Rocks call to me and say “let’s run away together” and I usually agree as long as they are portable because I know they really mean “pick me up and carry me home.” Except for a few photos from my daughter’s childhood and my grandmother’s jewelry, the oldest possessions of mine are rocks. They don’t burn, melt in water, become vermin infested, or die. Rocks are loyal to the end — my end, presumably, not theirs — although sometimes rocks are tricksters. Rocks have tripped me up, confused my sense of location so I wandered for hours to find my way back to the truck. Any hiking route that depends on orienting using “elephant shaped rock” is trouble because the moment I am uncertain about the route, elephant-shaped rocks appear everywhere. Another game rocks play is hide and seek. If I set down my backpack by a boulder that is unmistakeable and walk off, that boulder suddenly blends into the landscape.
The rocks whose stories I’m sharing today are from two different regions: one set is from central Arizona and the other single rock is from northeastern California. I imagine the rocks I’ve brought home and placed in my garden, beside paths, and in pots with houseplants will one day be viewed by scientists as marvels in a weird place. Perhaps the rocks themselves marvel to be living beneath an alien camellia bush or indoors snuggled up to a potted palm tree. Living as long as rocks do, they need to be tolerant of change because as the earth moves along, rocks move with it.
The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns spinning around us.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
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Twenty-five years ago I brought a huge backpack of rocks home from Arizona’s Tonto Basin. Many are heart-shaped because by day four of a two week work project, I already had a motel room full of rocks and needed a filter as they had to fly home with me in one backpack. I picked up others because they mimic in miniature the higher mountains where they originated, upstream of the basin in the Mogollon Rim and along the south rim of the Grand Canyon.
The Mogollon Rim's limestones and sandstones were formed from sediments deposited in the Carboniferous and Permian Periods. Several of the Rim's rock formations are also seen on the walls of the Grand Canyon. In many places, the Rim is capped or even buried by the extensive basaltic lava flows.
Tonto needed dozens of samples to represent its myriad rock styles. But Glass Mountain only needed one. Formed by a volcanic flow in northeast California near the Oregon border 950 years ago, Glass Mountain dominates the scenery. Medicine Lake Volcano, the largest volcano (by volume) in the Cascade Range, is a shield volcano. It sprawls across the landscape looking like a warrior’s shield (so they say), and rises 3,900 feet above the Modoc Plateau for a total elevation of 7,795 feet. Medicine Lake fills the caldera in the summit area of the volcano.
Glass Mountain is a spectacular, nearly treeless, steep-sided rhyolite and daciteobsidian flow that erupted just outside the eastern caldera rim and flowed down the steep eastern flank of Medicine Lake volcano.
I studied rare plants in this area for a month in 1995 and have visited other times but never picked up any obsidian. I figured even if there were no Pele’s Curse on Glass Mountain, rocks there would speak up if they wanted to come home with me, but none ever did. The same eruption that made Glass Mountain also shot out pumice that forms slopes north of Glass Mountain. Pumice rocks are volcanic fluff, trollops who leaped into my backpack and filled my shoes. I welcomed them gladly to save pumice from the big trucks hauling them off by the ton to labor in the stone-washed jeans factory. Pumice doesn’t hold still. The rocks who came home with me wandered away over the years.
Obsidian and pumice intermingle on the lava flow around Glass Mountain. North of here are mountains of just pumice.
One night during the botany project I decided to sleep on the ground near the summit of Glass Mountain. Before sunset, it was gorgeous as the setting sun gleamed off Glass Mountain, swirling pink-gold on Mount Shasta and the western horizon. After dark, the atmosphere shifted from lovely to intensely eerie. The area was empty of organic life but full of rock energy. Before sleeping, I asked Glass Mountain to keep us safe, it seemed wise although I wasn’t concerned about humans, bears, or cougars. “Also,” I added, “I’d love to have a piece of your 950 year old body. If you’re willing, give me a sign.”
I felt spooky all night about I don’t know what, and so did my dog. In the morning, a big hunk of rock was lying on the ground next to the front tire of my truck. Glad the rock hadn’t landed on me, I decided it was a sign. And I took her home. (This is illegal under federal law because Glass Mountain has historic and pre-historic significance. My justification is I asked the ultimate authority.)
The lava flow was recent, geologically-speaking. The black glass is obsidian and the reddish markings in it are from weathering or oxidation of iron during the eruption. A Modoc Indian told me the brown-red streaked type of obsidian was the most special to them. A surgeon told me obsidian blades are sharper than steel scalpels. Now people call this mahogany obsidian and some is found hundreds of miles distant from this area where it doesn’t naturally exist. Historians believe it was used in trade.
A long time from now, after the apocalypse, when humanity regains the luxury that allows idle speculation, this piece of obsidian who volunteered to live with me might be seen as bartered. Maybe it will still share the space with heart-shaped rocks from the Mogollon Rim. Scientists will wonder, “Why did those ancient people want a big hunk of obsidian and small rocks from what once was called Arizona?” Perhaps by then these rocks will be covered in sediment from the last centuries of the Anthropocene. Studies of the isotopes, fossilized organisms, and plastic bits in the sediment will tell the story of my Sierra foothill life during the dawn of the third millennium. That story will say “It was a weird few years in an incredibly short life.”
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Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us,
or we find it not.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson