Hi Mark. Ah yes. No sounds of traffic. There was a time when you could get yourself to a place where it would take six months for a phone call to reach you. Not anymore.

I have the good fortune of having friends who own ranches and have given me the combinations to their gates so I can come and go as I wish.

One ranch I go to is located in Griswold Canyon. It has some of the strangest rock formations I have ever seen. When I first saw them I took them to be volcanic in nature, but a friend on mine who is a retired geologist said there were sedimentary and were very young, but had no idea as to how they were formed the way they were.

Some appear to have flowed out of the ground while others appear to have been pushed out of the ground, while others appear to have formed on top of a hill in then another hill placed on top of it. They are filled with holes of various sizes. Some are big enough that you can crawl into them while others are so small you can barely get your little finger into it. The surface on some is very smooth while on others it is sort of rough. The color is mostly a light shade of brown or tan while the area surrounding is much darker.

Griswold Canyon is the entrance way to the New Idria quicksilver mines, which by the way are no longer operational. However they still have a big mess there with mercury contamination. Due to the run off during the rainy season the ranchers are no longer able to use the upper pastures. One of these days I will e-mail some pictures to Canie and she can post them. I think she has the capability to do that. If not then I will post them on our site. Petra can do that with no problem. At least I think she can.

Further up the mountain are some old asbestos strip mines. These have also shut down and the equipment left there to rust. There is a small lake not to far from here that is so full of asbestos that not even birds will drink from it. This area is full of serpentine, which is a green colored rock. I understand that this kind of rock is usually found where there has been volcanics of some kind. I can’t say that I have ever found any other material that would indicate volcanics, but further north on another ranch I have found basalt on top of some of the higher ridges and a find layer of pumice on some of the lower ones.

One ranch I go on has some sulfur springs in which the water is so cold you can’t keep your hand in it for much more then a minute. You can smell them from about 200 yards away if the wind is right. It is in this area that Call Mountain fault is located. It is about two miles north of the springs. There may be a relationship between the fault and the springs, but have no way of knowing if this is the case of not. I’m not 100% sure of this, but I think the springs are located a little higher then the fault. There is a small range of hills between the fault and the springs so I can’t really tell.

Anyway this is my area for getting away from it all. By the way I don’t eat the ground squirrels, as there is nothing left of them when I shoot them. Also they don’t squeal when hit. They don’t have the time, as they never know what hit them. The pigs on the other hand are very good eating. Some of the best meat I have ever eaten. The meat is very white with almost no fat at all. Take Care…Don in creepy town