Eastern California has the best geology in the world. If anyone wants to argue this point, go ahead, but you’ll lose. Why do I make this assertion? Check it out:

✔ Volcanoes?  

✔ Earthquakes?  

✔ Glaciers? 

✔ Hot springs?   

✔ Alpine granite peaks?  

✔ Mountains of upside-down rocks?  

✔ Folds, faults, unconformities, and other geologic features that look like they were made for textbook display?  

✔ Extreme topography? The topography is so extreme that the highest point in the lower 48 states and the lowest point in North America are in the same county. 

✔ Supereruptions? 

✔ Evidence of rapid, extreme climate change that wasn’t our fault? 

✔ Evidence that the Earth was almost entirely iced over in the distant past? 

The area is bordered by three national parks (Yosemite, Death Valley, and Kings Canyon) and could easily support the designation of several more. There are enough roads, but not too many. Plenty of campgrounds and trailheads. Development has been sparse due to land use restrictions, so you can drive long stretches of Owens Valley, with the mountains rising 10,000 feet on either side, and not see a building or a billboard.

Hordes of people visit eastern California to climb, hike, fish, backpack, camp, ski, and enjoy the spectacular scenery. All this scenery, water, snow, rocky trails, cliffs, boulders, and so on are products of geology. This is part of the region known as the Basin and Range, and without plate tectonics and the forces that are rifting the area apart, there would be no basins or ranges. Without the Sierra Nevada trapping moisture from storms, California would be a drier place but, perversely, Death Valley would be wetter. And there would be no mountain scenery.

If you want to learn about the geology underlying this magnificent part of the world, pick up a copy of Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Eastern California. It comprises 33 copiously illustrated vignettes that each tell a geologic story or two about a particular place. The emphasis is to get you out of your vehicle and get the geology under your feet.

Vignettes cover topics including Badwater, the lowest place in North America (-282 feet); Dantes View (sorry, the Board of Geographic Names doesn’t like apostrophes), where you can see Badwater and 14,000-foot peaks in the Sierra Nevada in the same view; the Racetrack,, the mysterious dry lake where rocks move across the mud; Fossil Falls, a dry double fall carved by the glacial Owens River; the magnificent scarp of the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake, a temblor as large as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; and Devils Postpile, a thick lava flow whose glaciated top reveals a beautiful mosaic of 5-, 6-, and 7-sided columns.

Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Eastern California is available at bookstores, visitor centers, and other outlets in eastern California, including Spellbinder Books and Eastside Sports in Bishop. If you can’t support local, you can order it online.

15 May 2022