08-14-2019, 03:31 PM
I had read a couple of his essays, so I had high hopes for this book, about the geology of California. Alas, those hopes were dashed. It has so much technical terminology that it got to be a slog and I gave up. Also a lot about plate tectonics, some of it interesting, some not. The extremely short story of the forming of California is that an island chain crashed into the coast, pushing up into the Sierras.
However, there was one great chapter about the Gold Rush and the environmental impact of it. I had an image of miners with pans (probably from elementary school) but that was only the beginnings of it. Then came large scale hydraulic mining operations. According to McPhee, they washed off a thousand million tons of silt into the watershed. It destroyed thousands of acres of farmland and even made San Fransisco larger. At one point in the book, he stands in a valley near Auburn where the lower end of the valley is 150 feet lower than the upper, but both were about even before the miners came. Angry citizens organized and stopped it in the 1880s and that's when they went to hard rock mining, digging ore out of tunnels.
However, there was one great chapter about the Gold Rush and the environmental impact of it. I had an image of miners with pans (probably from elementary school) but that was only the beginnings of it. Then came large scale hydraulic mining operations. According to McPhee, they washed off a thousand million tons of silt into the watershed. It destroyed thousands of acres of farmland and even made San Fransisco larger. At one point in the book, he stands in a valley near Auburn where the lower end of the valley is 150 feet lower than the upper, but both were about even before the miners came. Angry citizens organized and stopped it in the 1880s and that's when they went to hard rock mining, digging ore out of tunnels.
the hands that guide me are invisible