Fringed Pinesap

Hi all,

A rare and ghostly flower haunts the deep woods, called Fringed Pinesap.

On the gentle uplands of Moody Ridge, some four thousand feet above sea level, there once grew an open forest of mighty pines and cedars. Then, around 1870, came Progress: those gigantic trees, centuries old, were laid low. A dense forest of young pines rose in its place, almost impenetrable, as is remarked in the field notes of Berkeley zoologist Joseph Grinnell (see http://mvz.berkeley.edu/Grinnell.html), who visited in 1912, collecting specimens for days on end. He stayed at the Pine Mound Inn, one of several hotels in and near Dutch Flat at that time.

Fires swept across Moody Ridge and thinned that dense forest again and again. More logging took place, notably, around 1960 and 1977-78. This last cut was the unkindest, in that every conifer over fifteen inches in diameter was taken, and then, adding insult to injury, the bulldozer-churned forest land was illegally subdivided.

Thirty years later, the signs of logging have softened, but the skid trails of the 1977-78 timber harvest are still plainly visible, as the bulldozers spun their treads deeply into the rich forest soil, casting it to the side, and exposing the clayey subsoil.

Only recently did I finally realize, after a few decades of walking about, that signs of the earliest phase of logging, dating to around 1875, remain visible, in the form of narrow-gauge railroad grades, very carefully located to allow for the easiest yarding of the huge first-growth sawlogs, which would be rolled directly onto the flatcars, and hauled away to the Canyon Creek Mill.

I have cleared debris and small trees from one of these old logging-railroad grades, which winds in and out of a small valley on a line so level one would imagine it an old mining ditch, and it makes for a nice walk. I call it the Railroad Trail. Yesterday, walking along the Railroad Trail amid Incense Cedar and White Fir, Ponderosa Pine and Sugar Pine, I saw what seemed to be the white ghosts of small pine cones thrusting up through the pine needles which deeply cover the forest floor. They were quite intricate, and clearly, without any chlorophyll, being one of those saprophytic plants often placed in the Heath Family, like Pine Drops and Snow Plant. I took some photographs, but was not pleased with my efforts, when I got home to my computer, so today I returned.

In the meantime, I succeeded in identifying these ghostly flowers as Fringed Pinesap, Pleuricospora fimbriolata. It derives all its energy and nutrients from fungal mycelia in coniferous leaf litter. There are quite a few nice photographs of Fringed Pinesap on the internet.

As I neared the Railroad Trail, a loud and sudden flapping of very large wings, very near by, shocked me, and I hastened forward into an opening, expecting to see a Golden Eagle lifting away.

Instead I saw a large dark bird move awkwardly, from one branch to another, in an Incense Cedar. A turkey? I sidled closer, camera raised, hoping for a shot. Many an intervening branch left my subject indistinct. I lost patience and strode closer.

Immediately that first large bird took wing, and a second followed, in a great commotion of flapping. Two turkey vultures. Just as I recognized what they were, a sour smell spoke of Death. I walked towards the tree in which the vultures had roosted, and found a dead Gray Fox stretched long on the pine needles, long and oddly narrow, since most of it had been eaten, and for a radius of twenty feet around the carcass, vulture feathers littered the ground. A cloud of flies hovered above.

Returning to the trail, I was soon in the gentle uplands of the surface of the andesitic mudflow plateau which was once universal, but the larger part of the plateau is gone, carried away bit by bit during in the canyons of our modern rivers, canyons only a few million years old. It is very likely that the canyons of the North Fork American, the Bear, Steephollow, and the South Yuba, are all alike only four million years old.

I revisited the several locations where my Fringed Pinesap pushed up from the forest floor, in clusters of five to ten individual plants, and took a number of photos. These plants never grow very tall, a few inches at best. In years past I have often mistaken them for young Pine Drops, somehow, due to their youth no doubt, not colored red. It is gratifying to recognize at last they are a distinct species.


Above: Pine Drops

Fringed Pinesap and Pine Drops alike are classic residents of the deep pine woods, along with a number of native orchids, such as Rattlesnake Orchid, and other plants either in the Heath Family or closely allied to it, such as Little Prince's Pine, and Wintergreen.

I left the Railroad Trail and struck out through the densely overgrown forest, gathering spider webs in great swaths across face and chest as I pushed through thickets of young cedars and firs, but only found one new cluster of Fringed Pinesap.

A dead fox, ghostly flowers which mimic pine cones, uneasy vultures; it was, all in all, a nice walk. I will post a picture or two on my blog (http://northforktrails.blogspot.com/).

Cheers,

Russell Towle

Return to Hayden Hill and the Terrace Trail

Apparently spurred in the very midst of a moment, Ron Gould sent me an email at 11:29 P.M. Wednesday, suggesting a visit to far-flung Hayden Hill on Thursday. I did not see his message until 7:30 Thursday morning. The strange and severe tasks, which shall always attend upon writing an article about zonotopal tilings, those tasks drifted, in serried ranks, before my mind's eye. Then I thought of the Terrace Trail. It was essential that Ron see the Terrace Trail. For goodness' sake, it was imperative that I follow that almost-level, bear-stomped track, through the ancient forest west of Hayden Hill. And then ... and then, there was the mysterious Hayden Hill Trail itself, which would seem to descend 2,400' to the North Fork, from a promontory on the canyon rim, off Elliott Ranch Road. That mysterious trail which was depicted on more than one old Tahoe National Forest map, and which I had stumbled upon, unbelieving, full of skepticism, last fall. It was a trail ... no, a lumber slide ... a lumber slide, which had also been used as a trail?


