Ready to Plant
I amended the soil with 15 cubic feet (~1/2 cubic yard) of Tacgro compost at about 1:1. That’s the darker soil in the bottom of the pond. The original mulch was spread out 4-6 inches deep, sufficient to cover the grass and weeds; it’s ready for planting.
That’s not my department, unless a hole has to be dug in the stony, original soil.
The total time for this project was about 20 hours. The only cost was 14 bags of compost, less than $100.
Sisyphus and the Stone
I finished the surface today, and dug down about 10 inches to mix in compost for the central planting area. Along the way I encountered this boulder, which weighed a couple hundred pounds. I was able to roll it up the slope, but now what do I do with it? I’ll be using a compost created from yard waste collected by the city of Tacoma to amend the silty soil. The hole ended up deeper than I like, so I’ll need a lot more than four bags…
These are all the stones I could easily remove from the soil I removed and that to be amended by compost. Hauling them in a steel bucket may seem inefficient (it is), but carrying fifty pounds at a time is a lot easier than rolling the wagon up the hill, which is about six-feet higher than the job site. I estimate that I lost 10-15% of the soil volume, which will be replaced by compost.
Excavation Update
Five hours of digging finished the major excavation–six inches of soil removed, cleaned, and spread around the site. I’ll remove another 6-8 inches along the center next and knock the sides down to a 30 degree slope. I had to transport most of the pebbles and cobbles up the hill, but some of it filled the inflow sluice (to the right in the image).
I found this soil tamper in the shed, left by the last owner. It does a great job compacting the relocated soil and isn’t too much work to use. And it’s a lot more efficient than walking around in circles to use my body weight.
Excavation Begins
I worked four hours today and made a lot of progress. This photo makes it clear how shallow the rain garden pond is going to be; the areas that have been excavated to 6-8 inches aren’t going to be any deeper. There will be a deeper (18 inches before backfilling with compost-amended soil) thalweg along the center of the pond, and I’ll cut a slope of about 30 degrees from the edge to the center line. The piece of siding is covering the infiltration hole–a sure ankle breaker for someone like me stumbling around with shovel-fulls of soil. Better safe than sorry.
I definitely have more pebbles/boulders than I need. I’m dumping the excess in a quiet corner of the yard. I’ll figure out what to do with it later. I’ve been using this area to dump soil removed to plant a few shrubs and small trees, so the new material fits right in.
This is my version of being a sculptor, but I work with earth rather than clay.
Site Preparation
I think the job can be completed without removing any material from the site, which is now completely exposed. Excavation is hard work, but transporting soil any distance is exhausting. Now that the mulch has been relocated to the perimeter of the site, excavation can begin. The soil is sand/silt with minor clay, and a significant amount of rock in the form of pebbles and cobbles.
I am removing most of the rock fragments by raking the excavated soil with a garden rake (back and forth until it is clean enough), then collecting the unwanted material.
Plastic buckets don’t hold up well transporting rock, so I’m using a steel bucket. The pile of rock is from the perimeter ditch only; there is going to be a lot more. It is going to be used to armor the inflow, which will be where the bucket is; the rest will either be transported to a location for long-term storage, or used as mulch around the perimeter–depending on how much there is.
In a perfect world I would use a wheelbarrow to move material around, but we inherited a good dumping wagon from the previous owners, which is too bulky to use on this small site. The amount of material to be transported is relatively small, however, so a bucket works well.
I’m not on the clock, so time isn’t an issue. Nevertheless, the work goes faster than you might think. I completed the work shown here, since my last post, in less than three hours. I’m 69 and not a weight lifter, although I do exercise regularly.
Review of “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything” by Ervin Laszlo
I’m not sure how to review this book. I bought it used because I’m interested in physics and the apparent deadlock it has reached; everyone admits that the Standard Model of Physics, as well as the Standard Cosmological Model, are facing challenges from a scarcity and plethora of new observations, respectively. The pioneers of modern physics acknowledged that they weren’t looking deep enough. We have developed a very solid model of physics, but it is based on high-energy, collisional experiments; it is very accurate in predicting the behavior of subatomic particles. Every physicists knows that particles do not exist, but are only the result of interacting quantum fields.
Cosmologists, astronomers, and astrophysicists are facing a crisis because of the incredible power of modern instruments like the JWST. Nothing adds up the way it should. We either can’t look deep enough (particle physics) or we’ve looked too deep (astrophysics). It is a conundrum. There is mounting evidence, collected by reputable physicists and other scientists, that we are missing something.
