Rick Courtright
Hawkeye
Hi,
Lots of jokes are made of CA falling into the ocean! Could it happen? Who knows... but IF "The Big One" comes, a few scientists feel it's gonna happen in our desert east of here, with an epicenter not all that far from where these pictures were taken.
A buddy and I were out this morning, scouting some possible dove hunting spots for Monday's opener, and decided to add a little fun to the trip. He works for the county transportation department, and was assigned to a yard near the foot of this hill until they moved him recently. His boss had told him about how the San Andreas Fault ran right along the back side of it, and he wanted to actually go up and see what's there. So we took a little ride (with apologies for cell phone pix):
Starting the climb, a little ridge can be seen near the top left thru the windshield. There's part of it which looks like a small slide, where the left corner of the mirror is pointing. That's where we're headed:
There's a "road" that goes up most of the way, which got the oil in the 4wd-Lo part of the transfer case warmed up nicely. Turns out the fault had a bad case of the jitters some years back, and just opened up. This is where the rift begins:
The split in the earth runs basically west to east. From the shadow which faces almost due west, we pan a couple of hundred yards to the east where we see that "little" slide drops down pretty quickly. The top of that hill is maybe 450 ft in elevation, and the drop off isn't visible on this side, but it's easily a couple of hundred feet almost straight down from the edge:
Continuing to the east, things open up some, and get even deeper:
Finally what we could see opens up to the desert floor, and appears to come to an end about the middle of the little hill in the center, but it turns and continues around the right end a ways. That's actually close to a couple of miles away:
There's a good and a bad side to the trip's story... the bad being we found lots of doves, but they were all in people's yards and holding tight! The good? We didn't have any earthquakes while we were up there, but if we had, you're looking at the view from future beach front property, as we were on the "good" side! And one of my buddy's coworkers from the "old" yard met us for breakfast later, bringing a load of mesquite he'd cut on his property so we could enjoy a couple of barbecues watching sunsets from that beach! Wonder how long we've gotta wait?
Rick C
Lots of jokes are made of CA falling into the ocean! Could it happen? Who knows... but IF "The Big One" comes, a few scientists feel it's gonna happen in our desert east of here, with an epicenter not all that far from where these pictures were taken.
A buddy and I were out this morning, scouting some possible dove hunting spots for Monday's opener, and decided to add a little fun to the trip. He works for the county transportation department, and was assigned to a yard near the foot of this hill until they moved him recently. His boss had told him about how the San Andreas Fault ran right along the back side of it, and he wanted to actually go up and see what's there. So we took a little ride (with apologies for cell phone pix):
Starting the climb, a little ridge can be seen near the top left thru the windshield. There's part of it which looks like a small slide, where the left corner of the mirror is pointing. That's where we're headed:
There's a "road" that goes up most of the way, which got the oil in the 4wd-Lo part of the transfer case warmed up nicely. Turns out the fault had a bad case of the jitters some years back, and just opened up. This is where the rift begins:
The split in the earth runs basically west to east. From the shadow which faces almost due west, we pan a couple of hundred yards to the east where we see that "little" slide drops down pretty quickly. The top of that hill is maybe 450 ft in elevation, and the drop off isn't visible on this side, but it's easily a couple of hundred feet almost straight down from the edge:
Continuing to the east, things open up some, and get even deeper:
Finally what we could see opens up to the desert floor, and appears to come to an end about the middle of the little hill in the center, but it turns and continues around the right end a ways. That's actually close to a couple of miles away:
There's a good and a bad side to the trip's story... the bad being we found lots of doves, but they were all in people's yards and holding tight! The good? We didn't have any earthquakes while we were up there, but if we had, you're looking at the view from future beach front property, as we were on the "good" side! And one of my buddy's coworkers from the "old" yard met us for breakfast later, bringing a load of mesquite he'd cut on his property so we could enjoy a couple of barbecues watching sunsets from that beach! Wonder how long we've gotta wait?
Rick C