So I gave Ron a call, and managed to meet him in Colfax around nine in the morning, the uncluttered blue of the early morning sky giving some way to an isolated shield of altocumulus clouds, with a few fair-weather cumulus popping up below, showing surprisingly strong vertical development for that early in the day. We set off on the road to Mineral Bar and Iowa Hill, with all its intricate curves, and fantastic views of the North Fork canyon. A nice mix of wildflowers adorned the road's margins, including some Clarkia biloba and Bleeding Hearts. It takes quite a while to snake through Iowa Hill and Monona Flat and at last reach the very head of Indian Canyon, at Giant Gap Ridge, where we hung a left onto essentially unmarked Elliott Ranch Road, bearing right in half a mile, where Giant Gap Road stays left, and soon we were skimming across the head of Giant Gap Ravine, with views north across Green Valley to Moody Ridge. We passed the southern terminus of the Green Valley Trail; once it continued south to Sugar Pine Guard Station, as can been seen on some old maps, and is also evidenced by a photograph in my possession, of the Tahoe National Forest sign which marked the opposite, northern terminus of the Green Valley Trail. The photograph dates to around 1940.

It was quite a nice sign, in the shape of an arrow, and it read, as I recall, "North Fork American River. Little Switzerland. Green Valley 3. Sugar Pine G.S. 7."

It is funny and nice that Green Valley was named "Little Switzerland." Is it only a coincidence that Joe Steiner, who lived for decades in Green Valley, as caretaker of the Dunckhorst mining properties before dying there, in 1948 ... is it only coincidence that he was once described (scrawled on a slip of paper within a Mason jar, atop his grave) as loving Green Valley, because it reminded him of his native Switzerland?

The recent rains had laid the dust well on Elliott Ranch Road, and we soon reached the unmarked road left to the Hayden Hill Trail; I grabbed my loppers and started cutting back some of the many branches which hung into the road, and heaved a few small downed trees aside, as Ron's truck is a delicate, delicate thing, really too pretty, and it would not do to mar that beauty with a scratch. Ah, one could wish for the good old days, when the previous truck was still alive and well; now, there was a real man's truck, a truck which shrugged off the deadly and many-fingered hands of dead manzanita without the slightest whimper, a truck which just kept forging ahead, an almost inexorable truck, as such things go.

Ah, Toyota.

The roadside vegetation opened slightly and I climbed back in. We slowly advanced to the road's terminus, on the promontory, where a hunters' camp reminded me that, so far as I am concerned, hunting could come to a complete end on public lands. Or, do some hunters have a conscience? Do some hunters not leave mountains of garbage behind? Do some hunters not stand around like idiots, firing round after round from their shotguns, for the sake of making noise, and emptying whole boxes of bullets right in their camping area? I began picking up plastic bottles here, beer cans there, but then I saw quite a quantity of garbage fifty yards down the hill, and realized it was beyond me to even consolidate what the deer season of 2007 had inflicted upon this tiny little patch of public land. The garbage from the deer season of 2006 had been bad enough; I had informed Tahoe National Forest of the hunters' mess, but nothing had been done. So, a little job has grown into a big job.

Like very much of the Foresthill Divide, this area is blanketed by thick, quasi-horizontal strata of Mio-Pliocene andesitic mudflows. It might be better to assign all these mudflows to the Miocene. Beneath these ridge-capping andesitic debris flows are older Miocene rhyolite ash flows. Some of these latter were pyroclastic flows, and became welded tuffs, but this far west, more commonly they were reworked and redistributed by water. We can still call them tuff. Rhyolite tuff. While the source of the younger andesitic flows was along the Sierra crest, the source of the older rhyolite ash seems to have been in central Nevada. This fairly recent discovery supports the classic model of Sierran geomorphology, in which the entire range has been recently tilted up, like a trap-door, with the "hinge" buried beneath the young sediments of the Central Valley, and the Sierra crest forming the long high edge of the tilted block. For, those volcanoes in central Nevada could not have delivered such vast volumes of rhyolite ash to the west slope of the Sierra, if the crest had stood as high as it does today. In particular, those pyroclastic flows which gave us the welded tuffs of higher and middle elevations had to be flowing downhill. It appears the crest has been uplifted around 5,000 feet over the past few million years. There, near the sources of the andesitic lahars, the whole volcanic section thickens, and we see mudflows stacked up, 1500' thick and more. Rarely, basalt flows are preserved in valleys within the vast and often chaotic section of mudflows. For, multiple episodes of erosion punctuated the eruptions; the eruptive phases likely have been far outstripped by the erosive phases, in absolute time, in duration. Time enough for canyons or valleys to form in the mudflow land surface. Whatever came next, eruptively, be it more mudflow, or basalt, or volcanic ash, whatever, would tend to fill those nascent valleys. A new mudflow surface is created, and now it endures a prolonged phase of erosion. New valleys are cut, which are in turn filled by the next eruptive sequence ... .

This area was, it seems, burned over in the 1960 "Volcano" fire, which started over in the Middle Fork American side of things, in Volcano Canyon, and then swept north and east on the Foresthill Divide, reaching Humbug Canyon, and Westville, and even crossing the North Fork American to burn parts of Sawtooth Ridge.

