Pepper Trail | Natural History

THE MOUNTAINS OF PARADOX

Originally Published in:
Intricate Homeland: Collected Writings from the Klamath Siskiyou, ed. by Susan Cross. Headwaters Press, 2000

The Klamath-Siskiyou region has always been difficult of approach. In the beginning, 250 million years ago, it was born as an island in the Pacific. Today it lies buried like an ancient arrowhead in the flank of North America, but it is an island still: a place apart, isolated by its geology, its geography, and by the very depths of time it has lived through, and that it seems to hold undisturbed in its deep valleys.

To the traveler on foot, the Klamath-Siskiyou throws up series of hardscrabble ridges, cloaked in poison oak and more often than not leading nowhere at all. To the traveler in the imagination, it is encompassed by formidable thickets of arbitrary names and wavering boundaries, of hyphens, qualified adjectives, and faint praise. Here, rocks, plants, animals, and people all contend with expectations, and usually win. It is not a place where first impressions are likely to be useful. To enter the Klamath-Siskiyou is to venture into the mountains of paradox.

Rocks
Toward the end of his life, the great naturalist John Muir explored the fringes of the Klamath-Siskiyou. Even this most lyrical of writers found himself groping for words as he tried to summon up enthusiasm for the country around Mt. Shasta: “The main lines of the landscape are immensely bold and simple, and so regular that it needs all its shaggy wealth of woods and chaparral and its finely tinted ice and snow and brown jutting crags to keep it from looking conventional.” Muir could not help but compare this landscape to his beloved Sierra Nevada, that “range of light” whose polished granite glows like sun-warmed skin. A century later, the ability to resist such comparisons remains a first requisite for those who would enter the wrinkled ranges of Klamath and Siskiyou with open eyes.

Instead of flawless purity, the rocks of the Klamath-Siskiyou are fiendishly complex --and devilishly interesting. If Sierran granite is the stone of heaven, the Klamath-Siskiyou is clad in more infernal stuff: serpentine and peridotite. One green and slick, the other red and rough, these two rock types share a common origin in the immense pressures deep beneath the earth. This stressful birth left behind residues that have profoundly influenced the evolution of life in the Klamath-Siskiyou, and that today lie at the root of some of the most impassioned conflicts in the region.

		THE MOUNTAINS OF PARADOX Originally Published in: Intricate Homeland: Collected Writings from the Klamath Siskiyou, ed. by Susan Cross. Headwaters Press, 2000 The Klamath-Siskiyou region has always been difficult of approach. In the beginning, 250 million years ago, it was born as an island in the Pacific. Today it lies buried like an ancient arrowhead in the flank of North America, but it is an island still: a place apart, isolated by its geology, its geography, and by the very depths of time it has lived through, and that it seems to hold undisturbed in its deep valleys. To the traveler on foot, the Klamath-Siskiyou throws up series of hardscrabble ridges, cloaked in poison oak and more often than not leading nowhere at all. To the traveler in the imagination, it is encompassed by formidable thickets of arbitrary names and wavering boundaries, of hyphens, qualified adjectives, and faint praise. Here, rocks, plants, animals, and people all contend with expectations, and usually win. It is not a place where first impressions are likely to be useful. To enter the Klamath-Siskiyou is to venture into the mountains of paradox. Rocks Toward the end of his life, the great naturalist John Muir explored the fringes of the Klamath-Siskiyou. Even this most lyrical of writers found himself groping for words as he tried to summon up enthusiasm for the country around Mt. Shasta: “The main lines of the landscape are immensely bold and simple, and so regular that it needs all its shaggy wealth of woods and chaparral and its finely tinted ice and snow and brown jutting crags to keep it from looking conventional.” Muir could not help but compare this landscape to his beloved Sierra Nevada, that “range of light” whose polished granite glows like sun-warmed skin. A century later, the ability to resist such comparisons remains a first requisite for those who would enter the wrinkled ranges of Klamath and Siskiyou with open eyes. Instead of flawless purity, the rocks of the Klamath-Siskiyou are fiendishly complex --and devilishly interesting. If Sierran granite is the stone of heaven, the Klamath-Siskiyou is clad in more infernal stuff: serpentine and peridotite. One green and slick, the other red and rough, these two rock types share a common origin in the immense pressures deep beneath the earth. This stressful birth left behind residues that have profoundly influenced the evolution of life in the Klamath-Siskiyou, and that today lie at the root of some of the most impassioned conflicts in the region.