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.
Back on April 29 I was hot on the trail of mineralization; it hadn’t quite clicked with me yet that Mt. Sugarloaf was in any way geologically active. But I had figured out that it wasn’t just a sand dune; it capped a “hub” point in the swirl of local faults and folds. So I scrambled up to the top of the Dome to see if there was anything distinctive about the rocks that I could notice, anything that might connect with the other strange sites i’d been learning about. (I’d been up there once before, but I was young and blind and dumb, then, with my East Cost glasses on. This time I went with my Science Goggles.) These are, I figured out gradually, recent subaerial exhalative mineralizations of the copper series: chrysocolla (blue) and malachite (green) and there is even some azurite (azure, of course); on very old metamorphic rocks pushed, or sucked up the straw, or shaken in liquefaction, or steamed, or boiled up through the sands, to the top of an old diatreme that lets out on the dome’s crest: think of a submarine hatch, or, a whale’s blowhole.
That day was exciting; it was when, for me, the penny dropped — the Universe changed — all the madness of porphyries and hydrothermal vents and chalcopyrite and the crown-shaped burnt craters suddenly appearing on other hillsides, started to make a kind of sense. BUT — when you see how I found them arranged — or how somebody had re-arranged them — you’ll understand how another penny dropped that day — the Universe changed — and real anger crawled over me like a nasty spider. This is our country, folks. We each owe it to the murdered victims of fascism to stop this in our place, in our time.
I don’t even remember, except as flashes of anger, how I kicked the spider to death. It certainly isn’t how Nature puffed them to the surface. But this is how I left the dome of Sugarloaf that day, hoping no other hiker would ever have their soul scalded by recognizing that they had once held that pattern. I was too sad and ashamed of my country to post this a few months ago, and too vexed to share with Patient Reader my joy over finding these sea-colored gifts of creation in the desert. Now, I’m ashamed I did not post this story, so I offer it to the dead.
RIP, ALL SOULS WHO PERISHED FROM FASCISM, HATE, RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA. RIP, ALL WHO EVER FOUGHT AGAINST THE SPIDER.
Oscar Hammerstein II, founded the Hollywood Anti-Naxi Foundation, July, 1936
I’ve learned this is wand buckwheat, Eriogonum elongatum. The wands wave in wild winds on wuthering heights…whereas, workaday wooly buckwheat is wont to wallow a world away, in washes and wadis:
CalFlora.net: Eriogonum – from the Greek erion, “wool,” and gonu, “joint or knee;” that is, wooly puffs on jointed stems.Fasciculatum – ‘the one clustered together,’ fascicular = in bundles or clusters.Sawtooth goldenbush, Hazardia squarrosa. Lopez Canyon is where I first marveled at these elegant Asteracea, waiting along the side of the road as if I were the parade they were lined up to see. They are so common, yet so erect and poised…as if a fleabane or back-alley dandelion got into a Swiss finishing school. Its prickly holly-leaf is the convergent evolutionary choice of many chaparral plants, to retain water and deter browsing. Convergence makes it easy to confuse all the weedy yellow asters and false dandelions. For instance, one kind of goldenbush is called grindelioides, which means “like a grindellia.” And there is a grindellia with holly-sharp leaves just like the sawtooths, called Grindellia squarrosa var. serrulata. I think below is an example of the latter. Anyway, they’re all lovely.
From CE Conrad’s 1987 US Forest Service field guide to chaparral. Note the taxonomy change: the genus was Haplopappus and the species was squarrosus, not squarrosa. Zheesh! Botanists.
