About a week ago, I was up hiking in the San Bernardino Mountains, and the rocks there happen to be very old. The Baldwin Gneiss formation, which comprises the central block of the San Bernardinos, is dated to older than 1.7 billion years old, in the Proterozoic Period. For perspective, animals evolved closer to 500 million years ago, and the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. And yet the same pile of ancient stone is also very young, being thrust up along the San Andreas Fault as we speak, perhaps as recently as within the last 2 million years. Mount San Gorgonio is thus at once extremely ancient and very young. In human terms, if the Baldwin Gneiss were 80 years old, the uplift of the San Bernardinos would be a 1-month-old infant. The views from atop Mt San Gorgonio at 11,503-ft were incredible. The day before was a Santa Ana wind event, so all the smog had been lifted from the LA Basin, uncovering a panorama that swept over Southern California. I could see up to Olancha Peak in the southern Sierras, Telescope Peak over Death Valley, Charleston Peak by Las Vegas, the Kelso dunes of Mojave National Preserve, almost into Arizona at the Chocolate Mountains, almost into Mexico at the Salton Sea, down into San Diego at Point Loma, past the Channel Islands into the vast Pacific. I was lucky to be able to slip in the hike in December, before the serious snows and icy weather come. There were already small patches of snow and ice.

All along the trail, the warp-marbled rocks were swirling silently before me with impassioned meditation. Bands of frosted quartz and gunpowder gray in eddied augens, criss-crossed with pink veins of potassium feldspar, quartz blending into the feldspar so that the gneiss was equally often pink-and-gray as it was the classic white-and-gray. A slow-flowing blur of nonlinearity, oxbows in solid rock, something that seems to have descended to us from another realm, a supertemporal world of far-removed divinities, clockworking disinterestedly the natural forces, and these rocks along the trail that thinly traces this little fold on the surface of our planet are dusty icons of that realm, holy messengers seen through an unpolished copper mirror, patina from the ages of ages surfacing incomprehensibly to our tiny bubble of a lifespan before it pops. Stirring in the depths of the soul is the limit of the perceivable universe, wherein the innermost and outermost mysteries are unified, and through its folds and seams the unknown glows with a faint twilight blue; it is a mandorla of the beyond. Everywhere above treeline, this mystery becomes palpably irradiant—whether it is from the rarefied quality of life, landscape, and weather or the personal effort required to walk there, and it inclines your subsequent memories with the physicality unique to that place and that day—even if it never surpasses the the level of a sutble aesthetic cue. Here on Mount San Gorgonio, above treeline along the summit ridge, the gneiss is married and melded to apparently tan rocks: graniodioritic blocks which have been thrusted up above the otherwise overlying gneiss. Littered about the granodiorites in the sparse alpine zone are all its cousins: chunks of black biotite, white monzonites, pink feldspars, peppered tonalites, brushed trondhjemites faintly fluorescing ultravioletly in the thin-aired intensity. The sky’s immanence is pure, you can drink the panoramic vision like spring water. It is not the impressiveness of the vista, the beauty of its contours, or the feeling of expansiveness, but the true content and context of perspective that is your reward. Coming back down, the moldy gray face of Galena Peak predominates the steep view below. Galena is a mineral containing high amounts of lead, and lead is frequently the final byproduct of radioactive decay. As you are walking, you can almost taste a metallic irradiance emanating from the distant past, although maybe it is the dehydrative stress of hiking mixed with the pollution from Los Angeles. Further down, the trail mixes with red and black schists, the shingled black biotite and deep red garnet stains looking more like a dragon than a mineral. Crossing the Mill Creek bed, a gneissic floodplain, a land reverberating with forgotten epics, I studdered into my car.

When I got home, I did a little digging into the geology of the area, as I’m wont to do. One sentence in the official USGS Mineral Resources of the San Bernardino Mountains mentions, “Although known uranium and(or) thorium deposits are rare, geochemical and scintillation studies suggest that anomalous concentrations of radioactive minerals are present in this area.” Radioactivity in the San Bernardinos. No wonder there would be a Galena Peak amidst “anomalous concentrations of radioactive minerals.” Perhaps the rocks fluoresced with more than sunlight. I looked up some information about minerals that contain uranium and thorium, about geiger counters and scintillators. For between $50-400, I could get myself a radiation sensor. Scintillators are more specific and sensitive, like a stethescope for radiation, whereas geiger counters are less directed. Radioactive minerals fluoresce under an ultraviolet flashlight. I wondered if any rocks I had found over the years were radioactive. One in particular I have been suspicious is uranium. It is awfully dense, dark, gray, somewhat lustrous, has red and yellow in blotches in a way reminiscent of earwax—all of which are identifying traits of uraninite. I asked a friend of mine if he thought it was uranium, and he said “yes,” but he was neither in person with me nor is much of a geology nerd; and I wouldn’t put it past him to keep me inspired by saying “yes, what you saw that night in the sky was in fact Santa Claus.” What started as a novel inquiry into identifying radioactive minerals in the field kindled something in me. A few days later, I binge watched a documentary series on Netflix about the Three Mile Island nuclear powerplant meltdown in 1979. And with that, I crossed a threshold—a passion was ignited. I started devouring information on nuclear power. I wanted to know how you go from uraninite in a mountainside to electricity. After all, nuclear energy was totally ignored in my engineering education, and I have the know-how to decipher technical information. I wanted a high-level understanding of fission reactors. In the process, I would come across stories about nuclear accidents, which are both fascinating and haunting. Unfortunately, I am learning that although the technology can truly be safe and well-contained, especially in military contexts like nuclear submarines, corrupt human motives infect the management of nuclear energy.


December 2023
Escondido