DryStoneGarden

Devil's Postpile National Monument

Probably the most striking geological feature on the eastside, an area full of geological features, is the Devil’s Postpile, one of the world’s best examples of columnar basalt. Columnar basalt is one of those natural elements that looks unnaturally geometric. It forms when it lava cools very, very slowly and evenly. The lava starts to contract and then crack, and because it cools so evenly the cracks form into hexagons, the most stable and efficient shape. As the Park Service page about the formation of the Postpile explains, “a hexagonal system provides the greatest relief with the fewest cracks.” (Bees use the same hexagonal system in their honeycombs because it forms a matrix with the largest amount of storage space for the least amount of wall.) Devil’s Postpile isn’t the only place where this has happened — the Wikipedia entry has links to many other columnar basalt cliffs, and pieces of columnar basalt regularly show up at stoneyards in the Bay Area –but the columns at the Devil’s Postpile are especially long and regular.

The Devil's Talus

The base of the cliff has the world’s coolest talus in my opinion. My crew was so well trained/indoctrinated that their first comment was how great these pieces would be for building steps. The park service doesn’t even let you climb on the talus, though, let alone build with it.

The Devil's Patio

Possibly the best part is that a glaciar carved off the top and made a natural patio.

The Devil's Paver Pattern

It’s uncanny how much they look like rough-cut natural stone pavers. Hexagons are stable because three joints come together at every vertex, making for a nice oblique 120 degree angle. The park service says that at Devil’s Postpile 55% of the pieces have 6 sides, 37% have 5, 5% have 7, and the remaining 3% have 4 sides or fewer. That’s a high percentage of hexagons compared to other sites in the world.

The Devil's Grading

The grading is a bit extreme on parts of the patio.

Surprisingly Comfortable

Ahhh, nice, soft basalt. My crew never saw a flat surface that couldn’t be slept on.

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Rock Step 'Clancy'

Instead of a bridge, my crew spent most of our time building rock steps, primarily on Duck Pass Trail in the Mammoth Lakes basin.

Arrowhead Lake

The trail to Duck Pass is one of the area’s quickest routes up into the high country, so it gets a ton of usage. The first section is a series of steep dusty switchbacks through lodgepole pine forest, but then you’re up in granite country the rest of the way to the pass. Arrowhead Lake is only a mile and a half in, with a fifteen foot high rock to jump from (unbelievably refreshing after a day of moving rock, jump at your own discretion), and then Skelton Lake’s another mile and Barney Lake’s another mile after that.

For some reason, this trail somehow became THE TRAIL for cross-country running teams from Los Angeles. Every day, we would have entire high school and college teams run through our work site, forty or fifty runners at a time, once on their way up and then again on their way back down an hour or two later. I’d never worked on such a popular trail. It was frustrating to have people constantly walking through our work site, but then, on the other hand, I’ve never had so many people thank me for anything I was doing. Literally hundreds of people thanked us. A much used and much loved trail.

High Timber Step

The trail is slowly evolving into a giant staircase. Because it’s a steep trail, gullies form and then steps are installed to try and control the gullies. The steps hold the tread in place on their uphill side, but then the downhill side of each step slowly erodes and it becomes necessary to add another step in front of it, which inevitably needs another step in front it, and so on. My crew spent the bulk of our time building new steps in front of the steps that past crews had built, and future crews will no doubt build more steps in front of ours. At times it felt a bit sisyphean.

Rock Step 'Bigeasy'

The steps we built are western trail steps, designed for horses and mules. Each step is supposed to be 4-6 feet long so that a horse can have its front and back legs on each step before stepping onto the next one. This step, Bigeasy, we actually sited even further in front of the timber step above it because that step is overly close to the next step above it. When that timber step inevitably rots out and needs to be replaced, it can be relocated a couple of feet forward and then all three steps will have proper spacing.

'Bigeasy' in transit

Finding the rock, aka rock-shopping, is probably the most enjoyable part. Moving it to the work site is often the biggest chore. Did I mention Sisyphus?

Rockbar Power Activate!

You do develop a good sense for the shape and size of each rock as you roll or skid it through the landscape, though. We gave names to most of the big ones. Basically, if you found the rock and spent enough time wrestling with it, if it was big enough and gravity-enfused enough, then it became ‘your’ rock and you got to choose a name for it. Names were usually descriptive, but sometimes random. For instance, Clancy (a big one fit snugly between Elton and John) was named after a forest service guy who had his macho turned up to eleven. Mammoth was an early 500 pounder. Bigeasy was surprisingly painless and easy to move. P.I.T.A. (Pain-in-the-Ass) was the opposite. Melon was low-hanging-fruit. Quickie was finished quickly. The macho, male names of our early rocks led to a series of less macho names, Howard and Jeffrey, then Fabio (very handsome), then Buttercup, Jewel, and Pearl. Showtime, the Three Musketeers, Mastodon, Alligator, and Shitzy round out the list, the last of the names I remember. A few of those steps and the view from near the top of Duck Pass are below. (more…)

