Tag Archives: Pacoima

Sugarloaf? The Name Is Mud

[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, mud volcanism; 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.

Mud volcanoes 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 hydrothermal vents 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

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:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825219300777

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03346-6

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005JB004094

The pictures above are from Azerbaijan; this is “The Doorway To Hell” in Turkmenistan.

Picture-perfect example of the illustration.

https://www.intechopen.com/books/updates-in-volcanology-new-advances-in-understanding-volcanic-systems/an-overview-of-mud-volcanoes-associated-to-gas-hydrate-system

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.

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.

Achoicomenga; or, Where the Indians Were

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THE THEATRE OF CONVERSION, Part 2

Take in View: Achoicomenga, the Valley’s largest Indian rancheria. It sat at the apex of a vast sunny triangle, on the high ground of a south-east tilting wetland plain. Foothills and canyons were all around, dribbling their creeks. These canyons were cool in the summer. And because the plain, in winter, lies above the shadow of the Santa Monica Mountains, it was a warm spot during the solstice festival. The village was sun-kissed, and excellent for human morale. (The very name “Tataviam” means “people facing the sun,” or “people of the southern slopes.”)

Each side of the Valley was the territorial limit of a different tribe, each with its own language. The Tongva were most numerous, and held the Santa Monica Mountains and the LA River valley. The Tataviam settled around 650 C.E. on the southern slopes of the San Gabriels, but their range extended through the mountain canyons up to their core homeland in the Santa Clara Valley. Both the Tongva and Tataviam languages descend from the Takic, of the Uto-Aztecan family. Tongva and Tataviam were not necessarily mutually intelligible in speech. The band of Chumash that settled in the West Valley, Simi Valley, Calabasas and on the Malibu coast, were the southern-most of the Chumashan peoples. Their main territory extended to Ventura, where the Franciscans had already begun to reduce (sic) the Indians and disrupt the ancient Chumash culture. Achoicomenga contained residents of all three tribes. The town lay just outside each of the tribes’ core territories; or, conversely, just inside each tribe’s frontier. it was a metropolis; it was an expression of the Valley’s geography.

Pacoima, the lush mini-valley surrounding the village, was the southern-most land of the Tataviam. Pasaakogna (Pacoima) means “The Entrance Place,” Entrada, or canyon-mouth. This implies a kind of front yard or porch leading to their home lands. It’s reasonable to conjecture the village was originally a Tataviam settlement, which then attracted Tongva and Chumash; eventually these outnumbered Tataviam.

A house in Achoicomenga was a kije, or kiche, a dome of tule-reed mats tied onto a willow frame. A kije could be sized for an individual, or could be large enough for a family, or several families, on platform-beds. Around the village would be temescals, sweat lodges, and at the center a wamkech — a kind of temple, or dancing-floor for the performance of sacred choreography. Seasonally, or when kijes got filthy or worn out, they were burned; so the town rebuilt itself.

The foothills and canyons supplied abundant game, a pharmacopeia of herbs, basketsful of berries seeds, mineral crystals for amulets, potions and pigments, game animals for meat, skins and feathers for costumes and ceremonies, and bounties of nutritious acorns. The dry/wet Valley floor teemed with rabbits, tule elk, deer and antelope, yuccas and sage. Steelhead ran up the creeks as far as Little Tujunga. Grizzlies prowled everywhere.

Tongva, Tataviam, and Chumash people shared and integrated each others’ cultures at Achoicomenga. This is a generic illustration from the Santa Monica Audubon, but the setting looks just like Pacoima Wash: looking south past the green Lopez hills to the Santa Monica Mountains.

Click below for social historian John R. Johnson’s article “The Indians of Mission San Fernando.”

https://scvhistory.com/scvhistory/hssc97-3_jjohnson.pdf

During the first four years of the mission’s existence, the missionaries concentrated most of their conversion efforts among the Gabrielino/Tongva inhabitants of
rancherías within the San Fernando Valley proper, especially the large rancherías of Cahuenga, Tujunga, Siutcanga, and Jajamonga. In 1802 and 1803 the focus was on Tataviam rancherías of the upper Santa Clara River watershed, while Ventureño Chumash from the
Malibu Creek drainage and Simi Valley were mostly proselytized between 1803 and 1804…
— John R. Johnson, The Indians of Mission San Fernando, So. Cal. Hist. Soc.

