falls
themselves, a place where a now-dry river had eroded a deep canyon
into the basalt. We climbed around a bit in the canyon--it was really
neat.

At this point it was around 5:30 PM and we drove a bit farther north
into the Owens Valley until we got to the city of Lone Pine, where we
camped at the Diaz Lake Campground, which is located on a small lake
on the west side of the valley. After setting up my tent, which was
fairly difficult since the soil was really hard and some of the tent
pegs bent rather than going in, I climbed up one of the hills, which I
later found out was part of the Alabama Hills, just west of the
campground. I wanted to but failed to get to the top, but I got some
neat photos of the Owens Valley and close-ups of the LA Aquiduct,
which I had to cross to get all the way up the hills. After dinner,
we built two campfires, one to blow things up in--mostly lighters--and
one for people to sit around. Some people made smores and a few of us
sang, although we couldn't find many songs we all (or almost all)
knew--American Pie, some songs from The Sound of Music and The
Producers, random Disney songs, the Star-Spangled Banner, and a couple
hymns. Then the professors told stories. Professor Brown told us
about discovering his planet and about the party Time Magazine had him
go to in New York for being on their list of the 100 most influential
people of the year because he discovered a planet that it seems like
no one remembers. Professor Farley told us the history of aqueducts
in California. Apparently Owens Valley used to be fertile and wet
until the city of Los Angeles bought up all the water rights and
started redirecting water to the city. As a result, Owens Lake has
dried up and toxic dust from the lake bed is blowing into communities
in the valley and making people sick. Similarly, San Francisco
apparently gets a lot of its water from a dam that's built in Yosemite
National Park and that floods a valley supposedly as spectacular as
the Yosemite Valley. He also mentioned that a lot of jurisdictions in
California are finding they don't have enough water. He suggested
treating waste water to be used as drinking water, but said that (a)
people tend to really hate that idea and (b) it's apparently really
hard to get prescription drugs, especially birth control pills, that
people have passed out as urine out of the water.

The next morning, I woke up early and ate breakfast, which was
probably a bad choice given what I did next. Me, Lori, and Kristen
climbed all the way to the top of the taller of the two hills west of
camp. The view from the top was amazing--you could see the whole
Owens Valley spread out to the east and the Sierra Nevada to the west.
I felt a bit sick to my stomach, though, because I was climbing on a
really full stomach.

Afterwards, we broke camp and got on the buses to look at rocks at the
foot of the Sierra Nevada and then to climb big rockpiles in the
Alabama Hills. Me, Bourneman, and Napolitano nearly got back to the
bus late because of how far we climbed.

We then drove across the valley and across the Panamint Mountains to
the Father Crowley Overlook (which is within Death Valley National
Park), which overlooks Rainbow Canyon (a canyon carved by a now-dry
river) and the Panamint Valley, which, like the Owens Valley, dropped
down as a result of crustal extension. Apparently, during the ice
age, the Panamint Valley used to be filled to the top with
water--considering how deep it is, that's fairly incredible. We then
drove down into the valley and then across a ridge into Searles
Valley, another dried-up ice-age lake which is the site of one of the
most valuable rare-chemicals mines in the world. We stopped to use
the public bathroom in the city of Trona. That whole area is rather
depressing. It's incredibly hot there--I think it was over 100 F when
we stopped there--and the city is really, really poor, because the
mine owners make lots of money but the miners make very little. We
then visited a outcropping of sediment from when the valley was a lake
a few thousand years ago and found some fossil snails. It's amazing
that raising the Earth's temperature by a few degrees since the end of
the ice age has turned this huge lake into a desert. A bit scary,
too. Then we drove back to Caltech.

Some photos I took:

http://s29.photobucket.com/albums/c281/ratatosklemur/Geology%201%20Field%20Trip/



Some photos a friend took:

http://public.fotki.com/demidec/team/marena_lin/caltech/ge_panoramas/



The trip was a lot of fun--California geography is amazing.

Also, http://public.fotki.com/demidec/team/marena_lin/caltech/ge_1_camping_trip/