Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
“Californ-i-ay, where the rain doesn’t rain, it just drizzles champagne.” — Yip Harburg
We finally had a real winter storm, two days of nice soft rain. Thank the Elye-wun, or whose-ever long white beards those are, flowing over the hills.
The hollyleaf cherries greeted me as if they were Irish Spring models, fresh and perky.
The deerweed has pinked up remarkably; the tired wilted look is gone everywhere. It’s a pioneer species in recovering disturbed areas: it cleverly fixes nitrogen in the soil, preparing for fertility.
The star of the show is an elegant hunting-pink buckwheat variety, Eriogonum fasciculatum, only this strain seems very gracile, and ripens to ruby red, not orange-brown.
The gracile buckwheat strain blooming white, and the deerweed in gold, in the June, 2020 Superbloom.Comparing the LOC buckwheat, left, with your common-or-garden variety, right.
Re-capping from Feb. 2019:
January, 2019. Hills bare, contrasts extreme, and the creek bed was streaked with oak-char, but…potential!
Here’s one year later, Spring 2020:
January, 2020
In August 2020 we had a single-day spike of 118 degrees, and everything then alive, sizzled, I thought to death. By Christmas Day of 2020, after months of no rain, the hills had roasted up brown and crispy.
Christmas, 2020. Looks pretty fried, doesn’t it? But one month, and a couple inches of rain later:January 29, 2021. The land is filling in with “Foothill Alluvial Fan Chaparral.” It’s far more diverse than ever.
YOUR OROGENOUS ZONES DEPT./ TRANSFORMATION OF LOPEZ CANYON DEPT./ A VALE FOR ALL SEASONS
We have had on average a cool, dry rainy season, which I glean [Old Farmer’s Almanac] is best for trees showing the colors. I’d rather have more rain and fecund green growth. Two or three degrees cooler temperatures in the Transverse Ranges, might equal at least that many inches of seasonal rain, in terms of the survival of individuals in our habitat suites. [The New Deal of climate change: one single day of 119-degree temperatures, a feat which we’ve been leaping towards for the past few years, could wipe out half the whole suite of plants of our Foothill Alluvial Fan Chaparral. Wish us luck.] In such circumstances, the degree of angle of slope, inches one way or the other of elevation, the time of the moonrise that determines the flowering, the relative hour and minute of total shade, or one day’s record high or low temperature, might mean life or extinction. Life and death together, is the definition of beauty: thus behold. The next few Views will be a celebration of the light, the clouds, the shadows, the slopes, the faults, the chaparral, and how they all are creating each other, destroying each other, in some of my choicest bits of the Transverse Mountains, this rainy season. LOPEZ CANYON, THE LAND OF CONTRASTS:
Morningtime.
SAN GABRIEL FAULT, THE MENDENHALL RIDGE; LITTLE TUJUNGA, SURELY A VALE FOR ALL SEASONS:
Eveningtime…
Then came the rains. Patient Reader might remember Mary Martin’s cloud-show in this setting? Well, it seems clouds do all kinds of interesting things in a Transverse Range. Here at the beautiful Laurel Crest/Beverly Crest Overlook of the Valley, north, and Beverly Hills, westerly transverse:
Look! Fault block mountains, there, and there…everywhere! All around! Closing in –!!
If Southern California is an Island on the Land, as Carey McWilliams dubbed it, the Transverse Ranges are the reason. They seal up the southern end of the Central Valley and separate Northern California from Southern California. The San Gabriels/Sierra Pelona division marks a key split in the northern and southern breeding populations among much of California’s wildlife. All that to do, and they’re still always on my back.
The mountains’ southerly-exposed bluffs and alluvial fans host the Foothill Alluvial Fan Chaparral and Southern Coastal Sage Scrub suites of the California Floristic Province, some of the youngest, rarest and most endangered organisms on earth.
Our microclimates are legion; this breeds diversity. Habitats feet apart, are completely different. Note the “Slope Effect” in Placerita Canyon on the back side (north side) of the San Gabriels:
Click below and fly souteasterly, over the whole Transverse Range Geomorphic in gorgeous relief:
But why do the mountain ranges trend easterly-westerly, when, as everyone knows, most of the other mountain ranges on the continent trend northerly-southerly? I asked a geologist. He didn’t get back to me, so I asked Norah and Ito. Here’s the scoop:
The cats say the reason is plate tectonics: subduction, rift zones, arc accretion, volcanics, uplift, rotation. Click on the animation by the seraphic C.R. Scotese. [Thank Thoth for his work at the Paleomap Project.] Try to spot western North America as it emerges: gasp when it does!
[Point of Awe: this is how far the plate theory has advanced since the 1970s, when the penny finally dropped for geologists and they realized it was the whole show, and had been, all along. Our generation of fifth graders were among the first kids who learned about “Gondwonaland” as basement bedrock of our knowledge. Our poor teachers must have been reeling with it, groping, grasping to understand so they could teach it to us. BLESS THEM.] But what I’ve been groping and grasping to understand lately, is that the Western Transverse Range Fault Block, Home Sweet Home, was formed all the way down by Baja. Santa Barbara and San Diego were suburbs of each other! Then it — we, the Transverse mountains and our Valley — were pushed and pulled and folded and rotated into position, transverse that is. This was quite recently indeed, and it’s still going on. It all hinges — quite literally — on the subduction of the “old Farallon Plate” and the rise of the East Pacific Rise, and the birth of the San Andreas Fault. Enjoy Tanya Atwater’s brief but brilliant video models of how it went down:
To really get an idea of this process at our very local level, consider Malibu Creek State Park. This is how it looks today:
Their resident geologist Don Kovalevsky has done a MAGNIFICENT set of illustrations tracking how this area of Santa Monica Mountains — and everything else — looked in various epochs. Click below for the whole series.
Today the Western Transverse Range Block is half covered by the ocean, with the Channel Islands the only peek-a-boo features. But the whole lump was made anyway from uplifted beach and marine sediments, bunched and folded, so even the bits that are high up in the mountains and miles from the tides, show their marine origin. I’m told you can find marine fossils, seaweed leaves and foot-wide nautilus shells, but I don’t need another solitary well-ventilated hobby…or do I?
His courage, his leadership, his crystal-clear perception, his imagination, his vision, his voice, were never more needed in our American moment than right now. His message is one of the most powerful moral arrows in America’s quiver. May it strike our hearts with love. In memoriam, hear the State House Bell toll twelve across Independence Square: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TW_uOyl4FQbqq82M9BeZR9svGFh22KsF/view?usp=sharing
The two remarkable sculptures are from last year’s student competition at Brookgreen Gardens, the winners’ works exhibited in a special gallery. I wish I had thought to note the artists’ names. Mute admiration must be their tribute.
The Valley Village View 