Central Valley photographs

The Lakeview Gusher, which blew out in 1910 at Midway-Sunset oilfield near Taft, California. The Lakeview is the largest gusher the U.S. has ever seen, blowing more oil than either Spindletop in Texas, or the 2010 Gulf oil spill.

Look away, you can't have a drop of it.

There is nothing spectacular or grand about the low-lying triangle by which California's Central Valley rivers seek the sea--except, at times, its sky. The skyscape can be a tremendous pile of billowing cumulus clouds, sometimes as dramatic as the firmament over the Arizona desert or the heavens off the Kona Coast. but the flattended horizon is broken only by the distant bulk of Mount Diablo's saddle.

Spectacle is the business of our desert mesas and buttes; the jagged and surf-battered Redwood Coast; or the High Sierra, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin are born in springs, snowbanks, and even glaciers.

The Delta, in contrast, is a bucolic land of peace, a tranquil place of ease largely unsullied by civilization. It is low-keyed; it must be approached on its own unhurried terms in order to be properly appreciated.

It is a backwater, a throwback in a few hidden "gunkholes," or anchorages, to the pristine landscape of the Spanish explorers and, everywhere else, to the easygoing rural and pastoral California of a century ago.

Time stands still. It is almost as much "an island in time" as Harold Gilliam's lonesome Point Reyes Peninsula.

Mima mounds are ~1-m-high hillocks found on every continent except Antarctica. Despite often numbering in the millions within a single field, their origin has been a mystery, with proposed explanations ranging from glacial processes to seismic shaking. One hypothesis proposes that mounds in North America are built by burrowing mammals to provide refuge from seasonally saturated soils. We test this hypothesis with a numerical model, parameterized with measurements of soil transport by gophers from a California mound field, that couples animal behavior with geomorphic processes. The model successfully simulates the development of the mounds as well as key details such as the creation of vernal pools, small intermound basins that provide habitat for endemic species. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the spatial structure of the modeled mound fields is similar to actual mound fields and provides an example of self-organized topographic features. We conclude that, scaled by body mass, Mima mounds are the largest structures built by nonhuman mammals and may provide a rare example of an evolutionary coupling between landforms and the organisms that create them.

Our Wines receiving glowing reviews

For Livermore Valley wines purchased in 2014, the highest concentration of tritium (4.1 Bq/L [111 pCi/L]) was just 0.55% of the EPA’s standard for maximal permissible level of tritium in drinking water (740 Bq/L [20,000 pCi/L]). Drinking one liter per day of the Livermore Valley wine with the highest concentration purchased in 2014 would have resulted in a dose of 41 nSv/y (4.1 μrem/y). A more realistic dose estimate, based on moderate drinking (one liter per week) (1) at the mean of the Livermore Valley wine concentrations (2.3 Bq/L [62 pCi/L]) would have been 3.3 nSv/y (0.33 μrem/y). Both doses account for the added contribution of Organically Bound Tritium(2). The potential dose from drinking Livermore Valley wines in 2014, including the contribution of OBT, even at the high consumption rate of one liter per day, and the highest observed concentration, would be about 1/250 of a single dose from a panoramic dental x-ray.

For 2015, the Livermore Valley wines represent vintages from 2010, 2012, and 2013; the California wines represent vintage from 2013 and 2014; and the Rhone Valley and Bordeaux region wines represent vintage from 2011. Tritium concentrations must be decay-corrected to the year of harvest to correlate with tritium concentrations in air and soil to which the grape was exposed. In 2015, decay-corrected concentrations for Livermore Valley wine samples ranged from 1.0 to 4.8 Bq/L; for the two California wine samples, -0.21 and 0.86 Bq/L; and for the Rhone Valley and Bordeaux wine samples, 1.1 and 2.8 Bq/L, respectively.

(1) Moderate consumption is higher than the average consumption of wine in California (15.7 L/yr) (Avalos 2005).
(2) Dose from wine was calculated based on the measured concentration of HTO multiplied by 1.3 to account for the potential contribution of OBT that was removed so that the tritium in wine could be counted using liquid scintillation counting. The ingestion dose coefficient for HTO is 2.1 × 10–11 Sv/Bg per DOE (2011).

"One time while in high school, I went with Dave Baxter to haul wood from Green Mountain in the Raymond District. Jerd Baxter had two wagons so Bud Baxter went along with him to open the many gates.

Dave had to get a third wagon at the Raynor ranch. The wagon was in a barn near the end of Buchanan Hollow road where the hogs all slept.

After we got the wagon hitched up and started up the hill I had to get my clothes off to shake out the fleas and got them on just in tome to close the gates." --Glenn Gillette