Category Archives: geography

View Vasquez Rocks

Where All Good Location Scouts Go When They Die

The Old West as Outer Space. The rocks’ visuals are of jutting planes apparently defying the normal geometries of gravity: like a Bierstadt landscape, hung crooked on the wall.

Unsettled, is built into the suspenseful psychology of the scenery.

Surely, any characters beamed into this disjointed landscape must be in tension themselves; on the brink; at a tipping point.

Today it is a Los Angeles County Park; 1,000 acres spread across 20 million years. The lay of the land is a north-facing slope with a series of hog-back ridges poking up through the slope. North-facing slope means shade, which prospers old-growth mosses and lichens, in dazzling variety.

The sedimentary layers are similar to those in the Valley. The alluvia laid down as sea, estuary, or bay floor make a beautiful sequence of inter-fingered sandstones, siltstones and mudstones. Then, the layers were crunched up into folds and anticlines by compression (between the Pacific and the NA Plates). Then the land got pulled back – extension – and a rift formed. Wet sands were intruded from below by volcanic metamorphic magma. Uplift out of the sea followed, and the hogbacks of harder rock emerged out of differential erosion of the softer rock.

The regional tectonic story is the breakout of the San Andreas Fault. This occurred when the compressive force of the Pacific Plate, partially sliding under the old Rodinian Riviera at what is now San Gabriel Fault, jammed. The old seaward faults (those in LA, e.g.) had been sutured into a mass riding atop the Pacific Plate. The tectonic border moved inland, which became our current plate boundary, the San Andreas Fault, with its dextral strike-slip. (The ’Great Bend’ in the San Andreas is just a few miles northeast of Vasquez Rocks.) Sadly, though unsurprising to me at this point, the visitors center contained no information whatsoever about the geology of the area. Anyone coming to the site of Vasquez Rocks to learn about Vasquez Rocks, will be disappointed.

Above: scrub oak, Quercus dumosa.

It is one of the most fragrant parks in So Cal, thanks to the junipers. Fun Fact: that’s mistletoe dangling from the branches. Who knew it favored juniper?

I liberated some berries to crush into my martinis for a little aromatherapy.

There is a commendable but basic exhibit on the Tataviam, the northern part of whose territory included this gorgeous place. But it is a general cultural overview, with nothing about how or when or why they used this particular site. There are what looked like Chinigchinich-religion-inspired wall paintings on a rock near the entrance, including the Centipede character. I don’t know whether the figures are genuine or graffiti, or what artifacts archaeologists might have found so far.

Why is it called “Vasquez Rocks?”

”Vasquez Rocks” got the name in the 1860s-70s, when the ”gentleman bandit” Tiburcio Vasquez camped here as a hideout. The bandido’s suave Monterey manners, fluency in English, and fine connections among good Californio families give his legend an undeserved air of grace. Certainly he was handsome and of fine carriage; hearing he might be near would cause local girls’ hearts to swoon. Envious or disaffected young men among the lower classes took him for a revolutionary emblem, a folk hero fighting against the Yankee oppressors. This was the defense Vasquez used at his trial: he claimed he did it all as a freedom fighter for California. But there’s not a thing in it; Vasquez’s decades-long string of petty robberies and random hold-ups, interrupted twice by stints in San Quentin, add up to nothing but pointless and not very profitable thuggery. Honestly, he seemed to be in it for the girls — which is how he was caught. He was canoodling with local girls while holed up in Greek George’s adobe, on what is today’s Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.

The posse kept surveillance on Vasquez while he was at Greek George’s (somewhere around the Sunset Tower?), from view-points in Nichols Canyon. Vasquez was held in LA for a week, while adoring senoritas crowded the jail, sang to him, and pleaded for his release. He wrote favored girls little love-verses. He was moved upstate and tried in San Jose, and executed in 1874.

I Have Crossed Oceans Of Time

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I found fossils of shellfish in fragments of freshly fallen conglomerate on the trailside of Pacoima Creek, between Lopez Dam and the Lopez hills.

They are reminders, miles from today’s shoreline, that the San Fernando Valley was once embayed, the playground of scallops and clams. Later all that shallow bay muck was uplifted — crunched up — by convergence of the migrating West Transverse Range fault block against the edge of the North American craton. The line of suture where the fault block docked (at San Gabriel Fault) is now just a couple of miles north of this spot.

Speaking of Cathay, Speaking of Trade, Speaking of Hudson…

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in 1609 Hudson was an unremarkable English seaman working for Dutch masters, doing the unremarkable (to them) English/Dutch sailing captain’s job of finding the Northwest Passage to Fabled Cathay. He failed of course but everybody did at that job, and they didn’t mind; they kept hiring him anyway. In the short and medium term, the real job of these voyages was the job of finding new wijk ports to extend the English-Dutch common trading network. As we know, Hudson’s inestimable success was in finding the Valley that bears the River that today bears his name. The North River, as the Dutch called it, has a perfect configuration for a wijk, or indeed, for many. It has deep harbors in a wide central bay at its mouth; for a long way upriver, there are vigorous tides for the effortless ebb and flow of traffic; and it is directly adjacent to willing and eager trading partners. The City, the cities, built on this estuary made the Hudson River the New Money River in the world, supplanting the Rhine. Hudson didn’t build New York, but he and his men did bring back plenty of extraordinarily soft beaver pelts. In Mokum they sold for a pretty stuiver soon after landing, to the keen-eyed merchants who crowded the Damraak and maybe slipped the Half Moon sailors and stevedores a little something to get a peek into their cargo. Several of those merchants immediately chartered ships of their own, and there were Dutch traders smoking with Mohawks at Albany and Raritans on Staten Island from 1610. What made the amazing pelts so soft, what made them valuable, what gave them the perfectly trimmed nap, was that they had previously been worn by the Indians as their clothing. The most important and successful wijk trading city of them all, was built on carving the percent out of dealing in the Native Americans’ own second-hand jewelry and their own second-hand rags. Both industries, of course are still huge in New York. But if we take the Half Moon as a metaphor — Hudson certainly did find a route for Dutch-English trade to illuminate, penetrate and dominate the distant hemisphere, through the traders who built in his wake. It just took The Whirligig of Time, and a Gold Rush, and a whole lot more capital, for the wijks to open the passage to Cathay.

Full Disclosure: Bait and switch. The wise homily above was merely a ruse, to get Patient Reader to click on Michael Hudson’s latest interview on Nakedcapitalism.com. It is a sharp non-jargony reading of the China Question. He is that rare economist in America who actually seems to know and follow, and who cares about, where China is actually at…versus, where America is at, and how where we’re at is so far out into the Swamp of Ignorance, that the rest of the world has not only stopped following, but has given up even waving and calling out from the shoreline. Hudson explains why America’s plutocracy is just not where it’s at, for China, or the world, or the wijks, anymore. In other words, Hudson explains why China has de-monetized the Money River of Hudson.