Quite a lot of bulldozer activity took place during and just after the Volcano Fire, and the fire breaks and mounds of dirt can be seen to this day. So far as the Promontory goes, it seems the bulldozers made several swaths, perhaps pushing fuels from the top of the promontory down and over the sides. As a result the old trail leading down to Hayden Hill had first been obliterated around 1960. Ron and I just started wandering down the nose of the ridge, bearing north and east, and soon reached an almost level reach of the Promontory Ridge from which we could see down and west to the heavily forested Terrace. The old trail followed this ridge crest north, until it reached the Terrace, and broke west towards Hayden Hill.

However, a ~1980s Tahoe National Forest clearcut, directly along the line of the trail, served to obliterate it just above the Terrace, and the brush-infested plantation of small Ponderosa Pines was too dense to permit trying to stay on the original course, so we peeled away west, dropping into the Terrace Forest, and soon reached the nearly level road which extends far to the east into the Sugarloaf Basin, and west into the headwaters of the east fork of McIntyre Ravine.

Soon we reached a road bulldozed upon the line of the old trail, perhaps during the Volcano Fire and its aftermath, or perhaps during the 1980s clearcut activity. There we found the section corner common to sections 5, 6, 7, and 8 of T15N, R11E. All the townships in T15N in this area reflect the difficulties faced by early surveyors. A township is supposed to be a six-by-six square array of thirty-six one-mile-square sections. However, the townships in T15N all seem to show a northern tier of six sections which are about one mile east and west, but run about two miles north and south. Hence all these townships verge towards forty-two square miles in extent, instead of thirty-six.

At the section corner a modern monument, consisting of a two-inch diameter galvanized pipe with a marked cap, was accompanied by an older monument, a length of ore-cart track driven into the ground, with its own inscrutable markings. Large trees nearby also contained little signs. Below, to the north and west, is an old cabin site, a mining ditch, and some collapsed tunnels. Presumably a bit of Eocene-age river channel is buried beneath the roughly 400-foot-thick section of "young volcanics" in this area. Possibly the ore-cart track marked one corner of a mining claim.

From here the old trail, now an overgrown road, bears west. We followed along, passing the almost invisible fork right to Hayden Hill itself, coinciding with the trail as depicted on the USGS 7.5-minute "Dutch Flat quadrangle, and soon a mining ditch was crossed, the road dropping below the ditch, then rising to coincide with the ditch, thus obliterating it. This ditch drew water from springs to the west, delivering it to the mine site near the section corner. It is near the 3800' contour.

The bulldozed road, thankfully, came to an end. The trail continued, roughly following the line of the ditch, which was not always evident. The deep impressions of bear feet dotted the ground; they like to step in the same spot each time they walk a favorite trail. It is, in its way, a historic trail, one which likely was never drawn on any official map, but which saw use for centuries, for millenia, being after a fashion the "most-natural" and easiest way to traverse these slopes, for all sorts of animals, including humans. If one were walking from Iowa Hill to the Hayden Hill mines, either those up high, by the section corner, or those below, in Green Valley, one might well peel off the canyon rim at the head of McIntyre Ravine, and follow this old Terrace Trail east to Hayden Hill. One would then avoid an unnecessary climb of two hundred feet, to the now garbage-strewn Promontory, where the "official" Hayden Hill Trail begins.

Continuing west, we entered an area of old-growth forest containing some very large trees. There were Douglas Fir in the six- and seven-foot diameter range, and many large pines and cedars. The whole area screamed of abundant ground water, which in turn suggests that the heavily forested Terrace coincides with the rhyolite ash strata. Almost always, these rhyolite ash strata are associated with springs and seeps. Almost always, the strata themselves are not exposed at all, buried beneath deep soils, developed over many millenia. Almost always, a belt of enhanced forest marks these wet slopes.

Here, on the Terrace, about half a mile west of Hayden Hill, the ground water breaks out in big springs, surrounded by heavy timber, with an understory of robust Bigleaf Maples and Pacific Dogwood, but also, notably, quite a few Pacific Yew and sharp-needled California Nutmeg. So it is a rather fascinating area, botanically, and biogeographically. One rarely sees these Pacific Yews, and more rarely yet, yews as large as here on the Terrace. These springs are at the head of the East Fork of McIntyre Ravine, which joins the North Fork American in Green Valley.

Beyond the big springs, with their yews, and masses of delicate Lady Ferns, and bear-churned black mud, the trail continues, but much less distinctly. It is almost a case of too much of a good thing: the Terrace is broad enough, the forest, open enough, that no one particular route much commends itself over another. The game follows many paths. We strolled along, rarely seeing what could convincingly count as the line of a single, distinct, historic human trail. Here as so often elsewhere, modern use by game is enough to blur and disguise historic use by humans.

