Tag Archives: Chatsworth Formation

Fire Down Below?

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Last week I finally found the elusive 3rd trailhead into Santa Susana State Park and it was the Gateway to Hell. It’s on something called Larwin Avenue in Chatsworth (which good luck finding) where condos and cul-de-sacs abruptly give way to wild, recently incinerated lands. The park is in the pinch point of the braid of three Transverse Mountain Ranges (the Simi Hills, the Santa Susana Mountains, and the Santa Monica Mountains.)

Google satellite View of the trailhead from what must have been this past spring, 2021. Note the chaparral looks more or less normal, not overgrown…in fact sparse, patchy or dead in spots, where the soil also appears singed. Drought, sure…but, a few rock-hollows show grey ash char. ROCK-hollows.

Caves around here are famous; the Chumash and Tongva and Tataviam shamans performed rituals in them, and many have cave paintings. [I’m assured that the few surviving true Chumash medicine caves are well-hidden and protected; and that all the art on the accessible cave walls is punk graffiti.]

It took a week of internet searching (“recent wildfire, Chatsworth, Larwin Street, SSSP, brushfire, Simi Hills…”) before I could find any news reports of the ”Jeffrey Fire,” last month. The capture above is from KTLA 5. There’s clearly some good fuel growing on the back slopes. But of course, that isn’t what’s burning, and its smoke would be black, I think, at least a little.

VITRIOL FALLS?

🤔It appears the scorchiest parts, and the freshest and deepest ash piles, are under rocks, between rocks, and deep inside piles of rocks. 😈Sure, tree roots smolder underground… 🤔 Why aren’t the crowns and limbs burned? And note how everywhere there’s flow of scorch, out of the holes…rivers of incinerated rock and oddly altered soil and, sure, some wood ash, and bounded or banked by badly deformed rocks?

🥺Why aren’t the rocks on top of piles of burned rocks, burned? 😈 Subterranean downdrafts. 🙄 Then why is there scorching in loose soil around seemingly emergent pillow basalts? Why does the pillow basalt appear to have wiggled its way up out of loose earth at all? Why is it that the minerally altered gravels that washed over or splashed on boulders, has become chemically fixed to their surfaces, like emory? Why is the ground under my feet still hot? 😈⚡️Erosion; homeless cookfires; turbidity currents, weathering invasive grasses. Punk kids! Drought! Dogs off leash! 😌This cliff face; there are an awful lot of different kinds of rock here from many different ages, intruded by volcanics and altered. Isn’t that a great recipe for hydrothermals, or gas releases? 😈 I only have Craig Claiborne’s recipe: too much sodium, not enough sulfur.

🤔 You’re sure there are no volcanoes in Los Angeles, right? 😈That’s right, you’re wrong. 🤭Never have been? 😈Well, if you mean the Conejo Volcanics… 🤔Oh right; where were they again, down in Orange County? 😈Maybe there, but also…..maybe, just over the hill. I mean, MILES away, five at least, past Topanga. Anyway, eight, ten million years ago. When all this was underwater! 😏 Right, making these pillow basalts! 😈Fire-fused sandbags buried after an old Western movie shoot. 😏 I wonder if anyone else has reported there are gorgeous volcanics in Santa Susana Pass. 😈It would take you YEARS to find a refrence in the geology literature online! HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. 🙄 So no Miocene pillow basalts intruding the Chatsworth Formation, at all? 😈 It concerns me that this matters so much to you. 😏…nor in the Simi Hills, no hydrothermal flows through all this basalt, no methane seeps near these fault zones, no underground mineral fires, or Vitriol Falls flowing out of those two white- and-yellow steaming mounds? 😈 Did you search for those things? 😌Yes! 😈Find anything? 🥺No. 😈THEN THERE ISN’T! 🥺Then what’s all this stuff here? 😈None of this stuff is here! HA ha ha ha ha ha! 🙄And who believes bloggers, I suppose? 😈 Welcome to the Devil’s Slide, sucker! HA ha ha ha ha ha!