Day 365: The Grand Finale

into the Venice Beach Sunset and LA's odd natural world

It seems fitting to abruptly end an epic project in LA. It is been an amazing process, 365 days of blogging to date. Certainly full of ups and downs, and as a result there now is an entire year of my life and/or thoughts falling below this post. Not sure if this is actually worth celebrating or not, but regardless, the project is complete. Life goes on elsewhere. Thanks for reading and keep in touch.

The fabulous Drew Anastasia will be picking up year two of 365 - check out his artful ways and days here.

Day 364: Deep diggin

We're in Culver City, deep in the CLUI archive.

Day 363: All in a day

from here to there, in a matter of hours

We left Mono Lake yesterday morning and drove through the Owens Valley. Our tiny car sandwiched between the the last slab of the Basin and Range and the Sierra Nevadas to the West and Death Valley to our east. Proceeding south we crossed the Mojave, the San Andreas fault, drove the crest of the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains to find ourselves landing in a valley that at first glance fits the epitome of pop-culture- Los Angeles. The whiplash effects are high, but something in the air around here makes everything feel alright and slowed down. Is this why people live here? Somehow the super reality of all that a day can hold seems fitting when landing in this particular place, yet Baudrillard on Death Vallery echoes in my geologically focused mind...

"A fragment of another planet (at least predating any form of human life), where another, deeper temporality reigns, on whose surface you float as you would on salt-laden waters. The senses, the mind, and even your sense of belonging to the human race are all numbed by the fact of having before you the pure, unadulterated, sign of 180 million years, and therefore the implacable enigma of your own existence. It is the only place where it is possible to relive, alongside the physical spectrum of colours, our successive historical forms: the mineral, the organic, salt desert, sand dunes, rock, ore, light, heat, everything on earth has been, all the inhuman forms it has been through, gathered together in a single anthologizing vision."

Day 362: Tufa

Don't climb on the tufa!

Day 361: Deep blue

Everything you've ever heard and might have imagined about Lake Tahoe is true. It is extremely deep, blue, alpine, high-altitude, exclusive feeling, crystal clear. It rests right outside the great Sierra Nevadas and receives tons of clear, fresh mountain melt. Yet, the climate is changing due to human induced activity and the local wildlife and lake waters are changing in response. On our way through yesterday we learned that this area truly is a fragile and threatened ecosystem. Its future is extremely precarious.

Day 360: Beyond the Basin

black rock desert in polaroid, pyramid lake in background, both traces of Lake Lahontan

Today we cross into California. Saying good bye for now to the ancient lakes and playas of the majestic Basin and Range. I am endlessly captivated, and in awe, of this landscape's other-worldliness.

Day 359: BLM

Sand Mountain recreational area (BLM land outside Fallon, NV)

We've heard that 87% of Nevada is BLM land. This means it is essentially public, but noone can live on this land. Land use ranges from military to recreational. On our way back from Shoal (also on BLM land) we came across the Sand Mountain recreational area and stopped to use the bathroom.

Day 358: Unpredictable everything

sunrise from the 15th floor of the Eldorado and storms clouds this afternoon

We have been experiencing odd weather since we arrived. Temperatures haven't made it past 73 degrees the entire time and storms keep rolling over the horizon. Today the temps dipped down to 50 only to soar to 70 within the same hour. Dramatic weather, light -everything. Summer must be on the horizon soon.

Day 357: Golden days

Beautiful days in Reno. Incredible people and amazing times in the Altered Landscape archive.

Day 356: Faultless

We found the site of Faultless yesterday.

Day 355: Extreme

Great Basin National Park isn't your average family oriented National Park. It's basically designed for backpackers, professional hikers and survivalists. Starting at 6,000 ft and climbing to 12,000 ft (with a glacier to boot) it is basically one long, winding, thin road to the base of Mt. Wheeler. The road stops at 9,000 ft. which is where we stopped too. I don't do well with heights, or altitude, and this was my limit. Unfortunately, we weren't able to see the ancient Bristlecone Pine forest since the trail to the anticipated forest involved a 4 mile hike through snow at over 9,000 ft. Who knew! We did find this lovely young Bristlecone Pine tree in the parking lot of the visitors center (6,200ft), but were told it would only live to around 100-150 years since it isn't in the "stressed" environment that these trees needs to thrive. In such conditions they can live to be over 4,000 years old. We are going to seek out more of these mighty pines in California next week in the White Mountains. Perhaps we will have better luck.

Day 354: Departing

The military has literally moved in next door. For the next two weeks they will be training at South Base, with live ammunition, right next door to where we are living. It is time to move on. We say goodbye to the mountains, the lake line, and Wendover until next time.

Day 353: Enola

click to enlarge

Yesterday we toured the Enola Gay Hangar.

Day 352: From the lake bed

view from the Quonset

We're living below the water line of ancient Lake Bonneville. We can see the trace of the lake on the mountains all around Wendover. It is rather magical and humbling.

