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The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Here at the academy The Making of HOTSPOT It’s a clear moonless night in midsummer at over
10,000 feet, and I am fending off a nauseating altitude sickness headache
while sinking and sliding across snow. Once in awhile, I catch a glimpse
of movement in the bright beam of my headlamp and bend down to examine
the surface more closely. We have been searching for over an hour now
with Then, in the direction of a faint headlamp glow, I hear Academy beetle expert Dave Kavanaugh yell “Got one!” Quickly, we converge on what we have all been looking for—an inch-long black beetle, Nebria sierrae. Its long legs and rapid scuttling has earned it the common name of gazelle beetle. Encouraged, we continue scanning the snowfields around frigid Saddlebag Lake in the eastern Sierra Nevada. Soon we all begin finding Nebria, gently plucking them from the snow with our bare hands and placing them in vials for safe travel back to San Francisco. By night’s end our combined catch equals 38 beetles, all destined for a home in the exhibit halls of the Academy. Our trip to the high Sierra was one of 18 taken this summer by the Academy’s exhibit team. Our goal: to collect specimens, photographs and stories for HOTSPOT: California on the Edge. The exhibit showcases California’s rich geological and biological diversity, including vernal pools, coast redwood forests, and the Klamath Siskiyou Wilderness. Not since Life Through Time, assembled nearly two decades ago, has the Academy undertaken such extensive research and fieldwork for a single exhibit. Our team included an entomologist, a botanist, an invertebrate zoologist, and exhibit designers. Colleagues Elizabeth Kools, Mona Bourell, and I researched the stories and, as it turned out, schlepped a lot of rocks and timber too. We began in early June after weeks of planning where and when we needed to go to obtain specimens for the exhibit. With a wish list of animals and plants in hand, exhibit designer Marco Centin and I took a 1,200-mile journey to the Academy’s Trinity Alps Field Station and Lassen Volcanic National Park. The Trinity Alps lie within the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion, an area that owes its rich assemblage of plants and animals, many found nowhere else, to a complex geological history. The magnificent views of snow-capped mountain ranges and lush alpine meadows are reminiscent of the Swiss Alps. As on any expedition, we devoted much precious time to solving logistical problems. The rough, seven-mile dirt road that leads to the preserve proved too much for our aging pickup truck’s tires. The surprising absence of a jack made changing the flat a major ordeal. Marco and property manager Steve Craig struggled to raise the truck’s tire high enough off the ground by ingeniously swapping out logs of several sizes and scrap lumber to build a fulcrum. After struggling for an hour or more, they showed that Greek mathematician Archimedes might have been right when he said “give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world.” We had even less luck with the weather. An unexpected snowstorm cramped our insect collecting, but the rocks were more cooperative and we amassed examples of blue schist, green serpentine, and sparkling granodiorite amid the cold, persistent drizzle. Frustrated but undeterred, we ventured out to find some plants. Uprooting, snipping, and photographing, we added sopping wet bundles of plants to our cache. Slowly meandering up the road that skirts Coffee Creek, we witnessed the toll years of gold mining have taken on local rivers and streams; banks of abandoned tailings taller than a city bus snaked along waterways for miles, blocking rivulets and changing stream courses. Driving southeast, we couldn’t shake the bone-chilling rain and intermittent snow flurries of Lassen Volcanic National Park. All four types of volcanoes are found within the park’s boundaries: cinder cones, which typically erupt only once in their lifetime; plug domes like Lassen Peak, which sometimes grow along the flanks of larger volcanoes; steep-sided composite volcanoes built from layers of volcanic flows, ash, cinders, and lava blocks and bombs; and, most impressive of all, the gently sloping shield volcanoes, built over millions of years into exquisite symmetrical cones. We planned to collect examples of the region’s volcanic, or igneous, rocks for the exhibit. Exhibit chairman Linda Kulik and photographer Dong Lin photographed the park’s many bubbling mudpots and steaming fumaroles. The crust around them is so unstable that it can break like thin ice. Scalding steam and the stench of rotten eggs was enough to keep me from lingering for long. The belching gray mud, roiling milky water, and fearsome rumblings from below conjure up visions of fire and brimstone. At Lassen, United States Geological Survey geologist and volcano hazards expert Mike Clynne introduced us to the term “fresh rock.” To get it, you must whack pieces off huge boulders and expose their unweathered, pristine state. We found a chunk of the massive dacite lava dome that blew off the top of Lassen Peak in May 1915, a 1.4-million-year-old “polka dot rock,” and andesite, sprinkled with deep green pyroxene crystals that erupted from extinct Mount Maidu. A later trip to the Lassen area to get more rocks and photographs truly tested my strength and endurance. On the fourth day of trudging up, down, and around the craggy volcanic terrain, we embarked upon a day-long hike to Red Cinder, an 8,375-foot-high volcano, to retrieve a section of ropy, red basaltic andesite from its top. Having been at altitudes above 10,000 feet in the Sierra two weeks earlier, I was sure this would be a piece of cake. That morning, I cheerfully followed Academy colleague and accomplished climber Barb Andrews into the mountains. Navigating with only a topographic map and her memory of landmarks, she led graphic designer Sterling Larrimore, Centin, and I off trail through a dense forest. Occasionally, we climbed to the top of a hill where Andrews would pull out her map, study it for a bit, look around, nod to herself, and then lead us back down again. This went on for several hours until I realized what was happening—she was making sure we were still headed in the right direction. I thought to myself, the next time she heads up a hill, I’ll wait to see what she does before I follow her. After several hours of this, the shooting pains in my muscles had drained the fun from my afternoon. Whose idea was it to get this rock anyway? The sight of Red Cinder delivered my second wind. The summit was breathtaking in more ways than one. There lay a 360-degree panoramic spread: Lassen Peak, Chaos Crags, Cinder Cone, Prospect Peak, remnants of once-massive Brokeoff Volcano, and, 100 miles to the north, Mount Shasta. At the end of the day, I made it back to camp in one piece, my trust in Andrews—and my admiration for California’s wild places—still intact. Roberta Brett is an entomologist and exhibit content developer at the California Academy of Sciences. |