Finally, the Terrace seemed to pinch out, and we we reached an area where a bulldozed fire break, dating from the Volcano Fire, had been cut from the rim of the canyon on a steeply-descending course, bearing roughly north, right at the base of the rhyolite-enhanced forest, and just above the serpentine-stunted vegetation below us, in McIntyre Ravine. We found a pleasant little outcrop of serpentine which offered a fine view of the Ravine, with Green Valley and Giant Gap shown to good effect, to the north and to the west. The serpentine here is associated with the Melones Fault Zone. It is in faulted contact with the much-older Shoo Fly Complex metasediments to the east, the fault plane being almost vertical, and striking north and south; and it happens that between the serpentine and the Shoo Fly is a thin screen of Mesozoic metasediments and metavolcanics. If we interpret the serpentine as an ophiolite, as a section of ocean-floor basalt added to North American by continental accretion, and tilted up nearly ninety degrees in the process, this screen of Mesozoic rocks dividing the serpentine (metamorphosed basalt) from the Shoo Fly Complex could represent whatever sediments, possibly intercalated with lava flows, which lay on top of that section of ocean floor. These Mesozoic rocks can be seen to good effect along the river, from the east end of Green Valley, where they include some masses of limestone, upstream nearly to Euchre Bar. They are also evident near the head of the Euchre Bar Trail, on the road to Iron Point, and at Iron Point itself.

I would like to learn more about this Mesozoic screen between the Melones serpentine and the Shoo Fly. It is rarely more than a quarter-mile thick. Sometimes it is invaded by masses of serpentine. Were these masses squished into the Mesozoic screen during accretion, during the Nevadan Orogeny, or do they represent flows of basalt intercalated with the sediments cloaking the ocean floor?

Ron and I struck back east along the Terrace, and found a huge and ancient and recently-deceased Ponderosa Pine, over seven feet in diameter at chest height, and swelling larger still as it rose to split into three massive trunks. We paused to take photographs.

Reaching the almost-invisible fork leading north to Hayden Hill itself, we put our loppers to work opening up the old trail, which follows a nearly level ridge-crest for a quarter-mile before reaching the summit. Another old cabin site is marked by a cellar and odds and ends of sheet metal and glass. Perhaps it burned in the Volcano Fire.

Here the USGS map and TNF map both show the end of the trail. But I had found it continuing down the ridge to the north, last fall, and Ron had found old Forest Service maps which showed it dropping all the way to the river. In fact, a TNF map dating to 1909 showed "Hayden Hill" as a mining camp or settlement of some kind, with a little black square, just as it depicted Damascus, Red Point, and Westville. TNF maps from 1924 and 1930 seemed to show the Hayden Hill Trail dropping all the way to the North Fork. It was our job to settle the issue. Did it really exist? Was there yet another old trail into Green Valley, abandoned for many decades?

The trail is completely buried within manzanita near the cabin site, but it was easy to drop into the open forest to the east and, a hundred yards or so north, rejoin the ridge and the trail. Here a fallen pine, much rotted, has a number of two-by-four steps nailed to its side. When it still stood, whoever lived at the cabin might have climbed the tree, for the amazing view of Giant Gap. But it is a little hard to reconcile the fact that these wooden steps, nailed to the tree, show no signs of burning or scorching, whereas all the vegetation nearby seems to reflect, pretty clearly, having endured the Volcano Fire. Many trees lived through the fire, so it burned cool, and thousands of young conifers sprouted up after it. It is not impossible that here, anyway, it was a fire set purposely to limit the spread of the Volcano Fire.

We continued down the ridge. The trail exists, but it does not always make itself obvious. As we descended, in places we could see that there was a lumber slide, where sawed lumber for the sluice boxes at the Hayden Hill Mine had been dragged down, in bundles, from the canyon rim. One sees these lumber slides all over the place. They take the form of a trench running directly down the slope. Usually they are not at all suitable for a trail, being too steep.

At times there were very-well-defined, too-well-defined, game trails, switching back and forth on the slopes near the lumber slide. As we descended the forest changed from Canyon Live Oak on the steeper ground, with its poorer soils, to Kellogg's Black Oaks, on somewhat gentler slopes, with deeper and better soils.

From a discovering-old-trails standpoint, it was frustrating. A lumber slide cannot count as a bona fide trail. The game trails which switched back and forth could count as human trails, but if so, they were suspiciously narrow, suspiciously poorly-defined. And yet, the overall appearance of the slopes suggested a very active movement of soil and rock and debris of all kinds, downslope; if a trail were not used for, say, eighty years, it could be buried outright on such an actively-eroding slope. If only used by game it would shrink to a narrow track.


We reached the top of one of the huge red mining scars above the mine. These were much more visible thirty years ago; small pines and other trees have gradually populated the scars. The scars derive from hydraulic mining over a century ago. I had never been to the top of the scars before. I scanned the red surface closely; already the auriferous gravels at the Hayden Hill Mine counted as the oldest of the glacial outwash deposits left in Green Valley, as the mine is associated with an abandoned channel of the North Fork, the base of which channel is fully four hundred feet above the river, and the tops of the principal outwash terraces flanking this abandoned channel, six hundred feet above the river. I myself guess these terraces to be roughly 750,000 years old, dating from the Sherwin Glaciation. But the Red Scars rise higher yet. Could one find an absolute highest elevation where glacial outwash is preserved, in these scars?

At the top of the scars, the reddish material had the character of being a very weakly stratified deposit of angular chunks of rock, of an entirely local origin, in a matrix of silt and clay. Were it not for the weak stratification, almost invisible, one would be tempted to name it a colluvial deposit, *not* alluvial at all. As it is, it is about as frustrating as the trail-which-is-not-a-trail we had been following: the deposit has rocks deriving only from the slopes immediately above, and all angular: hence colluvium, hence not glacial outwash. But the deposit is weakly stratified! And it is, whatever its origin and significance, lying on top of true glacial outwash deposits, some distance below.

