On a day my brother was at work, my father and I decided to drive out to the Lodi Valley and hiked to the top of a peak overlooking a piece of property I had investigated on Google Earth adjacent to a mine that apparently is promised to begin operations after some test drilling is complete. Our eye level even with the tops of all ranges in every direction, we viewed row after row of wrinkles in the skin of the earth, thrust up from the valleys by volcanic swells, skirted by slump and turbidite (flow deposits of turbidinous currents). Volcanic flows are the most recent event in these ranges, overlaying many areas of the region’s upthrust rock formations, with some accumulation of sediment over the flow layers. This piques my curiosity as to when geologists estimate the recent volcanism occured in this area. Whenever it was, (and it cannot have been much more than 10,000 years ago, at or near the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, based on sediment accumulation) it was pervasive and violent. It would have been a nightmare to live through. It left a landscape that is angular and prickly, fissured and serrated, abrasive and yet, starkly beautiful.
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