Hi All. While looking for any new data concerning the Rodgers Creek fault I came across this little tidbit.

It seems there is a hill which is known as Gravity Hill where cars don’t do what you would think they would or should do when sitting on hill with the transmission in neutral and no brakes. They roll backwards up the hill instead of down it. That is of course if you driving down the hill, but then maybe you’re not driving down the hill, but instead you are diving up the hill. Confusing huh?

Well it seems there is an area of Lichau Road east of Rohnert Park where just such a thing happens. There is a stretch of road where the people drive their cars around the sharp bend in the road and halfway down the hill, then throw their engines into neutral and let go of the brake. Cars will roll backwards -- up the hill. According to Terry Wright, it's an optical illusion and nothing more.

However Fenwick Rysen (curator of Chaos Matrix) offered another explanation. After studying the hill with an engineer's compass, a level and a pendulum, he concluded that the gravity is misaligned by approximately 12 degrees in the direction 14 degrees south of due west (256 degrees). He felt that "the stretch that fools with gravity seems to be an energy line that the road just happened to cross for that small portion."

Now I don’t know about you, but this I have got to see. Petra has a carpenters level, I have a lenstatic compass and I can make pendulum with some string and a fishing sinker.

Now all I have to do is convince Petra that I have been up that road before, which of course I haven’t, but I won’t tell her that. She doesn’t like going on new roads unless there is something there she really wants to see. I’m still trying to figure out how she is going to ride with me when we take our four day trip into the wilderness near Shasta, Medicine Lake and the Lava National Monument. I’m real curious to see how she is going to manage to take the trip with me to Chester in the wee hours of the morning so I can take her to breakfast at Copper Kettle. For those who may be traveling that way this is the place to stop for breakfast. Unless you are big eaters I recommend ordering the half breakfast. The lumberjacks in the area have their breakfast there and they are known for eating a large breakfast, correction, make that a huge breakfast. Take Care…Don in creepy town.

• Gravity Hill