Wednesday, March 24, 2021

How To Disappear A Mountain


The Mazamas mountaineering club was founded in 1894 by a fellow named William Gladstone Steel, who was a journalist, mountain guide, and mailman. Back then you could have all the jobs because the world was fresh and new and not because you had to do gig work just to cover the rent.

Mailman Steel then named Mt. Mazama after his club, even though the mountain no longer existed, having blown to bits about 7700 years ago, leaving its caldera, Crater Lake. Crater Lake had been discovered only a few years earlier. Rumors persist that it had existed long before that but only the indigenous peoples knew about it and they named it wrong, so it didn't officially count. Mr. Steel was fifteen and living in Kansas when his mom wrapped his lunch in a newspaper that contained an article about the lake. Fifteen years later he traveled by rail and stagecoach to Fort Klamath and walked twenty miles to find it. He spent the next fifteen or so years lobbying Congress to make a park out of it, because mailmen can multitask.

So how do they know Mt. Mazama blew up 7700 years ago? This is why geologists are the coolest: they can take a chunk out of a roadcut and intuit a billion years of earth history before breakfast. The Mazama bit was easy. That volcano blew out enough crap to coat the territory for thousands of miles and the orange Mazama ash layer can be used to stick a pin in time anywhere it's found. Throw in a deposit of seriously charred trees that can be carbon-dated and you've got your story nailed down.

Generally speaking these calderas are not formed because the middle of the mountain got blown into the stratosphere. It's all the stuff well below ground that gets ralphed up, leaving a hollowed-out space, and, after a brief period of hanging in mid-air like a cartoon coyote, the mountain notices and collapses into the gap.

Nineteenth-century geologists, many of whom were also coach drivers, botanists, and pizza deliverers, did not know this is how calderas are formed. But the native population did. Chief Lalek of the Klamath tribe explained it all to a young white soldier in 1865. There had been people in the area for at least 10,000 years--we know, because we've found their sagebrush shoes--and evidently they listened to their parents, because the legend has survived to this day. It was the usual story. Underworld God meets pretty girl, invites her to live forever in his company, pretty girl's tribe hides her, god gets mad and starts pitching flaming rocks at everybody. All hell breaks loose. A wise elder prescribes a human sacrifice, and he and an equally old man discuss the matter, agree to leave the young people out of it, and--after what Chief Lalek said was "a period of silence," followed by a muttered "Oh shit," they trudge up the mountain and jump in. Overworld God is impressed, drives Underworld God back underground, and the mountain collapses on him.

Which is a pretty specific and geologically accurate scenario to have survived in the collective memory for so long--especially since this was several thousand years before Real God created the heavens and the earth.

The Klamath tribes were fond of Crater Lake, and disinclined to tell white people about it, because it was a sacred site. Basically, they knew white people would fuck it all up.

Some of them found it anyway, in 1853, when a man named Skeeters, which is a totally normal 19th-century name, led a band of eleven miners to the region in search of gold. They thought the lake was nice, and told people about it, and named it Deep Blue Lake because they were just that imaginative, but fortunately for the pristine blue waters everyone forgot all about it because there wasn't any gold. It remains a stroke of luck to this day to live on land devoid of oil or coal or precious minerals.

So let us now praise unknown men and women who know how to keep a legend alive across hundreds of generations, and let us not mock their god stories. We have no room to talk. We've got Jewish space lasers and lizard people, we can't remember what happened last week, and our shoes fall apart in no time.

26 comments:

  1. And the lake seems to be in such a pleasant setting. All that potable water right there. I'm halfway through Meave Leakey's intense memoir, "Sediments of Time" describing her research in the most dreadful places in Africa. Baking heat and drought, blankets of flies and ticks, not much to eat, and sieving rivers of sand for fragments of fossilized bone while fending off the violence of camp-robbers. She battled for every grain of knowledge the earth could give back. I'm in awe of people like her. Also, it's a really good book!

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    1. At first I thought you were describing a depiction of modern life in parts of Africa and I could NOT figure out why a person in need would sieve through rivers of sand for bits of bone, and then I saw the author's name. Oh!

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  2. I, on the other hand, am reading a book about the Green River Killer and pretty as Oregon and Washington are, all I can think about right now are clusters of body dumps. Covid lockdown has turned me into a ghoul.

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    1. They say the lockdown brings out who you really are...

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    2. You too? I am not a fan of "found" poetry, but I just couldn’t resist when I learned from the Humane Society that Seventeen people have died from "large constrictor snake related incidents" in the United States since 1978, so I wrote down the opening words of each of 15 incident reports dating back to 2007, in the order in which they were presented by the Humane Society, and plan to read it at an open mic as if it were a poem, which it isn't:

      Four babies sleeping in their cribs
      Unsuspecting people
      Experienced reptile handlers and novices alike
      All of the giant constrictors have demonstrated an appetite for dogs
      Frightened residents have discovered
      Constrictor snakes have found warmth and shelter
      Constrictor snakes have been spotted sunning themselves
      Police departments have issued community alerts
      Pet constrictor-snakes may suffer from starvation
      Firefighters already risk their lives
      Authorities have confiscated
      A teen reaching for her alarm clock
      A 15-foot, 140-pound Burmese python brought to a Halloween party
      A family filed a $50,000 lawsuit
      A teenager making lemonade started screaming

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    3. That is some awesome *found* poetry, right there 😎

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    4. This thread has really taken a turn.

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  3. The lakes I am surrounded by in Michigan all came into existence much more slowly, having been scraped out by glaciers.

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  4. And still we chalk up those old histories (if we hear them) as myth and fantasy.

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    1. Isn't it amazing that this legend survived 7600 years?

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    2. Conversely, people accept myth and fantasy as history. (Old Testament, I'm lookin' at YOU.)

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  5. Great story! We have a landmark near here called Father Baraga's Cross. Father Baraga found himself on the Wisconsin shore of the lake and wanted to preach to people on the Minnesota side. He hired a local Indian to take him across. A big storm blew up and Baraga thought he was a goner. They made it and Baraga erected a wooden cross to god for getting him across safely. He forgot to thank the local native for getting his sorry carcass across the lake alive, but hey, there is a granite cross there now.

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  6. Crater Lake is mesmerizing. If I lived in sight of it, I’d never get a thing done, but stare and stare trying to wrap my brain around that depthless blue. Somehow I can never remember what makes it look like that, like a lake of blue neon. Is it just the depth, a mineral, do you know?

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  7. Thank you, I never knew exactly how a caldera was formed. I'm very glad there was no gold there nor any other marketable mineral.

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  8. P.S. we have our own right here in South Australia, in a city called Mt Gambier, the caldera is named Blue Lake.

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  9. As a kid growing up in '50's Bend we would often find 'thunder eggs' out in the desert east of Bend. I'm not sure if they came from the Crater Lake or Newberry volcano. The Newberry was much closer. Thunder eggs are hollow geodes, we'd either break them open to see the insides, or just play catch with them.

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    1. Our state rock! I guess they're about 60 million years old and occurred in lava flows. We had a lot of lava flows here that covered a lot of territory (like, the whole state?) Anyway, they didn't erupt out of a volcano or anything. Slower process. I'm a little unclear...

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  10. The Mazama ash layer is actually grey/white, not red.

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    1. Thanks! Now I have to track down the dirty dogs that wrote the thing about it being orangeish.

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    2. A-HA! Here you go: "Mazama ash forms orange-colored deposits." Wikipedia. Now get in there and correct that sumbitch.

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  11. So interesting. What did the Klamath people call the lake?

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