Well. Interesting, anyway. We followed a game trail right through the Western Red Scar basin, and entered another patch of oak forest, with more game trails, of the kind which with enough imagination might be human trails.

So it was with some frustration that we continued down, zigging and zagging widely in hopes of picking up the line of the "true" trail. Whenever we hit a suspiciously-well-defined game trail, we followed it, in hope that it would become even more well-defined, and settle the issue. On just such a trail we found ourselves approaching a terrace, upon which we could see some relics of mining.

This was just the kind of confirmation we had hoped for.

The terrace was formed by glacial outwash cemented into a tough conflomerate, much as one sees elsewhere in Green Valley, but this must count as the very highest patch of cemented outwash I have ever seen. We were roughly at the same elevation as the top of the Hayden Hill Knoll, a remnant of an outwash terrace flanking the mined-out area. Its summit is just above the 2400-foot contour, six hundred feet above the river. We could see the oak-forested Knoll through the trees, to the north. Between us and the Knoll was a deep ravine.

I told Ron of a buried anvil I had once found near the mine, where a series of terraces and trails flanked the diggings, and we dropped lower yet in search of it. We never found my terraces, never found my anvil, but we did reach one of the huge boulder piles. The Hayden Hill Mine had to get these big boulders out of the way, so they built ore-cart runs to dumps, and, my goodness, left piles of big boulders two hundred feet high. Amazing.

It was fairly overgrown down there, and we had done quite a lot of lopping earlier in the day, upon the Terrace Trail, and on the trail out to Hayden Hill. We didn't have it in us to range widely in search of the Lost Anvil of Hayden Hill, a massive thing, by the way, it must be over two hundred pounds. Well. We did range, but we only ranged up. Unfortunately, we entered a steep wet area choked with maple, dogwood, willow, and all of this very intricately intertwined with poison oak. We climbed directly up through this mad tangle for quite a long time, sweating and huffing and puffing, before breaking out into more open oak forest above. Soon we were back up in the Red Scar, and even struck the very same game trail we had used to enter and traverse the scar. I noticed a very few rounded cobbles of chert, of the sort one sees in Eocene-age relict channels, mixed into the angular rocks of the quasi-colluvium. This confirmed my earlier assessment, that the quasi-colluvium was, to some degree, alluvium; it had been, however briefly, transported by water, and had weakly stratified, as a result. We were fifty to a hundred feet below the tip top of this Red Scar, and there were rounded cobbles of chert. Robbed, no doubt, from an Eocene channel to the east, such as Lost Camp. Or, perhaps, upper Humbug Canyon. Or, perhaps, these chert cobbles came from the putative channel high above us, near the section corner. If this last was the case, then perhaps we should say that the sediments near the top of the red scars are not glacial outwash at all, but very slightly reworked colluvium which rested on top of a glacial outwash floodplain.

Whatever the case, the glacio-fluvial sediments around the Hayden Hill Mine will someday be closely investigated, and will provide evidence of rather old glaciations, in this part of the Sierra.

Ron and I made very slow work of climbing up and out of the great canyon. We were thrashed. Our shirts were wet with sweat. As we climbed, we ranged back and forth, hoping for more definitive signs of a discrete Hayden Hill Trail. We followed the lumber slide, and we ranged back and forth near it, and when we finally did reach the top, we were left with the impression that, yes, a trail did exist, and parts of it can still be followed, but it is often indistinct or even missing.

It occurs to me that the Red Scars might have greatly increased in size since the time the trail was in use. They are in part the direct result of hydraulic mining, and also the result of mining away the gold-bearing glacial outwash deposits below, over-steepening the slopes, which have been sliding and failing ever since.

We reached Ron's truck around six in the evening and it felt very good to just sit down.

Such was a nice day exploring parts of the great canyon of the North Fork of the American River.


The view east from the Promontory, with Quartz Mountain (left), Big Valley Bluff (center), and Snow Mountain (right) in the background.

Helicopters in Giant Gap

A year or so ago I found that it was impossible to convince the Placer County Sherif's department that it should avoid Giant Gap with its helicopters, inasmuch as both Peregrine Falcons and Golden Eagles were actively nesting. The Sheriff's department seemed to think I was from Outer Space; what I asked was absurd.

Several times this spring the Sheriff helicopter has flown through Giant Gap.

Yesterday I received an email from Jan Cutts, District Ranger of the American River Ranger District, Tahoe National Forest (TNF), at Foresthill. Jan wrote:

"I want to let you know that in the next day or so there will be a helicopter operating in the North Fork American River drainage east of Giant Gap to remove trash from the Green Valley area. We have worked with our biologist regarding concerns with impacts to the Peregrine falcon in the Giant Gap area, and will be working with the helicopter to keep it as far away from the area as possible."

This was good news. I called Jan immediately and asked, which mess of garbage would they clean up? Were they going after all the garbage sites, or one, or what?

For years I have urged TNF to bring a helicopter in to the Euchre Bar and Green Valley areas, where huge and horrible accumulations of garbage exist, beyond, really, the capacity of hikers to simply carry up and out. I sent maps showing all these locations. My friends and I would volunteer to help pack it up for the helicopter cargo nets. However, there was never enough money in the TNF budget.

Well. Jan replied she did not know just what garbage site was being cleaned up, but that surely, any garbage taken out, whatsoever, was a good thing. I agreed, but wondered whether we could not expand the cleanup to include that especially horrid site, above Euchre Bar, on the North Fork of the North Fork of the American.

