Earthquake Storms

by John Dvorak

  “It’s nothing,” he responded as he passed out cigars. “It happens all the time.”

  Then, as a diversion, he offered to wrestle any of the reporters. There were no takers.

  *The California Department of Transportation has taken advantage of this natural corridor and has rerouted the Warren Freeway, officially California State Highway 13, which is used by thousands of commuters every day.

  *Technically, the rock is called serpentinite and is comprised of a group of minerals known collectively as serpentine, but the word “serpentine” is so widely used to refer to the rock outside scientific circles that I have used it here.

  Chapter 5

  Blue Cut and the Mormon Rocks

  Our ranch in Valyermo is but a few yards from the Fault

  and that really was one reason why we settled there.

  —Levi Noble, on living along the San Andreas Fault

  To be successful, a field geologist must possess two personal traits: an ability to use any of the five senses to divine the nature of a rock, and a crazed obsession for barren landscapes. If one wonders how the sense of taste might be employed, let me explain.

  Years ago, during my one and only class in field geology, I was standing at the bottom of a small basin in the central part of the Mojave Desert near a place appropriately called Calico Peaks. All around, exposed in the walls of the basin, were layers of colors. There were blue mudstones, green siltstones, and buff-colored sandstones. Each layer represented a slow accumulation of sediments at the bottom of a small lake that had disappeared millions of years ago.

  On one occasion, the professor who taught the course called the students together. He walked us over to the base of a protruding outcrop near the edge of the basin. He asked us to take up small samples from a thin greenish mudstone exposed on the outcrop and to place the samples in our mouths. We did as instructed.

  “Feel the creamy texture,” I can still hear him saying, “as you press it with your tongue against the roof of your mouth.”

  Next, he had us take samples from a dark brown siltstone immediately beneath the green mudstone. This time, he said, we should feel a gritty component as we gently ground the samples between our teeth. Again, we followed his instructions.

  When we had finally completed both tasks, the professor, who, as I distinctly recall, had a gleeful tone in his voice, told us that the particles of grit we were now grinding between our molars and swirling in our mouths were fossilized fecal pellets that had been excreted by tiny animals that had once scurried around on the bottom of the lake.

  Such is one of the rites of passage to which an individual might be subjected if one wished to be a field geologist. And there are others. Each one, at its core, actually represents a means to identify and characterize rocks in the field.

  As to the other necessary trait of a successful field geologist, the desire for barren landscapes is something that I doubt can be acquired but must be inborn. By illustration, I point to the remarkably productive and always self-indulgent career of a New York sophisticate, Levi Fatzinger Noble.

  Noble was born into a world of wealth and privilege. His childhood home was a four-storied mansion built in the Queen Anne style complete with steep gabled roofs, large bay windows, and a stone archway over the main door. It was located along the main street of Auburn, New York. Inside were 17 rooms, each with a fireplace, and one of the fireplace mantels, so it was said, had been carved by the hand of Brigham Young when he was 19.

  On entering the house, a visitor was struck by the immensity of the rooms. Even the main hall had a fireplace. There was a grand, highly polished mahogany staircase that connected the ground floor to the upper floors. There was a large dining room with a table and chairs that could seat 24, though as far as Noble could remember he had never seen more than six people at the table. It was within such a world of excess that Noble was born in 1882. In many ways, it was a world he never left.

  At age 20, still supported financially by his father, a railroad attorney and owner and president of Auburn’s largest trust company, Noble entered Yale College. He never gave a reason why he decided to study paleontology—in fact, this shy and unassuming man seldom offered a reason for anything he did—but his interest in fossils and shells led him to geology. And it was that field that would become his passion.

  During Noble’s sixth year at Yale, still undecided on what to do with his life, he joined a group of students invited by geology professor Herbert Gregory invited students to accompany him on an extended Christmas holiday to Arizona. Each student had to pay his own way, which meant few could afford to go. But Noble was an exception—he always had money. And, though not yet experienced in travel and not yet having lived outside the niceties of a privileged life, he knew the trip would be an easy one because Gregory had just married and this wintertime trip to Arizona would double as his honeymoon. So Noble decided he would go.

  The first major stop Gregory, his bride, Noble, and the other Yale students made was at the Grand Canyon. The canyon was not yet the iconic feature it is today. Nor was it yet the mecca for crowds of tourists who now come during all seasons. In January 1908, when the Yale group made its trip, they arrived, as visitors did at the time, at a train station near the south rim of the canyon known as Bass Station. Here, they boarded a stagecoach and rode 20 miles to a conclave of rustic buildings and several worn tents known as Bass Camp, the only accommodations then at the Grand Canyon. Here they could descend along the only known trail that led down to the canyon bottom—the Bass Trail.

  In 1908, the entire canyon-rim facility—and access to the canyon—was controlled by one person, William Wallace Bass, a former train dispatcher in New York who had come west in the 1880s for his health and to seek his fortune. His health improved, but a fortune never materialized. Instead, after discovering a trail that led partway down into the Grand Canyon while on a hunting trip, he decided to open a campground, clear the trail, and cater to the occasional tourist. By 1900, he had extended the trail all the way to the bottom. He also constructed a few wooden buildings that served as a kitchen, a dining room, and a recovery room, the last for those bold souls who had risked venturing the full length of the trail down into the depths of the canyon.

