Story at Tahoe
Yesterday we were adventuring at Lake Tahoe, California.
On this crystal clear spring day, we hiked up the mountain above Emerald Bay. Departing on foot from the road we ascended up to Eagle Lake.
When we arrived at the lake, I was reminded of John Denver’s mentioning the “serenity of a clear blue mountain lake.
While we were traipsing up that trail, the mountain told me a story.The story was a silent, evidentiary account of how new, rough mountains, such as the Sierras, gradually deteriorate into old, smooth mountains like our Appalachians back home in North Carolina.
In the center of this picture, notice at the water’s edge the pile of rock rubble. The pile widens from its top to bottom, to form a rough triangular shape.
The rubble comes from mountains being broken into big rocks that tumble down and break into smaller rocks.
The forces of nature — volcanic activity, earthquakes, freezing rain, snow — dislodge those big mountain chunks from on high and cast them down into lower regions where they become rubble.
As geologic time creeps slowly onward, the rubble gets broken further down, as rocks get dislodged and tumble down to some lower stopping point. Big chunks become smaller as the forces of nature weaken their integrity.
Boulders tumble down and split into rocks, accompanied by the sonic rumble of ancient rock musicians such as Led Zep and Jeff Airplane doin their thing.
Further down in that great ancient concert of change, rotting trees . . .
and other organic stuff — dead animals, poop, trillions of leaves, mosses, lichens tossed around by raging waters and furious storms, before you know it . . .
Ages and ages down the river of time we find gravel and dirt, and plants growing in the dirt, and homo sapiens eating the plants after using sharpened stones from the mountain to cut up his food.
Someday these Sierras will lose their rough character; then they will appear to the distant human eye as gentle lumps of Appalachian-style, tamed, mellowed out mountains like we have back home in the Blue Ridge.
And we all live happily ever after.