“Medicinal Uses: The medicinal use of gumweed dates back to Native American and folk times and it was listed as an official drug in the United States Pharmacopoeia until 1960. The slightly bitter and aromatic tea may be used for bronchitis or wherever an expectorant is needed; as an antispasmodic for dry hacking coughs (alone or often combined with Yerba Santa). It is believed to desensitize the nerve endings in the bronchial tree and slow the heart rate, thus leading to easier breathing; it merits investigation as a treatment for asthma. The tincture is useful for bladder and urethra infections. Tincture or poultice may be used topically for poison ivy and poison oak inflammations. Other indications include bronchial spasm, whooping cough, malaria, other chronic and acute skin conditions, vaginitis and as a mild stomach tonic. Native Americans (tribes including Pawnee, Cheyenne, Sioux [Lakota and Teton Dakota], Crows, Shoshones, Poncas, Blackfeet, Crees, Zunis and Flatheads) used preparations of curlycup gumweed both internally and externally as washes, poultices, decoctions and extracts to treat skin diseases and rashes, saddle sores, scabs, wounds, edema, asthma, bronchitis, cough, pneumonia, cold, nasal catarrh, tuberculosis, gonorrhea and syphilis, menstrual and postpartum pain, colic, digestive ailments, liver problems and as kidney medicine. The fresh gum was rubbed on the eyelids to treat snow-blindness. Effects: stimulant, sedative, astringent, purgative, emetic, diuretic, antiseptic, and disinfectant. Primary constituents: Tannins, volatile oils, resins, bitter alkaloids, and glucosides Other uses: Ornamental- it produces flowers over along period, even when the soil is poor and dry; young, sticky flower heads can be used as chewing gum; leafless stems can be bound together to make brooms. Contraindications: The herb is contraindicated for patients with kidney or heart complaints. There may be concentrated levels of selenium as it is a facultative selenium absorber.” — http://ayurveda.alandiashram.org/ayurvedic-herbs/grindelia-squarrosa-gumweed
Jepson’s doesn’t cite the common name for this flower, which is curlycup gumweed. (Maybe they were too embarrassed to mention it.) One might choose to chew the sticky flowers as gum; it’s also called Tarweed.
[Sen. Alex Padilla has proposed up to a million acres in California will receive federal protection. Hurrah! He is to be congratulated for moving much faster than I can — for a whole month, I’ve been working against time and Google tech troubles to get a comprehensive SFVNatGeoMon website up, making the case for preserving the Sylmar-Pacoima-Tujunga hills. These lands are mostly already public, but currently they are orphaned, with little upkeep and almost no public services (even trail markers). Thus, it is treated as a dumping ground, a wasteland. The side canyons of Lopez are still being leased off and paved over, level by level, as parking lots for cheap parking and storage of big-rig trucks and industrial junk. Of course this completely destroys the habitats, and scares off the animals. The SFV Canyons are on a slippery slope, which are the LA watershed, seem at terminal risk of being taken over by homeless jungles, dirt bikes and off-roaders, and remaining a dangerous junkyard, forever. The City is broke, the State is broke, and may be for a while, because of Covid-19…Federal support is the only thing that will cut across multiple agencies like the City, the DWP, the Forest Service, and the MCRC. And the geological theme would both unify the disparate canyons in the public mind, giving them a positive identity, and also help encourage local use, appreciation and respect for this integral part of Los Angeles.The investment would be small, for the benefits gained. More details will appear in coming blogs, and eventually, on the website when it emerges.
Since February of 2019, I’ve taken many Views of Sugarloaf in Lopez Canyon. A headless sphinx; a kaleidoscope of sedimentary rock; crown jewel of the Land of Contrasts. A riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in buckwheat. Now, I see it as an old volcano.
There are no volcanoes in Los Angeles, is the consensus of the Internet; but that’s misleading, a partial truth. True in that there is, or has never been discovered, a volcano with a textbook, one-vertical-pipe, ash-spewing Mt. Vesuvius model. Clearly Sugarloaf is not that. But from various ages and in different geological contexts all over the foothills are evinced quiet but insistent signs of molten-lava volcanism, such as the Miocene intrusions at Limerock and Gold Creek. And related to those, there may have been much more volcanism of a different but important kind, mudvolcanism; its traces may only have been revealed in the last few years, as they have been active.
The Dec., 2017 Creek Fire was no simple brush fire, it must have been fed by methane flaring from breccia pipes in the mud volcanoes of Sylmar-Pacoima-Tujunga. Methane flaring is the common eruption of mud volcanoes.
Mudvolcanoes are well-recognized internationally, associated with petroleum and hydrocarbon districts. They are even famous throughout the solar system, for the phenomenon is found on Mars; and everybody involved in planning our invasion of the Red Planet is looking intently and expensively at them there. But they are obscure in California, despite the fact that the recent Creek Fire, the Sand Fire, and the Saddleridge fires were all almost certainly fueled by MV processes: namely, the copious methane likely to have been released from hydrothermalvents in the hills, like the formations pictured here. Government needs to put geologists and biologists on the ground here to study them, and the land needs to be protected from any other use or development than as hiking and open space, until the risk of flares and gas-offs is better understood. Also, public agencies must take this new change in the land seriously; it means understanding that except for oaks, which have deep tap-roots and may very well “lure” gas to the surface, most chaparral plants only have roots six inches deep, and don’t send up a 100-foot flare when they burn.