  Eight years later, the Yale group was making a descent. Though they spent only a few hours at the bottom, one of the students—Noble—came back transformed.

  Unlike the northeastern United States where bedrock is often obscured by glacial drift or vegetation and where, for a significant part of the year, the ground is covered by ice and snow, here everything was revealed. It was “the completeness of exposure” and “the certainty of stratigraphic position,” Noble would write, that attracted him, “the diagrammatic simplicity” and the fact that the walls of the Grand Canyon were, as yet, “undescribed in absolute detail.” And there was another attraction: The mile-wide canyon with giant tiered walls was “lonely and inaccessible,” an ideal place where Noble, perhaps for the first time in his life, could find solitude and work alone.

  He returned in August 1908 to begin the first detailed study of the walls of the Grand Canyon. For four months he lived inside the canyon, returning to Bass Camp on the south rim only twice, once in September and again in November, both times for a week. During those months of work, a man named John Walthenburg, who served as canyon guide, mule tender, and camp organizer, also served as his field assistant. Years later, maintaining a close friendship, Noble would hire Walthenburg to work for him after he moved to California.

  With no prior field experience—college courses in geology then consisted of classroom lectures and the occasional nature walk when philosophy, not geology, was usually discussed—Noble sampled, studied, and described the many layers exposed in the canyon walls. He also measured the thickness of each layer as it was exposed along the Bass Trail, using a foot-long wooden ruler to make the measurements. For a layer
of limestone and shale located near the base of the trail, which he named the Bass Limestone in honor of William Bass, Noble determined the layer consisted of 74 separate units—which included a white cherty limestone and a lamellar blue shale with concretionary structures, both first described by Noble—that had a total thickness, according to his careful measurements, of 304 feet, 9 inches.

  One outcome of his work is familiar to anyone who visits and treks into the Grand Canyon today: Levi Noble named most of the layers exposed in the canyon walls.

  Before Noble began his work, only one layer had a formal name: the Redwall Limestone, a 500-foot-thick cliff-forming limestone exposed in the upper section of the canyon wall and named by Grove Karl Gilbert in 1875. Names were given to three other layers in 1910—four years before Noble published his work—by Nelson Horatio Darton, a government geologist who had been sent to Arizona to find sources of water for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. Darton worked at the Grand Canyon for only two weeks, and to him are owed the naming of the Kaibab Formation, the Coconino Sandstone, and the Supai Formation, all lying above the Redwall Limestone.

  Noble named the Hermit Shale, which he found sandwiched between the Coconino Sandstone and the Supai Formation, as well as the Muav Limestone, the Bright Angel Shale, and the Tapeats Sandstone. Deeper in the canyon, he identified the Cardenas Lavas, the Dox Sandstone—which he named after Virginia Dox, an early educator in the American West who had flaming red hair that matched the color of the sandstone—the Shinumo Quartzite, the Hakatai Shale, and, as already noted, the Bass Limestone.

  Noble returned to Yale in December 1908, and the next June presented his work to the Yale faculty. For his effort, he was given the college’s highest degree, a doctorate. Then, impressed by the thoroughness and quickness of his work, the federal government hired him as a geologist. And he gladly accepted—with an interesting proposal: He agreed to accept a government job if he was paid no salary. That way he would have the standing of a professional geologist—such as Darton and Gilbert—but for the most part he could choose what topics interested him and what he would study, since he would not be at the behest of grants or other economic interests. The federal government readily agreed. And for the next 43 years he worked as a federal civil servant—without pay.

  In 1910, Noble was set to return to Arizona and resume his work at the Grand Canyon and the surrounding area when fate intervened. He had fallen in love. And the woman he fell in love with lived in California. It would be she who would direct his extraordinary talents as a field geologist away from the Grand Canyon to a feature that, in the years since 1906, had been fading from scientific interest—the San Andreas Fault.

  Levi Noble and Dorothy Evans met through her younger brother, Deane Mann Evans, who was a student at Yale studying metallurgy. The courtship was a short one. On July 7, 1910, Noble and Evans married in Philadelphia, her hometown, and then they traveled across the country to Arizona.

  The next two weeks are a mystery—as honeymoons often are; in this case, the newlyweds simply disappeared into the desert. Where they went, what they did, or what they saw was never told. But this much is certain: Dorothy, who had been raised in Pennsylvania and who was now living with her parents in Los Angeles, came away enchanted by the desert. The beauty of a desolate landscape struck her immediately—in the same manner her husband had been struck when he first saw the Grand Canyon—and she came away with a desire to live in a desert environment. So it came as a pleasant surprise, once the newlywed couple reached Los Angeles, that her father offered them the chance to do exactly that.

