Odd Stones...

On our neighbor's property, there's a hill that lies due west of our home. Near the top of this hill, on its eastern slope (facing our home), there's a sloped expanse of exposed granite with a peculiar collection of rocks on it. The oddest one is in the foreground of both photos; it actually has a sort of “tripod” that it rests upon.

I don't actually how these rocks were formed, or how they came to be where they are. I can imagine both an entirely natural process (boulder falls from above, rolls to a stop where it is today, then erodes into this odd shape) and an entirely anthropomorphic process (a gang of kids or adults rolls a nearby boulder into place, then shapes it with sledges). I'm inclined to favor the natural process, as there's nothing about this rock that looks “manufactured” to me. But who knows? Maybe the perpetrators were drunk!

In any case, this exposed stretch of granite with its odd sculptures is a place we often stop at the mid-point of one of our walks. There's a fine view from here, including one of our home seen from a perspective that's very different than our usual one. In the photo above, you can see Gaskill Peak (to the left) and the several peaks that form Lawson Peak (to the right). The hill in the middle distance (with some large pines jutting up from it) is the hill we live on, below and to the left of what's visible in the photo, on the north face.

A couple of years ago, I heard (and I've forgotten where) about a fascinating study done of balanced rocks in our area. Some geologist had a very bright idea: that the balanced rocks could be used as a sort of recording seismograph. It's possible to compute the force (and therefore the size of the earthquake) required to dislodge a balanced rock. From other evidence, one can make a good estimate of when a rock was dislodged. On the other hand, one can also infer the absence of earthquakes from balanced rocks that have not been dislodged. By studying thousands of these rocks all over the southern California and northern Mexico, the geologist was able to develop maps of major earthquakes over the past 150,000 years. The connection: the two rocks above were part of that study.