Ervin Laszlo died in June of this year, after a long career as a philosopher with a metaphysical interest. That would explain why this book reads like a wish list rather than a proposed research program. His lack of a formal scientific education could explain why this book sounds like nonsense at first glance. However, if taken with a grain of salt, it is an excellent generalization of the characteristics of a theory of everything. What it lacks is a systematic, skeptical presentation of the data; he seems to accept a large amount of paranormal data at face value.
I would caution anyone who reads this to be more skeptical than the author. Scientific inquiry requires an open mind, a trait more common to philosophers than physicists–probably because philosophers don’t have to work so hard to comprehend what has already been learned. Progress is slow most of the time, but this book and the concepts it presents is a step in the right direction.
I recommend it as a primer on what may come in the future, but don’t expect Laszlo’s New Physics to become real anytime soon.
Breaking Ground on the Rain Garden and Pond
This is going to be a long-term project, but that doesn’t mean I can wait for someone else to do the work. Actually, I enjoy working with soil and rocks, maybe because I’m a geologist. After 20 years living along the Gulf Coast, where rain falls by the bucketful, and the land is often flat and impermeable (when it isn’t waterlogged), I’m familiar with drainage projects like this. I prefer surface drainage over buried pipes because they are easy to monitor and keep clear of debris.
This schematic drawing of a rain garden pond summarizes our plan pretty well. The pond isn’t intended to have standing water, so it isn’t lined; instead the bottom is typically filled with a mixture of sand (easy for us) and compost or some equivalent material. We already have a lot of mulch for covering the area.
The hole is going to be about 18 inches deep in the center, and filled with a mixture of the removed soil and compost/mulch. I don’t need to increase infiltration or water retention; the soil contains a lot of silt and thus holds moisture surprisingly well, while being well drained. Inflow will be through a sluice cut into the soil from the deck (the shovel location) to the edge of the pond. I plan to use the stones collected from the soil to armor the inflow; from the looks of the refuse so far, I should have plenty.
Other than dealing with all the rocks I’m finding in the soil, it isn’t too difficult to remove.
The outline has been set with a couple of hours work, but now the hard work begins. I am going to remove the inner soil to match the perimeter depth, then cut a smaller area down six inches deeper. This process will be repeated until I reach the design depth. The refuse is being used to fill the 4-inch area where the mulch was removed; it will also be used to build a low berm.
The next few months are going to be slow going, but I’ll keep you posted.
Geologic Survey of Eastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Figure 1. View looking west along the coast from Beacon Hill, in Victoria. The cliffs on Vancouver Island are similar in height to those across Juan de Fuca Strait, in Washington. However, the bluffs are composed of glacial deposits further south in Seattle, rather than bedrock. The large tidal range (7-10 feet) exposes rocky platforms at low tide. I’ll examine several of these features in this post.
Introduction
Figure 2. We drove to Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula and took a ferry to Victoria. We also drove about 70 miles west to Port Renfrew. The inset geologic map reveals a maze of faults and rock types. The rocks around Victoria comprise the Westcoast Crystalline Complex, which includes granitic and metamorphic rocks dated between 540 and 143 Ma (colored green). The purple area indicates a suite of granitic intrusions from the Jurassic period (200-160 Ma). The numbers indicate locations discussed below: (1) Beacon Hill; (2) Mount Douglas; and (3) Port Renfrew.
Beacon Hill
Figure 3. This exposure of the Westcoast Crystalline Complex at Beacon Hill Park doesn’t tell us much. These rocks are weathered and stained, making identification difficult without breaking off a fresh piece. We don’t do that here at Rocks and (no) Roads. Nevertheless, I am relatively confident that they are not sedimentary rocks.
Figure 4. This photo uses a magnification of 10x, and the field of view is less than an inch. Individual crystals of feldspar can be seen throughout the image, recognizable by flat surfaces that form irregular boxes. These light-colored feldspars are indicative of continental intrusive rocks like you would find in a subduction tectonic environment. The gray blobs are quartz. Based on this brief examination, I think these are granodiorite, an intrusive rock rather than metamorphic.
Mount Douglas
Figure 5. The view, looking south from the top of Mount Douglas (see Fig. 2 for location), reveals Mount Olympus (snow-covered peaks in the distance); and intrusive rocks with the characteristic salt-and-pepper color of granodiorite. This exposure also contains a set of joints (large X pattern enhanced by weathering) that would have appeared as the rock rose through the crust as overlying rocks were eroded. Victoria is visible in the distance.
Figure 6. This image shows veins of quartz or feldspar (white material) that would have filled cracks and voids after the main magma had solidified (tens of miles deep), but residual liquids were still present.