  Dorothy’s father, Cadwallader “Doc” Evans, who had made his money designing and patenting safety devices for the steel and iron industries of Pittsburgh, had brought his family to southern California during a series of short stays in the 1890s to escape the northeast winters. By 1900, he had decided they would stay permanently and he was soon heavily invested in real estate. He owned a large parcel close to Long Beach next to Signal Hill, where in 1921 a large oil field would be discovered. Another parcel was located west of Los Angeles among vineyards and barley fields. Once known as Cahuenga Valley, it is today known as Hollywood. A third was a large fruit ranch nestled against the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains and on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Evans asked: Would the newlyweds be willing to accept one of these parcels as a wedding present?

  Yes, they would. They chose the fruit ranch because it was remote and on the edge of a desert and—as Levi knew, having read Lawson’s report of the 1906 earthquake published just two years earlier—the San Andreas Fault ran through it.

  Known as Valyermo, a contraction of the Spanish words valle yermo or “barren valley,” the ranch was truly barren except for a strip of land right at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. Here was an impermeable barrier that forced groundwater to rise near the surface, in places within 20 feet, thus providing a plentiful supply of fresh water for the acres of fruit trees. And, as Noble would eventually show, the barrier was a consequence of the San Andreas Fault.

  Though both Levi and Dorothy had been raised in extravagant households, they accepted the modest six-room frame house that already existed at Valyermo, adding, at considerable expense, both electricity and a telephone.

  Levi also took one of the small storage sheds and converted it into a private study, choosing this particular shed because, as best as he could determine, it lay directly across the trace of the San Andreas Fault. If he was lucky, he would tell friends, he would be at work in his study when the next big earthquake struck and he would be able to see the approach of the ground crack merely by looking out a window.

  Most years, the Nobles wintered at Valyermo and summered at the Grand Canyon, where Levi continued to investigate the walls. They also made at least annual trips to the East Coast to live for a few weeks at the mansion in Auburn—which Levi had now inherited and which was under the care of a permanent staff—and to stay in hotels in New York City. While in New York, they rummaged through bookstores for rare books. They had their clothes tailor-made at Brooks Brothers, Levi favoring bright shirts. One design in particular, of which he had several made, was a yellow shirt with red polka dots. He had a suit made up in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, his favorite fictional character, complete with a long cape and a double-billed cap, claiming that this attire was the most practical for geologic fieldwork because it offered both freedom of movement and protection from the sun.

  They also favored luxury cars, at one point owning two Jaguars, one kept at the Auburn mansion and the other at Valyermo. For a field vehicle for use in the California desert, the government purchased a Model A modified with extra-low gears and a high clearance. Levi had it painted bright red so that he could easily spot where he parked it in the desert.

  During the First World War, Levi was asked by the federal government to survey around Death Valley for nitrate deposits that could supply the munitions industry. As a result, he and Dorothy established a third house in the small town of Shoshone, this one extremely primitive, being constructed of abandoned railroad ties.

  His work on the San Andreas Fault began in earnest after the war in 1920 and continued for three years. He focused on a 50-mile segment centered on Valyermo that ran from Soledad Pass south of Lancaster to Cajon Pass north of San Bernardino. It would be along this segment that he would identify many of the more subtle features that would begin to explain what the San Andreas Fault was and how it worked.

  As noted in an earlier chapter, before the 1906 earthquake Harold Fairbanks, one of Lawson’s former students, had traveled along the same segment of the San Andreas Fault that Noble was to study intensely. Fairbanks made a second trip just months after the earthquake, and with the varied scenes of that event fresh in his mind—having seen and followed the “mole track” and noting, as others did, how it ran along an alignment of hollows and ridges—he saw the same type of features aligned along the remarkably stra
ight boundary between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Mojave Desert.

  Noble, of course, recognized the same alignment of features—and much more.

  By following the edges of individual scarps, ridges, and depressions, he could identify what he called “the master fault.” And bordering the master fault was a zone, in places as much as six miles wide, of parallel branching and interlacing fractures. The zone, in essence, consisted of slivers of blocks or wedges whose long axes paralleled the master fault so that, in his words, “the dominant structure is a sort of slicing.”

  And within this zone of fractures and wedges he found a curious feature: a belt, a few hundred feet wide, of thoroughly crushed and shattered rock. Close inspection revealed that the rock was actually a powdery granite, evidently pulverized by repeated movements of the fault to form a “fault gouge,” the term first used 40 years earlier by miners who uncovered such friable material at the offset ends of mineral veins.

  Fault gouge is the bane of road builders. The material has the structural integrity of clay and when mixed with water turns into a soft paste. It clings to everything, is nearly impossible to walk on, and causes heavy equipment to get mired in a muck that seems to have no bottom.

  Noble recognized fault gouge along several sections of the San Andreas Fault that he studied. The most spectacular section is a few miles west of Valyermo, where today a highway swings through a series of sharp curves, both to climb a steep slope and to avoid, as much as possible, the soft gouge. Here a badlands landscape has formed—best seen near Appletree Campground—of steep ravines and crumbling knife-edge ridges. The gouge has the feel of talcum powder. It is impervious to water—which is why the San Andreas and other faults act as underground dams, forcing groundwater to the surface and resulting in springs like the one that fed the Nobles’ fruit farm. And if one stands back and looks at a large exposure, it is possible to see subtle bands of color that were in the original granite, indicating that this rock is in situ—pulverized in place as if it were caught in a vise.