Entrance to the de Young Museum

“Every time I hit a stone, it’s like my heart’s a little bit in my mouth.” Andy Goldsworthy

This Andy Goldsworthy installation, “Drawn Stone,” at the de Young is from 2005, but I didn’t have a blog back then and I’m generally slack about going to museums, so it’s just now that I’m checking it out and posting about it. Goldsworthy’s stone installations are always interesting to me, the way he often manages to (knowingly) break the rules about stonework while still remaining very attentive to and respectful of the craft. For instance, with “Drawn Stone,” the entire focus of the installation is a crack that runs through the sandstone pavers and slabs of the museum’s entrance. Installing a cracked paver is considered poor form, but he’s reveling in it, making it the entire focus of the installation. And in fact, it must have taken a lot of extra effort to crack the pavers and then match them up, so he even earns bonus points for doing something that would normally be frowned upon. Pretty bold.

The installation was originally named “Faultline,” but Goldsworthy changed the name along the way. I don’t know anything about the reasons for the change, but it seems like he somehow found out that Californians don’t really like earthquake-themed art, and so he decided to keep that aspect more low-key, the way Californians like it. In this case, it’s totally appropriate to have an earthquake theme — the new de Young was actually built because an earthquake made the old building unsafe — but it’s more in keeping with the local aesthetic to keep that aspect out of the title. And the piece is overall fairly subtle, anyways; several people didn’t notice it until I took out my camera and started snapping photos.

Goldsworthy is always an interesting talker, and KQED’s website has a 2005 segment about the installation with him talking about learning to break pavers (the best way is to just whack them with a hammer) and other aspects of the piece. The museum website has his artist’s statement along with a photo of him on top of one of the slabs, holding a sledgehammer, with the wedges and feathers still in the slab. It’s a fair bit of work to split a slab that big, but it must have been satisfying. Photos of cracked pavers and slabs are below. (more…)

Sold! To the person with a giant backhoe...

One of the fun parts about backcountry rock work is searching around to find the rocks to build with. One of the most laborious parts is then moving the chosen rocks to the building site. Some wilderness crews use a come-along or grip hoist, but most do it with human power, rolling the rocks downhill to the trail with their hands or with a six-foot long rockbar. Here are a few backcountry sayings, born of many hours of wrestling against gravity:

Skidding is better than rolling, rolling is better than lifting, lifting sucks.

Stones come in three sizes: hernia, double-hernia, and too small.

If you can carry it, it’s too small.

Old Town Patio Stone

I wanted to post a few more photos of the freestanding wall from the garden show. I haven’t seen many walls with the courses running at an angle, and none quite like this one. To lay the stones at an angle goes against the “rules” I learned about building walls, but, apparently, stoneworkers have been doing it in Cornwall for centuries. The Cornish call their walls “hedges”, and do things like cover them with sod, and they have a whole tradition of stacking slate vertically or at an angle. Their slate doesn’t support weight well when stacked horizontally, so they turn it on its edge, which makes a certain amount of sense; I’ve worked with slate which would crumble from a single hammer blow across the flat, but could withstand repeated blows against the narrow edge. The Guild of Cornish Hedgers has a collection of photos including some walls built with a herringbone pattern. I particularly like this one with stiles for climbing over it. There’s a photo on a blog here and another photo in the Cornish collection in the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain gallery.

the courses, with my camera rotated

Through the magic of turning the camera sideways, you can see that the wall is built with courses like a traditional wall, just that the courses run at an angle.

transition from traditional to angled

The horizontally laid stones of the arch set the angle for the slanted courses. A lot of the wall’s weight is going to be pushing against those horizontal courses and against that arch, but arches are strong and the wall could have stood for a lot longer than the five days of the garden show. Now it only exists in memories and photos.

The Dry Stone Walling Association of Canada has more photos of the wall on their site, and photos of another angled wall they built for a garden show in Canada last year.

WallsWithoutMortar has photos of another angled wall built in Danville, here.

I stuck a couple of detail photos of the arch below. (more…)

Big Springs Stone Table

It’s not quite April, but we already feel safe to move our cushions outside and get our front porch ready for summer. The table on our porch is new for us this year, assembled from a slab and a block of granite. The stone’s called Big Springs, from somewhere in Utah, boulders cut into slices that are perfect for tables and benches. The stone has a beautiful grain, as if it were wood, and the sides have bluish and yellowish lichen. This table didn’t take any skill to assemble; I just put the flat stone on the flat-topped granite block. It didn’t need mortar or even a shim. The slabs aren’t particularly expensive, so I don’t understand why they aren’t more common. Doesn’t everyone want a three-hundred pound bistro table?

There’s another photo showing the grain of the stone below. (more…)