Port Renfrew
Figure 7. The cliffs at Port Renfrew are lower than in Victoria (compare to Fig. 1). They also don’t appear to be the same intrusive rocks we saw at Beacon Hill Park or Mount Douglas. The beach is covered with boulders and dark, coarse sand that couldn’t have originated from the erosion of granitic rocks. Let’s take a closer look.
Figure 8. (A) This boulder includes a piece of the rock the magma was intruded into. The rounded edges suggest that the magma was still hot enough to partially melt the fragment; furthermore, the lack of a halo surrounding the inclusion implies that the melted material was incorporated into the magma by mixing. (B) This looks a lot like the granitic rocks in Fig. 5. (C) This boulder is fresh and individual minerals can be identified. Being wet enhances the contrast. The low quartz composition (I estimate it at ~20% from the gray blobs) suggests that this is either granodiorite or tonalite, depending on the amount of Ca-bearing feldspar. That requires either a chemical or mineralogical analysis. These boulders were transported along rivers from the center of the island, which is composed of granitic rocks (Fig. 2).
Figure 9. These ripples are almost a foot long, measured from crest to crest; and the troughs are filled with larger fragments of rock and shell. You don’t see these sedimentary structures preserved in the rock record very often, even if they do survive the vigorous tides on Vancouver Island.
Figure 10. Exposures like this make geology fun. The darker rocks are tilted about 30 degrees to the left, but there are two distinct rocks types here: the lighter colored rock to the left is the same sandstone that makes up the cliff (Fig. 7); and the darker rock is schist, highly altered mudstone. In other words, a mildly altered rock is in direct contact with a metamorphic rock.
I checked with RockD, which integrates a global geologic map with location, and discovered I was standing on the contact between Leech River Complex metamorphic rocks (200-66 Ma) and Carmanah Group unaltered sedimentary rocks (37-23 Ma). This is a textbook unconformity that represents at least 29 million years.
The younger rocks are nearly horizontal, so I think this is an angular unconformity. During the missing millions of years, the older sediments were buried and heated enough to create schist; then uplifted and exposed to the sea, whereupon the younger rocks were deposited on a beach not that different from what we see today.
Figure 11. The devil is in the details, as shown in these images. (A) The older rock was folded during burial and, when exposed to the waves, eroded along relict bedding surfaces. Coastal sediments were then deposited in nooks and crannies like we see today. (B) Those dark fragments that look like they’re lying on the beach are actually cemented in place; the background pebbles aren’t modern sand, but instead sand frozen in time at least 29 million years ago.
Amazing.
Summary
Sometimes you can tell a story about the rocks you find, and this is one of those times. And it’s a story that unfolds across the globe. However, this story can’t be easily told because it unfolds on a sphere–the Earth. I’ll do my best.
For hundreds of millions of years, way back in the Paleozoic era, what we now call North America was drifting eastward and the West Coast (e.g. the Pacific Northwest) was a passive margin, like the East Coast is today. Suddenly, geologically speaking, the supercontinent, Pangea, which had been created from all the continents, split apart. North America reversed direction and the passive margin became a collisional plate boundary.
Ocean crust, and any islands or microcontinents that were in the way, were swallowed by the mantle or crushed by North America, creating the igneous rocks we saw at Beacon Hill Park and Mount Douglas. Muddy ocean sediments were swallowed and transformed into the schist we found at Port Renfrew. Volcanoes erupted all along the West Coast.
Then the story gets complicated and controversial.
Because the earth is not flat, crustal plates don’t slide beneath one another like sheets of paper. They crumple at the edges, forming transform faults (e.g. San Andreas fault of California) along which tectonic plates (or pieces of them) can slide past each other horizontally. This probably occurred between 200 and 66 million-years ago; if so, the rocks of Vancouver Island were originally deposited/intruded in Eastern Washington before sliding hundreds of miles to the NW.
When the crumpled edges of the colliding plates had taken up the slack, subduction resumed to the SE and the Cascades Range of volcanoes was born. This process continues to this day.
That’s the best story I’ve heard so far.
Three Days on Vancouver Island
If you’re ever in the PNW, you can drive to Vancouver Island on the M.V. Coho, a ferry commissioned in 1959, which plies the route from Port Angeles, Washington, to a berth in downtown Victoria several times a day. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia–that’s a province in Canada. In this post, I hope to show you how much there is to explore without venturing into the wilds of an island that is more than 280 miles long.
This is going to be a long post because the culture and geography are so intertwined that they cannot be experienced, much less discussed, in isolation. However, I will present my geological survey in a separate post.
Let’s do it!