She advised me to contact Tom Madrigal of TNF, at the Foresthill office, and I immediately called, and left a message, but did not hear back.

Today, as advertised, a helicopter arrived in Green Valley. They appeared to be working on what I call Mexican Marijuana Growers' Camp #1, along the High Ditch, towards the east end of Green Valley. I could hear the thunder of the helicopter in the distance, grabbed my binoculars, and ran out to a cliff-top from which I can see much of Green Valley.

To my amazement, after spending quite a time in the east end of Green Valley, out of my view, the helicopter rose slowly westward, without any cargo net, and flew right through Giant Gap, perhaps 500 feet above the river, which is about as bad as it can get, so far as the nests of the falcons and eagles.

Needless to say, I was not pleased. I believe it was a National Guard helicopter. I would not be at all surprised if this garbage cleanup occurred under the auspices of the Drug Enforcement Agency, replete with special grants from the Bureau of Homeland Security, or whatever the blasted thing is called. For nothing happens nowadays without grants. Employees of one agency Coordinate Their Efforts with employees of some other agency, and this wonderful "coordination" could only happen thanks to a grant. It is the debacle of Hurricane Katrina, dragged out to an impossible degree, under an infinite recursion.

The Dialectic of Dialogue

I have been working on geometry projects lately, and haven't been hiking much at all, except here on Moody Ridge, where spring has sprung early, and the rare Phantom Orchids are already in bloom, three weeks ahead of normal, and hungry rattlesnakes roam.

I occasionally receive emails from people seeking information about the North Fork. I am always glad to oblige. At times these exchanges develop a life of their own. A man named Fraser wrote some months ago; he wanted to visit the North Fork, "near Snow Mountain," at the end of April. He asked which trail would be best, and explained he would have his 12-year-old son with him.

I replied that all the trails near Snow Mountain would be blocked with snow, likely until June, but that he could drive up past Foresthill and use the Mumford Bar Trail, possibly hiking over a little snow at first, and once down on the river, follow the North Fork trail up to Sailor Canyon, and even beyond, with all due vigor, prudence, and so on.

Fraser responded to this, quite quickly: he had looked at a map, and thought the Big Granite Trail would work well for him. I was a little taken aback. Hadn't I just told him that it, and all the others up there, would be blocked with snow? I replied at some length, warning him that even if he managed to hike over the snow, or ski, or snowshoe, to get to the trail, it crossed Big Granite Creek along the way, and he would be taking his life in his hands to ford that creek, at the end of April.

Being surprised by his apparent willingness to cross miles of snow to reach one of the toughest trails in the big canyon, I Googled him.

I found he is quite an adventurer, with a lot of wilderness and whitewater experience. So. He was certainly capable. But his son? His son worried me. I suggested that what he envisioned might be a little much, for the son.

He did not deign to respond to my worries. A new idea had possessed him: he would hike over the miles of snow to the Beacroft Trail, or to the Sailor Flat Trail, drop into the canyon, swim across the North Fork, visit Big Granite Creek, and then hike up and out to the north, over more miles of snow, to Big Bend, on the South Yuba.

I was pretty thoroughly shocked. I wrote back, hesitantly, that for my part I would never ever, ever, swim that river at the end of April, and that what he envisioned was a truly major hike, and that I did not think it at all suitable for a twelve-year-old, but that, if he was determined to do it, good camping spots could be found at Bluff Camp, and then, across the river, at the base of Big Granite Creek. Three days would be about the minimum, I suggested.

To my complete astonishment, Fraser replied that he and his son would do it in one day!

By then, I was about six emails, and two thousand words, and one custom map, deep into our dialogue. Whatever wisdom I had to offer seemed to count for nothing. I finally knew when to stop "helping" Fraser.

A few weeks ago I heard from Fraser again. What with the warm dry spring, he had been able to drive almost up to the Beacroft, cross a few patches of snow, and follow the trail down into the canyon. He and his son camped at Bluff Camp, and made a day hike to look at Big Granite Creek the next day. They did not swim the river. The following day they hiked up and out on the Beacroft.

So the bottom line was that, while appearing to ignore my advice, Fraser actually took my advice. I wrote back, congratulating him on a good trip, and asked if he had seen the big waterfall across the North Fork from Bluff Camp.

No reply. Goodness, people are busy, nowadays.

Odds; Ends; A New Old Trail

I am giving up on my ISP, recently purchased by some sleazy outfit in Virginia, and soon my only email address will be russelltowle@gmail.com.

Over recent weeks I have been clearing a beautiful little patch of forest up on Moody Ridge, and burning tons of dead wood in the snow. I walk half a mile or so to the job site, and while walking, I have seen many a mountain lion track, likely all from one and the same lion. I have had a chance to see what tracks look like in soft snow, in hard snow, what they look like after one day, or after four days, and so on.

Yesterday afternoon I was walking home and thought to take a shortcut to avoid some deep snow. I got myself into a real tangle of young conifers and brush and broke through into a small opening. Lion tracks dotted the snow, extremely fresh, retaining every detail. Hours old at best. I quickly scanned the trees above me: no lion. Then I looked down at the snow again and was puzzled to see that the lion had walked in circles. All the tracks looked very fresh. I looked again, up, and all around; nothing, but the forest is so overgrown I couldn't see far in any case. So I blundered along my supposed shortcut. In another few yards a disgusting smell wafted my way, and at first I thought of the gamy smell a bear can have, which I have only smelled a few times in my life. I walked another few paces, the smell ever stronger, and suddenly realized it was the smell of Death. The lion had left its kill somewhere very near, possibly up in a tree. I hastened away.

