The View is reeling these days from the fast-paced, hectic, thrill-a-minute, presto–chango world of local geology. I haven’t been blogging because I’m too busy learning from the rapidly changing land. I feel like the boy Wart, being given his lessons in Deep Time by old Merlin. Every time I set foot on a trail in this remarkable Valley, puzzled by its mysteries — suddenly, there, in this hillside, or that chasm, or lying at my feet, I find a stunning new revelation of whatever point of ignorance I’ve been working my brain around. Which then brings up a hundred new questions! I’ve broken a couple computers web-searching Chinese papers on “convergent accretion wedges.”
Mostly I’ve been baffled lately by “mineralization,” that strange alchemy that apparently creates lead, zinc, copper, silver, gold…and pyrite and molybdenum and arsenic and graphite and uranium and all the rest. It’s apparently a phreatic process that is dependent upon fine changes in the water table. Iron, sulfur, and carbon dissolved in water deep under the mountains periodically boils or bubbles or cold-seeps up through the rocks (or, sands, it turns out…remember gold nuggets in creek beds?). When the pressure drops or the temperature or acidity become too much for it, the water vapor trapped in the rocks goes pffft! up a long spout of the loosest conglomerates; and the metals and salts dissolved in the water precipitate out over or into the cracks of the surrounding rocks, where, if the type of country rock sitting there is right, makes more al-chemistry take place, creating more and more amazing minerals.
This process, I have been reading about but couldn’t comprehend in the slightest! Maybe you can’t either, to read that paragraph. But I found a demonstration on the surface, just a few hours after it happened, and I was so excited I must share it with Patient Reader. I won’t explain further, just bear in mind the above facts, and accept that geology is now and didn’t happen in the past. View on.
Trail on top of left ridge up Sugarloaf 
This geologically wonderful Viewpoint — wonderful west
Yes, a fools’ gilded dandelion. I may have missed the sulfur cloud by minutes. They can kill hikers!
I became instantly irate about the obvious prank vandalism of kids with spray-cans — loathing as I do the graffiti appearing on rocks EVERYWHERE these days, especially with the kids out of school during COVID. Trying to fool people…! But then again, it’s right where mineralization, I think, has been happening. What’s further up the path? How’s the griffone?
9…side vents to mud volcanoes). 
Wow —fresh coating of lacquery-coppery mineral wash! 
The vent is the lower crack with the burnt twigs. To the left is murmuring sand from carbonated water or boiling steam. It blew the stream of fluid right under the extruding gneiss vein, which got washed and transformed by that coppery-green-gold finish, like the rocks on the ridge. Fluid is venting from the crease right where the trail meets the slope. The theory is, since the road cut interrupted the flow to the dome, the spot just in the crease of the road was the first place this highly pressured deep earth fluid found an opening to low surface air pressure, where it went poof! leaving the heavy minerals sprayed on the rock and sand — exactly like a kid with a spray can! In this case I’m pretty sure that what I found is chalcopyrite, the chief copper ore, and along with iron pyrite, one of the true “fools’ golds.”
The brassy coppery-greeny-gold of fresh pyrite!
Of course, the real fool finding fools’ gold, is the fool who, finding pyrite, sells his claim thinking it’s worthless. The savvy prospector buys it, for he knows pyrite and gold — and silver and copper — all take the same steam elevator. These pyritey rocks are also nicely cooked with traces of many rare metals deep inside. 
For a guy who has been blundering around lately collecting mineralized ore samples to pound out and pan down looking for a few gold flakes…a process I DON’T EVER WANT TO REPEAT…
…I’ll take the fools’ gold, and the free lesson in Golden State geology, picked up off the trail side float. Gee whillikers, watch this space. Marvellous and strange things are happening in the Valley, and the View is on it!
The Valley Village View 