Hi All. My partner in crime and I had a nice trip to Parkfield Sat.

We took a little trip out to the end of Turkey Flat Road. Nothing there except two gates, of which one

led to a ranch that you had use binoculars to see. We got to see the outer edge of the rhyolite volcano that we were told about. Wished we could have gotten a little closer, but it was on private property and all the gates had locks on them so there was no way we could drive to any of the ranches and ask permission to access their land.

We went back to the Parkfield Inn and had lunch and while we were there I talked to Donnlee Thomson. She told me we could see a part of the caldera from Grapevine Road, but we would only be able to see the eastern inside edge of the caldera. What we saw was a typical rhyolite volcano. It had self destructed as most of them do.

On the way home I decided to take the road to Coalinga and then take highway 25 north to Hollister. This would also give us a chance to follow the San Andreas fault. I’m going to have to take Petra down there. She would find more rocks then she would know what to do with. That plus being able to take a walk in the fault.

It has been years since the last time I was down in that area. It’s not a place you want to have car trouble in. Not many people travel that road, and house are few and between.

I must admit that I was much more impressed with that crack in the ground known as the San Andreas fault, now that I have a better understanding of it. The fault shows itself very plainly in the Bitterwater area. That’s a place you don’t want to blink when you pass through it or you will miss it.

As you start getting closer to the Pinnacles you can see the fault moving towards the west to pass the Pinnacles to the west more or less. You can intercept in again when you turn on to Cienega Road. This is the road where the gentleman from the San Francisco built his winery after the 1906 earthquake knocked down the one he had in San Francisco. For right now it doesn’t look like this one will be knocked down, but it is being torn in two. He built his winery on top of the San Andreas fault. He said he wanted to build it where they didn’t have any earthquakes. Well we don’t have any quakes here. At least not big ones anyway. However the old fault just keeps moving along. One little bump after another. Never seems to stop. Take Care…Don in creepy town