Recently I was contacted by a nice young man who had tried and failed to find the Green Valley Trail. He had no idea that a public parking area exists, and, while walking in along "Aquila Lane" (the Green Valley Trail road), saw enough in the way of "No Trespassing" and "No Parking" signs to deter him. I reassured him that it was indeed a public trail, and told him about the parking area. Strangely, the parking area, recently constructed by Placer County for the public's use, itself has a "No Trespassing" sign, facing its entrance from Moody Ridge Road.

Last fall I explored the area around Hayden Hill, a high knoll jutting into Green Valley from the south canyon wall (see http://northforktrails.blogspot.com/2007/10/hayden-hill.html). The USGS 7.5 minute "Dutch Flat" quadrangle topographic map shows a trail leading down to Hayden Hill from Elliot Ranch Road, on the canyon rim; but as with so many Tahoe National Forest trails, this trail has been abandoned by the Forest Service, in favor of clearcutting, it seems. The trail is almost impossible to follow in its uppermost section, and impossible to follow, having been utterly erased, within the clearcut. However, one can leave the line of where the trail used to be, and strike out cross-country.

By the way, it is an entirely unacceptable violation of the public's trust for Tahoe National Forest to abandon any historic foot trails; but the Forest has made a regular business out of abandoning historic trails and historic roads. Not only that, these momentous derelictions of duty have been executed without public input or comment of any kind. It has all been done slyly, secretly, and under the table.

My own grandfather, who joined the Forest Service at a time when Teddy Roosevelt had inspired many a young man to join, in order to protect the public trust, in order to protect the public trails, in order to protect the wildlife--my own grandfather would be so shocked and ashamed.

Back to Hayden Hill.There is some really beautiful forest down there, with springs, and some old mine tunnels, and old mining ditches and cabin sites, and to my surprise, at the very summit of Hayden Hill itself, I found traces of an old trail plunging down the ridge-crest into Green Valley. Far below, far far below, is the historic Hayden Hill Mine, a hydraulic mine which worked the very highest and oldest of the glacial outwash sediments in Green Valley. At this mine, according to local legend, a few, or perhaps "twenty" Chinese miners were buried in a horrific landslide, way back when. I have never found any verification of this legend in the old newspapers of Placer County; but I may have missed it.

Today Ron Gould called my attention to a 1930 Tahoe National Forest map which actually shows this "Hayden Hill Trail." It will be interesting to explore it, someday, although it showed every sign of being badly overgrown.

Thrusting Shoo Fly

On YouTube, at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3KryrAGkBo

is an animation of a flight up the American River Canyon, using the USGS Digital Elevation Model 30-meter data set, and merging a couple dozen DEM quadrangles to build a landscape spanning Colfax on the west, the Sierra Crest on the east, the San Juan Ridge and Grouse Ridge to the north, and the Middle Fork of the American on the south. The virtual camera follows an almost due east heading from west of Rollins Lake, crossing over Lovers Leap and Green Valley, and flying on up the canyon into the Royal Gorge. The animation finishes with the virtual camera making an orbit of 360 degrees around Snow Mountain.

Thrusting Shoo Fly: on my iMac I can set the screensaver to loop through any folder of images in my iPhoto library. It so happens that right now it loops through a folder of some of my favorite photographs in the North Fork. Here is Giant Gap, from the west, and now from the east; or the 500-foot waterfall in New York Canyon, or Big Valley Bluff at dawn, as seen from the North Fork, a couple miles up the canyon.

And so on. It's not hard to take beautiful photographs in such a beautiful place.

It happens that one of these special photographs shows what I call Bluff Camp, an old mining camp immediately adjacent to the river, set on a cliff-bounded strath terrace bearing a fine grove of Canyon Live Oaks. From the North Fork American River Trail, connecting Sailor Canyon to Mumford Bar, a side trail leads one down a hundred yards, or so, to Bluff Camp. I have camped there many a time. It is half a mile or so east of Tadpole Canyon, and directly below Big Valley Bluff, rising in ragged cliffs all of 3500', across the river to the north.

And the photograph was taken from a point upstream from Bluff Camp; so one sees a part of the encircling cliffs, and a flat area--the strath terrace--perhaps thirty feet above river level. (A "strath terrace" is a glacio-fluvial landform associated with glacial outwash sediments which once occupied the terrace itself; and it was these very sediments which planed down the bedrock, to make the terrace).

It caught my eye, the other day, the Bluff Camp photo, as it filled the screen; I could see an abrupt change in the bedrock, right at the upstream end of the strath terrace. Slowly, dimly, I realized I was seeing a thrust fault. Two disparate bodies of rock had been juxtaposed by faulting.

The bedrock for miles up and down the canyon is composed of metasediments of the early-Paleozoic "Shoo Fly Complex," the oldest rocks in all the Sierra. I have a wonderfully precise geologic map of this part of the North Fork canyon, made by David S. Harwood et. al. of the USGS, in the early 1990s. Harwood shows many thrust faults in the Shoo Fly Complex near Big Valley Bluff, Sugar Pine Point, and New York Canyon. The faults sometimes bring big blocks of chert, hundreds of yards in extent, or more, into contact with slates and other types of rock in the Shoo Fly Complex.