Below is Kagel Mountain, known for its graphite deposits but not for the breccia pipes which bring it, and the micro-organism-excreted methane created with it, to the surface. As you might discern, there is almost nothing to this face of the mountain except breccia pipes. These lead down to ‘aureoles’ in the subduction zone. Older photos don’t show the outline of the pipes as clearly as they are seen today. Just like a backyard gas fire pit filled with sand and pretty gravel, the gas has no trouble venting up these pipes and will eventually flare off if ignited. It may not happen again for a hundred years, or never again.
The Creek Fire covers the quadrant. Note the big yellow flare at right, shooting out of Dexter Park
This cartoon from a mining company shows the process, but is misleading in the one-pipe vertical model. Ours are more likely to be horizontal or diagonal.
There are many articles online about MVs on Mars; I can’t provide links like I planned, since as of yesterday Google has suddenly stopped our websites from sharing links with each other; which was the whole point of the internet. But if you do your own online search, and are willing to load your own cookies, you might find much. Luckily, I copied a few links to science articles yesterday, on the general science of hydrothermal vents and mud volcanism:
Azerbaijan….is this is what Sugarloaf looked like once? Those striations are sand ducts, conglomerate-filled feeder pipes that bring mineralizing water and gas up from the hot high-pressure subduction zone below. It may take 100 years to take the journey. The little pyramid cones are called griphones, a mangling of the Italian griffone. Maybe in English we should just call them gryphons.
Below, a few of the huge number of recently active vents, cones, dribblers, eruptions, extrusions, seeps, and chemical blasts (in Lopez, Kagel, Limerock, Little T., Elsmere…). I could show a hundred more, and will, in future posts.
Recent (since about 2000) plate tectonics models illuminate the San Gabriel Range orogeny and the whole rise of the LA Basin— block capture and convergence, in a deep-sea and in-shore continental margin environment, where migrated and rotated fault blocks captured by the Pacific Plate were thrust up over, and/or down against shallow bay-shore shales and deep marine turbidites in a shallow subduction zone, forcing them under pressure towards magma intrusion centers relatively high in the upper mantle. All this, would predict a perfect environment for mud volcanism. These are similar conditions to the shale oil zones around the world where they are found.
The keyhole-shaped crater and flow formation atop Sugarloaf is the classic mud volcano vent. Next, the shape on a cone in Azerbaijan. Below, the Sugarloaf vent seen during the Creek Fire.
A new model for volcanism in pierced soft-sediment basins like Sylmar-Pacoima-Tujunga, shows how the plumbing can diffuse, spreading horizontally while rising through the sands via shallow feeder pipes. This new model supports what is seen on the surface. Mud volcanoes start, and are seen mostly, just offshore, but many are known on land, too, for the conveyor-belt thrust of continental crust convergence pushes some sediment layers up and over, while some of the seamounts, along with the sea, sink into the subduction zone. Now that there’s no bay left, our mud volcanoes are high and dry — until rains, or a temblor, or a shift in groundwater plumbing, fills them with caustic fluids again. Wh
Sugarloaf is certainly less active, but much prettier and dressier, than its cousins in Azerbaijan, the naked-prototype mud volcanoes, near Baku, atop the Caspian Sea shale oil region. In upcoming blogs, or soon on the new website, I’ll go into more detail about what I’ve witnessed happening in the local geology, including tracing some recent activity to the July, 2020 4.4 temblor in Sylmar; and the possibility that massive uranium deposition vents are blasting the walls of Elsmere Canyon with eerie green and yellow stains — the same colors seen staining the pipes feeding the big Azeri crater. Until then, I hope Patient Reader will take away the following key points:
That the hills are incredibly beautiful and unique, and full of hydrothermal vents, with breccia pipes and conglomerate pipes and seeps, lately developed or re-activated, which have recently been gassing off and extruding fluid, metasomized minerals and gases;
That the vents are linked to the liquefaction structures, sand blows, sand murmurs, and chemical bleaching recently found in spots everywhere on the slopes; and to the numerous recent soft-sediment deformations, fissures and rifts, gozzans and skarn, strange mudpots and fumaroles, bradyseisms and griffoni, now sprouting in the canyons;
That as a result of hydrocarbon venting and related groundwater anomalies, the hills look much different today than they did historically or even a few years ago. They might be undergoing an unusual period of rapid transformation, including mass wasting of the hills, and some areas seem on a path to total denudation of all living soil.
1877, Herman Herzog
1931, George M. Hendry
Now
G
Three panoramas taken last week, encompass the magnificent View of the quadrant from the vault of Sugarloaf: first, looking northwest; second, northeast; third, south over the Valley to Topanga. Expand them, and see the land.
The Valley Village View 