THE ?ANTAP RELIGION

Achoicomenga was a, or possibly the, center of the ?antap religion, which apparently came from the Chumash. ?antap was a spiritual movement that elaborated and overlay the tribes’ traditional religions; it did not displace their myth cycles, clan totems or seasonal hunting dances, but adapted and re-regulated them. ?antap brought a new class of shamans or spiritual elites, in alliance with a new class of chiefs. The main innovation of ?antap was the ritual consumption of jimsonweed, or moonflower, of the genus Datura. The Spanish word for the plant is “toloache;” the Chumash name is Momoy, same as their moon goddess. Toloacheros, toloache doctors, were a class of mostly Chumash shamans who skilled themselves in preparing doses that would promote visions and altered states of consciousness. (Momoy can be either hallucingenic or deadly poison in nearly equal doses.)

Thus, clan ceremonies that had been traditional, like puberty rites, male initiations, hunting rituals, and mourning ceremonies, took on an element of extreme out-of-body mysticism by adding the goddess Momoy to the myths. It’s also certain that other synergistic drugs were involved, especially various kinds of tobacco. Nicotiana attenuata or Nicotiana glauca were consumed along with Momoy. It is likely that toloacheros might mix different blends for different individuals. Vision questers would meet their guide animals, consult the dead, or meet the great chiefs on a toloache trip.

“Momoy” was the Chumash goddess of the moon, about whom many myths were told. Momoy was also the word for the moonflower. Thus, as in all true myth: the drug you ingested was the body of the goddess, who was the moon, which was the myth.

Many California tribes took toloache sparingly, and in the context of a public ceremony; maybe, only once or twice in a lifetime. But at Achoicomenga around the time of the Spanish invasion, individual seekers seem to have been visiting toloacheros throughout their lives, as a kind of religious self-help cult. It seems to have been a way of coaxing the individual back to the voices of the animals and the gods; righteous voices which affirmed Indian lifeways in the face of great environmental and social change. Momoy helped Indians hear the voices that were no longer so loud and clear.

“In major villages, at least a dozen ?antap operated, performing ceremonies and rituals locally, and traveling to disparate villages to participate in ceremonies there. The ?antap cult helped to integrated Chumash society across geographical boundaries, and membership in the cult enhanced a person’s status… Individuals of all stations used it, including shamans and curers — the latter administering it occasionally to their patients. Chumash of both sexes routinely ingested the drug… Chumash used datura for individual rather than collective reasons; and people consumed it routinely in the village, rather than at a special site. Datura suffused all of Chumash society. It stood at the center of Chumash life, fully integrated into mythology, used in religion, medicine, and personal spiritual growth.”
— James A. Sandos, “Levantamiento! The 1824 Chumash Uprising Reconsidered.”

Richard B. Appelgate’s 1975 article on the Datura cult among the Chumash:

https://escholarship.org/content/qt37r1g44r/qt37r1g44r.pdf

But the most fascinating thing about the religious life of Achoicomenga in 1795, is that, atop the intricate pattern of ancient myth-dances, seasonal or celestial observances, and awe-some hallucination ceremonies, there was a more recent religion, a dynamic revivalist cult that swept over Southern California’s rancherias in the second half of the 18th century. This was the cult of a semi-divine hero, Chinigchinich, who appeared at the moment his tyrant father was overthrown (he had reigned over a Golden Age, but then grew into a corrupt and impotent tyrant). Chinigchinich taught the Indians to BE Indians, it was said; he created them from what they were before into men. He instituted the proper dances and ritualized what foods were good and when to hunt. When he left this realm he danced his way up to the stars, where the good captains [chiefs] go. But he left Raven on Earth to watch people’s behavior. If the laws and ways of Chinigchinich were followed, all the spirit animals would help the Indian find right living and gain enormous supernatural power. But if the values and dances of Chinigchinich were dishonored or ignored, or the Indian became lazy or cruel or unreliable to his friends, then Chinigchinich would send his spirit animals, snake and coyote and scorpion, to torment and chastise the evil-doer.

The Chinigchinch cult grew upon, and into, and out of, and then grew protectively all around, the ?antap religion — just as a mighty oak grows upon, and into, and out of, and finally all around, the boulders in a canyon.