https://vimeo.com/321080538

“The Grotto” is a geologic wonder just a few yards up from an unmarked trailhead in La Tuna Canyon. I’d stopped here while driving through — and quickly left. I didn’t know it was called “the Grotto,” but the romantic name fits, even more so now that you can experience the awesome energy of this place. The spot was, until last week, a dark and impenetrable slot canyon, over-crowded with shaggy oaks and sycamores, and choked with dead tree trunks, waist-high brush and flesh-tearing blackberry brambles. It was a “mature” oak terrace formation, so aggraded with years of growth and upstream debris the creek barely flowed.

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The trail leads up to an unremarkable hike over scrubby hills, but if you stayed low and hacked a few yards in, you came abruptly to a one-flight staircase of rock, with a little landing and a left turn at the top to take you up into the oak terrace. But the “steps” were piled with slippery sycamore leaves and blocked by fallen timber. Clio, trusty hound, seemed spooked by the place (traffic accoustics can sound unnervingly like a mountain lion purring in the grass, ten feet away from you.) We left. Not much to see, no reason to stay.

Then came the fire, which burned off the dead fuel, and all the brush on the upstream hillsides. (The sycamores were toasted; amazingly, the oaks were thinned, but the grove came through.) Then came this winter’s rains.

No longer choked upstream, the creek ran high, fast, and strong. Like a pressure-wash jet, it de-gunked the Grotto, removing tons of debris. This exposed the compressed V’s of the bedrock walls, and laid out the creek bed in a nice sandy bar.

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The jet-rinse also revealed that “staircase” is an ancient lava flow over the fault, a lintel for the creek where ancient igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock all seem to come together in one formation. Striped with dikes of pink, lips of polished marble, and swirls of olive green serpentinite, its true beauty and geologic complexity is exposed, for the first time, maybe, ever.

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