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.
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 itfor 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 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.
Moules frites?Deviled littlenecks?I frutti di mare…petrificado; en croute.Only the shell of its former self.Fresh yellow-green mineralizing fluid?
Enjoy this treasury of photographs showcasing the geology, botany, and fascinating social history of LA’s greatest park, now celebrating its 125th birthday.
My favorite picture ever, I think. A bride escorted by her dad up Fern Dell. I had just passed the wedding party and officiant at the top of the trail, nicely kitted out, waiting in excitement. The bride was grimacing with fright as she caught the light. What a spot for a wedding! What a spot for anything.
TRAILS CAFE
The rancho adobe (in some form, since 1795!) was preserved as Park Ranger HQ.
This unbelievabvly rich land was Rancho Los Feliz — “the Felizes’,” the first (or second) rancho grant in California. It was granted as a reward to a retiring military intendente of Los Angeles. The Pueblo was successfully settled and competent, the Tongva successfully relocated to San Gabriel, and happy Mexican farmers were churning out grain in the vast riverbed. Griffith J. Griffith bought the rancho from Yankee speculators for a song, and when he offered it to the City, with his grand visions of civic adornment and classical education and human uplift and ecological connection — he practically had to beg the City to take it. They were afraid to take Griffith’s gift, thousands of untouched watershed acres, because Griffith personally, had problems… it turns out,he shot his wife in the face, in a hotel room on Santa Monica Beach. The City Fathers were afraid the voters’ wives’ ministers’ wives would reject the City Council socially, if they shook hands with a beast like Griffith. He did two years in Q.
This photo is from the California Department of Corrections online article about Q’s famous alumnus, which tells the whole lurid story! Click, Baited Reader, click….
It took decades before Victorian propriety thinned out enough for the City to take possession, and it took decades more (1930!) for them to get around to building the Observatory and the Greek Theatre; both were stipulated in the conveyance. The delay was a good thing too, architecturally, for the Observatory — by then, the grace of Art Deco had come in to soften the Greek of Griffith’s preference, and the Federal Fascism that looked forward to Roosevelt’s New Deal; and it could all coalesce with modern engineering. It is one of the most iconic buildings on planet Earth (which it turns out is where we are; go inside and they’ll explain.)
The Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round. Since we’re nosing into the Holidays anyway (Sinter Klaas, Dec. 5), and there’s apparently no other footage anywhere of the Merry-Go-Round, and the dead operator who loved and maintained this instrument for years can be seen in the video in his Sinter Klaas cap, here is Jolly Old St. Nicholas, with bells and whistles, and the moose bugling along. Enjoy the View Walt Disney had, a bench in the Park, watching his Merry- kids -Go -Round, and see if you dream up anything as lucrative as Disneyland, like he did. Dream harder…
“Griffith Park is 125. It looked 125 five years ago. It will look it twenty years from now. I hate parks.”Holly-leaf cherry, Prunus illicafoliaToyon, Heteromeles arbutifolia. It is the official native plant of the City of LA.Covellite, a secondary volcanic rock.The gorgeous Nevins Barberry, Mahonia nevinii, is one of the rarest plants in the California Floristic Province. Around 500 wild individuals of the species are recorded, and most of those occur in Griffith Park.
Off La Tuna Canyon Road in the green Verdugo Hills, lies a slot-canyon dubbed The Grotto, with cascades I dubbed Flow Falls. The View first arrived, gawping in wonder, in early 2019 after fire and storms had rejuvenated the canyon. Afterwards there was re-growth, another eruption of fire, and some vandalism. But in the last three years as a whole, the CFP has blown me away with its resilience.