Thinking of Robert today... we toured the Enola Gay Hangar this afternoon. More to come on that in the coming days.

Day 351: On the road

We encountered a major dust storm coming off the Great Salt Lake yesterday.

Day 350: A beginning

We are on our way to Salt Lake City today and the much anticipated journey begins!
We'll be sending signals from our search!

Day 349: Alive

click to enlarge images

"This is the sort of place where you really do not put a nuclear power plant...there was other action in the neighborhood at the same time- in the Stillwater Range, the Sonoma Range, Pumpernickel Valley. Actually, this is not a particularly spectacular scarp. The lesson is that the whole thing- the whole Basin and Range, or most of it- is alive. The earth is moving. The faults are moving. There are hot springs all over the province. There are young volcanic rocks. Fault scars everywhere. The world is splitting open and coming apart. You see a sudden break in the sage like this and it says to you that a fault is there and fault block is coming up. This is a gorgeous, fresh, young, active fault scarp. It's growing. The range is lifting up. This Nevada topography is what you see during mountain building. There are no foothills. It is all too young. It is live country. This is tectonic, active, spreading, mountain-building world. To a nongeologist, it's just ranges, ranges, ranges."
- Kenneth Deffeyes, in John McPhee's Basin and Range

Day 348 : Robert Del Tredici

At Work in the Field of the Bomb, Robert Del Tredici

"Robert Del Tredici began documenting the nuclear age in 1979. His first book of photographs and interviews, The People of Three Mile Island (Sierra Club Books, 1980), was part sociology and part critique of nuclear power. His second book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (Harper & Row, 1987), documented the US nuclear weapons industry and won the 1987 Olive Branch Book Award for its contribution to world peace. In 1987 Robert founded The Atomic Photographers Guild, a collective of 24 photographers who make culturally visible all aspects of the nuclear age. In 1991 he began documenting the nuclear weapons industry in the former Soviet Union." -read more

Day 347: Inner Dome

While reading the recent issue of CLUI's Lay of the Land, I came across the article, "Some Faces From The Portrait Gallery Of The Texas Oilscape". In this article (featured on page 25) the caption for the Mont Belvieu Storage Area caught my eye and reinvigorated my interest in geologically formed salt domes, salt beds, and country's interesting usage of them for storing oil, gas, and nuclear waste.

"Mont Belvieu is the largest volatile hydrocarbon storage site in the country. Around 100 excavated cavities have been made inside the large salt dome that underlies the rise in the landscape that gives the town its name. Of these some are over 2,000 feet tall, with more capacity than a supertanker. Several companies operate the storage cavities and the pipelines connected to them, that flow to and from the refineries of the Gulf Coast, and to markets elsewhere in the country. Mont Belieu is one of dozens of salt domes along the Gulf Coast, many of which have been developed as oil drilling sites, and as underground gas and petrochemical storage."

- From Lay of the Land

Day 346: Basin. Fault. Range.

one of my many takes on the slab basin and range formation

"Most mountain rangers around the world are a result of compression, of segments of the earth's crust being brought together, bent, mashed, thrust and folded, squeezed up into the sky. The Himalaya, the Appalachians, the Alps, the Urals, the Andes. The ranges of the Basin and Range came up another way. The crust- in this region between the Rockies and the Sierra- is spreading out, being stretched, being thinned, being literally pulled to pieces. The sites of Reno and Salt Lake City, on opposite sides of the province, have moved sixty miles apart. The crust of the Great Basin has broken into blocks. The blocks are not, except for simplicities sake, analogous to dominoes. They are irregular in shape. They more truly suggest stretch marks. Which they are. They trend nearly north south because the direction of the stretching is roughly east-west. The breaks, or faults, between them are not vertical but dive into the earth at angles that average sixty degrees, and this, from the outset, affected the centers of gravity of the blocks in a way that caused them to tilt. Classically, the high edge of one touched the low edge of another and formed a trough, or basin. The high-end sculpted, eroded, serrated by weather- turned into mountains The detritus of the mountains rolled into the basin. The basin filled with water- at first, it was fresh blue water- and accepted layer upon layer of sediment from the mountains, accumulating weight, and thus, unbalancing the block even further. Its tilt become more pronounced. In the manner of the seesaw, the high, mountain side of the block went higher and the low, basin side went lower until the block as a whole reached a state of precarious and temporary truce with God, physics, and mechanical and chemical erosion, not to mention, far below, the agitated mantle, which was running a temperature hotter than normal, as was, almost surely, controlling the action. Basin and Range. Integral fault blocks: low side the basin, high side the range. For 500 miles they nudged one another across the province of the Basin and Range. With extra faulting, and what not, they took care of their own irregularities. Some had their high sides on the west, some on the east. The escarpment of the Wasatch Mountains-easternmost expression of this immense suite of mountains -faced west. The Sierra-the westernmost, the highest, the predominant range, with Donner Pass only halfway up it-presented its escarpment to the east."

- Basin and Range, John McPhee