By the way, it is called a "Complex" because it is composed of many distinct formations, spanning many millions of years in time, but all very old. Harwood describes and names four such formations in this particular area. His map does not show the Bluff Camp Thrust, which is probably a sensible choice, for it is likely not very long or large as thrust faults go, and if he were to put every such minor thrust fault on his map, well, there would be room for precious little else.

It has long been considered that the great mashing-together, the epochal juxtaposition of the disparate Sierran metamorphic rocks alongside one another, took place around 145 million years ago, in what was named the "Nevadan Orogeny" (an "orogeny" is a mountain-building). It was this Nevadan Orogeny which acted to rotate all these disparate bodies of metamorphic rock almost 90 degrees to the east, so that what were once flat-lying beds are now almost vertical, or even slightly overturned. And it is considered that the "penetrative fabric" of these disparate metamorphic rocks is mainly due to the Nevadan Orogeny. The compressive and shearing forces which imparted the fabric were fairly well parallel with the current, almost-vertical orientation of the beds. Very likely it all had to do with continental accretion, at a time when Pacific ocean floor was being actively subducted beneath the continental margin, moving from west to east, but also plunging steeply down.

However, in many of these different metamorphic rock formations, whether they be down by Auburn or up at Big Valley Bluff, an experienced eye can detect at least two different episodes of deformation, each leaving its footprint, or imposing its fabric, upon the rocks. There is the later Nevadan Orogeny; and at Bluff Camp, there is a thrust fault vastly older than the Nevadan Orogeny. That is to say, the Shoo Fly was already well-deformed, well-sliced and diced by thrust faults, long before the Nevadan Orogeny.

And Harwood discusses all this in the twelve-page essay which accompanies his map. There are a couple of typographical errors in this essay which play the very devil in understanding the thing.

It is not at all easy to learn to recognize these different rock types. That this is chert, and that is quartzite, may not be discernible except under a microscope. To develop a simple portrait of the bedrock geology, one can read what was written about it a century and more ago. At that time the focus was upon the broad outlines, not the higgley-piggley details. And for a time, the following usage had currency, for instance, in the articles by C.J. Brown of Dutch Flat, published in the Mining & Scientific Press, in 1875.

Brown divides the metamorphic rocks as follows: the Western Slate, the Middle Slate, and the Eastern Slate. Between the Middle Slate and the Eastern Slate, he identifies the long narrow serpentine belt we now name for its associated Melones Fault Zone.

Hence his Eastern Slate corresponds to the Shoo Fly Complex, and those other Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks which lie on top of the Shoo Fly, and therefore, to the east (the whole shebang, be it remembered, rotating 90 degrees to the east during the Nevadan Orogeny).

Brown's Middle Slate corresponds to the Calaveras Complex, another complex of formations, but late-Paleozoic in age, and he correctly identifies the rock of Giant Gap as metavolcanic--in fact, Brown declares it to be metabasalt; and his Western Slate corresponds to all those metamorphic rocks west of Cape Horn, in which there are several distinct formations, often dominated by metavolcanic rock, but containing some metasediments, too.

So, if we wish to blur our focus and appreciate the broader outlines of local bedrock geology, we might give C.J. Brown's Western/Middle/Serpentine/Eastern model a try.

The Secret Trails of Green Valley

I was surprised to hear from someone, in response to my "Visit to Green Valley," that she wishes the trails of Green Valley kept a secret. She objects to my mention of hiking on old mining ditches or on this or that old trail; there are, it seems, Nefarious People on this North Fork Trails email list, who, though my malfeasance, now know about the mining ditches and old trails in Green Valley.

Never mind that I have often written about precisely these ditches and trails before.

The Nefarious People, she writes, will tie plastic flagging all along the ditches, all along the trails, spray-painting a boulder now and then for good measure, with artful messages like "Green Valley Blue Gravel Mine Ditch, .25."

Perhaps one spray-painted boulder would warn of rattlesnakes. Another might read, "Euchre Bar, 1 mile, If You Like Jumping on Cliffs and Fording Raging Rivers."

Well, I'm sorry, but it is my philosophy that the old trails of the North Fork need to be known, not unknown. The North Fork of the American River--its wildness, its beautiful scenery, its historic trails and mining ditches and prehistoric sites--deserves every kind of protection and preservation. But this protection and preservation is hardly possible if no one knows the great canyon, and its great old trails.

This email list is all about making this wildness, this beauty, these old trails and ditches, known. In Green Valley, a number of private parcels exist, old patented mining claims, any one of which could on any given day sprout "No Trespassing" signs, or even a cabin. The purchase of these private parcels, and the transfer of the titles to Tahoe National Forest, or to the Bureau of Land Management, depending upon the location of the parcel-- the purchase of these parcels is critical to the future of Green Valley.

So, don't forget, the High Ditch is quite near the 2080' contour, in Green Valley, north of the river. Hike it, and let me know if you like it; it makes for a nearly level walk of a mile or so, from one end of Green Valley to the other. It crosses the East Trail about three hundred yards above Joe Steiner's grave, with another ditch, at that point, closely paralleling it, just above. The Still-Higher Ditch, as it were. But the High Ditch itself is the ticket.

Below, a map of Green Valley, showing some of its trails and ditches--which are also trails.