The movies I made for the first couple of posts won’t play on Vimeo. When I went to check why they wouldn’t play, I found out nothing was wrong. But they now want me to pay a ridiculous rental fee every monthforever for the privilege of having already uploaded my content to their buggy, sluggish, no-frills, tinny free service ad-choked platform. ”Ransomware:” your family photos, homemade videos, galleries of personal projects, after you ”give” them to one of these gonifs. Can a corporation be a gonif? Yes: when they steal. So I deleted those older videos and made a much better one — hosted on my own Google Drive. You really ought to click. The music is Geoffrey Burgon’s ”Rain in Venice” variation on his ”Brideshead Theme.” As Charles Ryder said, ”This was my conversion to the Baroque.”
It is not immune to the galloping mineralization regime emerging in other ex-vulcanized hills in our watershed. But it’s clearer to me how the CFP has been, is being, entrained by the harsh regime of natural selection in these geological hot spots. Let’s take a reView of these rocks and rills, woods, and templed hills.
FEBRUARY, 2019
Arroyo willow is barely visible in the long shot just above of the bowl; she’s in the creekbed at the perspective point, the one sign of life in the canyon floor. She started budding out practically before my eyes, the grace of my first visit.
OCTOBER, 2021
She’s a bit thin but doing okay, considering the sulfur flowing down from the hill above. She‘s held her mlittle bar together and now it’s a thriving oblong thicket. The thicket allowed the sycamore to keep the raised bed soil space to grow back, and the raft of sagebrush in bloom was so fragrant I bet you can smell it where you are. However, yes, note that half the bar and a lot of Artemisia is pretty chemically scorched by that porphyry.
Tiny red blossoms of Artemisia californica, known as sagebrush. A primary aromatic of LA hiking.
ABOVE, TODAY: The poison oak loves the edges of a porphyry. I love its fall colors. The creekbed is sporting deerweed now, a great recovery plant; it fixes nitrogen in the soil. Deerweed in general is very partial to hydrothermal waters. Why?.🤷🏽♂️ Back to the past:
MARCH, 2019
Asclepias erosa — Ca. Desert Milkweed
As soon as I understood the elusive perfume was coming from the glossy leaves above, I knew that this shrub must be California Bay, Umbellularia californica. The titular ”umbles” are the sweet yellow flowers. It took more visits to realize that Ca. bay isn’t a shrub at all, it’s a proper tree; and that many, if not most, of the huge scorched trunks in the spillway were bay; and that they were alive in the roots, and would try hard to return; and that they had probably been through the cycle several times. This canyon is the most impressive bay grove I have ever seen.
Below, the same View today (as close as the poison oak allowed me to get).
OCTOBER 2021
BELOW, APRIL, 2019: The vine with triangle leaves and white whorls is Calystegia macrostegia, [Channel] Island morning glory. Beside it is a fine stand of giant wild rye, presumably evolved in the Pleistocene as mammoth munch.
In the upper canyon the rocks change. There are huge chunks of what looks like compressed Chatsworth Formation, blocks of old undersea sandstone, on top of all the metamorphic rock, and where they met, another staggeringly beautiful lava flow gushed thenceforth. I’m supposing the flow is anorthosite; and I’m supposing the great broken ribs poking through the lower canyon’s walls are the anorthosite ducts (dykes really) that brought it up to this cleft to spill.
This steep notch attracted the mugworts; I noticed because I had just learned about the plant’s ritual use in the Chinigchinich religion. The bright green leaves are Artemisia douglasiana; not in flower yet. The fragrant fuzzy leaves were used to heal skin cuts in the puberty ritual. The cream-flowering beauty is Artemisia ludoviciana, that is, “the mugwort you find in Louisiana.” Also, in Southern California; I also found one growing on the bricks at Fort Sumter, so we can assume they go across the South. The charred bay trunk is so beautiful, I hope it will stand for a long time.
