Hi All. When I was stationed at Edwards AFB in 1966 I would venture out on the Mojave Desert on the weekends to see what I could find.

One of the places in particular that I go to was Jawbone Canyon. It was about the most desolate place you could go to. I had obtained permission from William Sheera to go on his ranch and it was while on one of these trips on his ranch that I got the impression there was a fault in the area. I could see the various rock strata had been, or was being pushed upwards and in some areas it was being bent. My knowledge of faults at the time was next to nil. It wasn’t until Petra took me over to the coast to see where the San Andreas fault was cutting through the rock and what it was doing the rocks in the area that I knew my initial thoughts about the Jawbone Canyon area were correct. They were being bent in the same manner as what I had seen on the Onyx Ranch and in Jawbone Canyon it self.

A little more then a year ago I obtained the fault map from California. One of the first things I looked for was to see if there was one in Jawbone Canyon. Sure enough there it was. Jawbone fault and just a little to the south is the Garlock fault.

One of the things I remember about the fault in Jawbone Canyon is that the aqueduct that brings the water from Northern California to Southern California crosses over the fault. I suspect that this fault is the Garlock fault.

Most of the rock I found in the area was sedimentary, but there was some basalt and granite. However I didn’t get the impression that there was a lot of volcanics in the area, but I could be wrong. Based on what I know now as opposed to what I knew then it’s most likely that I am wrong.

One of the things that always fascinated me was how a stream would disappear underground only to appear at the surface again a couple of hundred yards away. Most of these streams were in the bottom of steep canyons. One of the first things I learned was that when I heard a noise that sounded like thunder was to climb the canyon wall as fast as I could as there was a flash flood coming down the canyon. The flood was caused by rain in the mountains to the west. A wall of water would wash everything in its way downstream.

Even to this day I can still remember some of the things I found while traipsing around that area. One of the things I found was a eucalyptus grove in an open flat area. Have no idea as to why it was put there. There were no roads leading into it anywhere. There had to be a source of water from somewhere as the tress where healthy and from the amount of debris found on the ground it had been there for sometime. I asked Mr. Sherra about it and he had no idea.

I also found a lot of mica in the area as well as agate and some opal. The opal however wasn’t a very good quality. In one of the canyons I did a little panning for gold. In a weekend I got almost 2 ounces of it. I can tell you right now it’s not my idea of a way to make a fast fortune, or ever a slow one for that matter. It was a lot of hard work for a very small gain. Not my idea of a way to make a living. Take Care…Don in creepy town