[pct-l] A GREAT book for trail

[Timothy Nye]

That is great book; I read it at Blue Lakes while trail angeling in 2009
after I had to get off the trail that year.  More than one thru picked it
up.

For what it's worth, I always puzzled over the old Mountain Press guide book
geologic narratives which were way over my head as I had never taken any
geology courses.

The partial answer to this gaping hole in my knowledge, and one that
subsequently made hiking more enjoyable as I observed the passing terrain,
was a Pulitzer prize winner: "Annals of the Former World", by John McPhee.
Accessable, and with a good narrative, this book is actually a compendium of
four or five books in an anthology; with each able stand on it's own.
"Assembling California" is by itself a worthwhile read for those of you,
who, like me, have no previous background in geology; or, also, again like
me, whose formal education ended before the advances in plate tectonics and
geology led to the current state of knowledge.

Last year I found myself hiking though the part of the Franciscan Melange
that the trail traverses in the Trinitys and recognising the dark blocks of
manganese that had previously underlain the ancient sea floor and serpentine
that represents the effects of heat and pressure that metamorphosed the sea
floor in the presence of salt water into the California state rock.  Other
items of interest include  the way gold and other depositions of precious
metals form, and, well, I could go on and on.