OCTOBER, 2019
ABOVE: the tree trunks are putting out shoots, laurel sumac doing well on the slopes. Down in the bowl, plenty of those lovely pink asters I cant ID; anonymity doesn’t bother the bee, see. Up in the canyon, Ca. fuchsia dangles red bugles from the walls, a lone scarlet monkey-flower pulls faces, and black nightshade ripens its love-apples to poison black. BELOW: The trees in the syncline, and those flanking the outFlow (sycamore and ash), are working their way back very elegantly. The creek bed had at this point an overgrowth of amaranth, horsetail and tree tobacco, all potentially invasive. (The Nicotianaglauca is invisible in these shots because dealt with by the View). The diagonal pink sill in the curved wall of the slot, so dramatically noticeable when it’s wet, almost disappears into the soil when it’s dry. Fat purple 4-O’Clocks enjoy perching shoulder-high, on the lips of mounds and ridges.
DECEMBER 7, 2019: I noticed there had been another fire episode; a strange one, I thought. The amaranth in the creekbed had all been singed off, as if somebody had torched the tops (a controlled burn to stifle the invasives?) But a big oak on the entrance trail was scorched at the bottom, where bracken was burnt but not consumed. I couldn’t imagine anybody letting a controlled burn get so uncontrolled as to go near that oak. When I look now, I see the scorched patterns in the hillside soil. (They match the spots where mineralization has now emerged.) In particular, the accordion-folded rock in the Grotto that I saw as ”the Syncline” is perhaps better seen as “the Anticline” — and indeed it really should be seen as something like a griffone. Note the nipple-shaped blowhole at the top, and note how everything around it got scorched.
The black circles and parabolas in the hill behind the sycamore may have blasted heat or volatile vapors out over the creekbed, singeing the amaranth and toasting the fringes of the oak in the foreground; see below.
The hill behind the Anticline is just roasted; but the flames apparently stayed high, further blackening the deadwood trunks, but sparing the new growth lower down. I didn’t go up and in, that day.
Strange again; the oak boughs were incinerated, the giant wild rye unscathed.
First time I saw Grindellia squarosa aka, curlycup gumweed
JANUARY, 2021 – I didn’t realize, but I skipped the canyon completely in 2020. So, in the pics below, it’s 13 months later, and the beginning of this year. Most of the fresh growth of the sycamores and ashes is gone, only one sycamore kept its leaves that year. Depressing…? Not with that one tree giving its all in fall colors. But my cheers quickly turned to jeers when I saw what some cretins did to Flow.
I was especially shocked because the area where Bimbo Bernofsky painted one of her idiotic hearts, the one seen here on the right, was a bit of freshly-exposed rock in Feb, 2019 – I think its facing or shell was blown off by intrusions from behind, or heat or gas buildup or both, just before I found it; it revealed all this great fresh pink (pegmatite?) and blue-black (pillow basalt?). The plywood ”love mattress” I tipped up and off to the side. It’s there still; I’d have to strap it to the top of the car to haul it out. I probably will have to, some day. I choose to think the gods punish those who desecrate their sacred spots. There are plenty of winding turns on the canyon roads, and enough roadside crosses and shrines to feed my hope.
Now and forever
Then
The bamboo-like saplings with yellow leaves are Ca. black walnuts, Juglans californica.
ABOVE: In January of this year, the pre-signs of mineralization weren’t obvious, but the fact that the trees had lost most of their skirting-shoots, was. Those have grown back, but BELOW: by October, the signs of hydrothermal venting were unmistakable. Whatever is happening to the upper LA River watershed, can be glimpsed here in all its avatars, within a span of a few hundred yards. Vest-pocket porphyries?
ABOVE: The slopes are undeniably mineralizing. That dark chocolate ore poking out is probably quite rich in copper. The little white extrusion is probably chemically leached — it was like pumice, light as a feather and sharp to the hand. BELOW: First, In the middle canyon, there seems to have been a pretty recent flow of whatever the white mineral fluid is, over the canyton floor. It’s similar to the white mineral fluid that has recently flowed and congealed at Nichols Canyon. Second, at the side of the entrance trail, there’s an unnverving rock risen to the surface. It’s unnerving because it has been bent back upon itself like a hairpin, forcing the white stuff to bulge at the center. It’s a memorial to the fact that this whole canyon is made of boiling rock, frozen in moments.
The Valley Village View 