Downtown Victoria
We stayed a couple of blocks from the waterfront, where British Columbia’s legislature meets (Victoria is the capital). On this particular weekend, which had spectacular weather, there was a free concert on the waterfront for David Foster, a Canadian music writer, publisher, etc, who comes from Victoria. They had a massive celebration, with Jay Leno as MC, beginning with an aerial display by the Snowbirds–the national aerobatics flying team–and ending with a fireworks display that lasted 30 minutes.
You can catch a tour in either a single- or twin-engine seaplane. They take off and land right in the harbor. That’s crazy, but somehow they don’t have enough incidents between aircraft and boats (including cruise ships), to make the news. I checked.
This is one of the most interesting waterfronts I’ve visited, probably because it is summer; however, Vancouver Island has the warmest overall climate in Canada. Food for thought.
Beacon Hill Park
We like to walk, so we strolled towards the coast and discovered beautiful gardens and some of the bedrock exposed, with steps leading up to it; but this isn’t Beacon Hill proper.
Beacon Hill Park is occupied by a flock of Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus), which apparently are okay with the mild winters in the PNW.
From Beacon Hill itself, you can see Mount Olympus (about 8000 feet elevation) across Juan de Fuca Strait. It is the snow-covered mountain, only forty-six miles distant.
Royal British Columbia Museum
The museum had a display of Egyptian artifacts focused on death and the afterlife, but you can see something like that almost anywhere…
My favorite exhibit was an incredibly detailed recreation of life in Victoria about 100 years ago, which showed how the island evolved through the twentieth century. As an aside, I have a license to drive that Ford Model T, but that’s another story.
Craigdarroch Castle
This luxurious estate (originally 28 acres) was built on a hill overlooking Victoria in the early 1900s by a coal baron, who didn’t live to occupy it. But his wife and children did. It served as a military hospital during WWI, which saw more than 200 thousand Canadian casualties. That’s a lot for a smaller country; those with long-term disabilities were sent to recuperate in places like this. The property fell into disrepair after the war, the property was divided into parcels for the surrounding homes, and eventually purchased by a non-profit society, who is restoring it to its original condition.
The interior is an eye-catching, and confusing, 4.5 floors of engraved wood and paneling, even the ceilings. The carpentry was completed by a Chicago company that had worked on several other mansions.
I’m sure that Robert Dunsmuir (the builder) would have enjoyed this oversized pool table. But the balls seem a little small–I guess it wasn’t for regulation play. The entire house was decorated to this detail.
Dinner is served. The kitchen has also been restored and tourists are encouraged to handle the stove and other appliances, but I wanted to keep this post as short as possible. LOL!
Port Renfrew
We finally used our car to drive the 68 miles to Port Renfrew. I don’t know why it’s called a port because it is a temperate rainforest with a few inhabitants, mostly catering to ecotourists. Obviously, this is not old-growth like Olympic National Park in Washington, but it’s working hard and fast to recover. We walked for a mile BENEATH a dense growth of ground cover, which had assumed monumental proportions. Surreal.
The tidal range is 7-10 feet, so a vast intertidal area exposes rock (I’ll address that in a later post) and a huge number of tidal pools, hosting a myriad of sea creatures.
I took this photo in a tide pool scoured in sandstone, about two-feet across and one foot deep. According to ChatGPT the circular animals are sea anemones whereas the shiny critter is some kind of chiton (a distant cousin of snails and clams). While I was studying the rocks, everyone else was staring into the huge number of tidal pools scoured into soft rock, each a tiny world that is never dry because the tide comes in twice a day.
The Butchart Gardens
This incredible garden was constructed in and around an abandoned limestone quarry, by the owner of a concrete company–kind of like the castle built by a coal baron. They had a vision and a plan, which included international experts and a commitment by their children. This is the sunken garden. The meticulous care given this floral extravaganza was displayed by workers pulling weeds by hand, and dead-heading the flower in full public view–well worth the 46 Canadian dollar price of entry. No senior discount.
This display cannot be adequately shown in a video. The “pond” running through the sunken garden is 40 feet deep and pristine–and I mean PRISTINE. Ferns and other climbing plants were meticulously planted in cracks in the limestone walls of the quarry. It ain’t a quarry anymore.
Butchart Gardens is more like an amusement park than a flower garden. Among the specialty gardens, I recall a Japanese garden with streams running throughout, the soft murmur of water encouraging me to take a seat on one of the many benches. There was a rose garden, with every plant labeled. An Italian garden. The topiary displayed in this photo was evident everywhere it was appropriate. And plenty of coffee bars…and washrooms (Canadian for toilet).
Mount Douglas Park
The sign welcoming us to Mount Douglas doesn’t say anything about blue trails or black trails. We learned about that when we climbed (not hiked) 600 feet in less than a mile–very similar to Piestewa Peak in Phoenix. By the time we found ourselves on a ledge overlooking Victoria, we figured out why the lettering was black on this trail.
It was a little scary, like riding The Hulk at Universal Studios the first time, but it was invigorating; neither of us got light-headed, except from the view…
That is Washington across Juan de Fuca Straight. The low cloud bank covers the water between the U.S. and Canada. Snow-covered Mount Olympus can be seen in the distance.
Looking east from the summit reveals a suburban landscape rather than a metropolis because Victoria’s downtown is north of Mount Douglas.
It was a busier day at sea on our return to Port Angeles. We saw two container ships, one smallish and one large, half-filled one, and this vessel. It was several miles from our ferry when I took this pixelated image, but ChatGPT identified it as probably the Seaspan Lions, an LNG bunker vessel; this is a new class that transfers liquified natural gas to larger, oceangoing vessels from Vancouver or other Canadian ports. I mention this because I’m fascinated by technology (real tech, not digital bullshit). These smaller vessels transport LNG from ports too small to accommodate large vessels, which are three times as long and ten times as heavy.
Final Thoughts
What a ride!
If you ever take a cruise to Alaska to see the glaciers, or even a cruise to Hawaii during the off season, take a couple of days to experience Vancouver Island. Despite being the capital of British Columbia, the only contact with North America is by boat, even from the city of Vancouver–British Columbia geographic names are confusing.
The best thing about this trip was that we never felt like we’d left home. Victoria feels like Washington, and even The United States in general. They don’t have the humorous Canadian accents I’ve seen on TV. They drive the same cars, shop in the same stores, and even go to the washroom–just like I did, growing up in Arizona in the 60s and 70s.
Best short vacation EVER!
Stormwater Retention Project
I always heard that the Pacific Northwest gets a lot of rain. Having lived in southern Louisiana for 25 years, I was a little skeptical. So when I moved here last year, to discover that all of the yards were brown, but the flowers and trees were flourishing, I became interested in the annual rain pattern. It doesn’t rain here in the summer. No thunderstorms twice a week. Nothing.
Water isn’t particularly expensive here, but I don’t like using clean tap water on plants. It turns out that most of Tacoma’s water comes from glaciers on Mount Rainier (Tahoma to natives). They melt naturally in the summer, so we aren’t using groundwater and have no control over their rate of melting.
We inherited a number of young fruit trees, which need a lot of water. Seeing how nice many of our neighbor’s yards were, we decided to collect plants. I watched water flowing out of the downspout during spring rains, flowing down the driveway into the street, and directly into Puget Sound. We installed a couple of rain barrels to collect some of it; you would be surprised how fast they fill during the light rains (compared to the Gulf coast) I’ve experienced here in Tacoma.
It turns out that Pierce County has a stormwater retention program, to prevent pollution of Puget Sound, and one can get free consultation on home projects that reduce storm runoff. There is even a competitive proposal system to get limited financial assistance. We jumped at the opportunity to contribute to the continued health of the place we’ve already fallen in love with.
The back yard was a basketball court at some point, complete with 3-4 inches of concrete. The previous owners removed the concrete (thank god!), but left some irregularly cut tree trunks. We were thinking about planting a garden in this area, but now we were part of something bigger than our back yard. We could get assistance on the whole project, from collecting rainwater to distributing it, and keeping it out of the pristine waters of Puget Sound.
But there were some engineering hurdles to clear…
We had to demonstrate that the soil under our back yard would absorb a reasonable amount of rainwater, which necessitated digging a hole and filling it with water. That sounds easy enough. The catch is that the soil in the hole has to be saturated before the test can be conducted. To assure saturation for all soil types, this means keeping a two-foot deep hole full of water for three hours. I had to keep the garden hose running at half-volume, tweaking it constantly, to meet this standard.
I spent the morning babysitting a one-foot-diameter hole with a hose running constantly.
But I kept the hole full for three hours. Finally, I could conduct the test. I filled the saturated soil to 12 inches and waited, but not for long! As I already knew, it drained in 17 minutes, as measured by a stopwatch. We have well-drained soil (mostly sand with some clay and rock cobbles).
While my garden hose kept the ground saturated, I kept myself busy, removing 4 inches of mulch filling the 4-inch deep depression left by the basketball court. I’m going to keep the material on-site as much as possible, to avoid hauling it up the slope seen to the right in this photo, where it would (please, god, no!) be spread to form a slight hump in my back yard.
You would be surprised how fast soil is used to fill a 4-inch deep area the size of the remaining mulch seen in this photo.
I can’t wait to begin digging the pond. I’ll see you then.
Timothy R. Keen 
Recent Comments