LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – When I decided to write “Lake County History,” a book that became a 450-page, three-pounder with more than a hundred stories, I had no idea what I was in for.
Before I was finished I had more than my share of surprises.
For starters, I discovered a hollow mountain, home-grown highwaymen, bloody massacres and a phantom railroad that plagued Lake County for years.
Now you will learn about Lake County's past wars and riots, its crimes and its heroes, its ghosts and high adventure. Once each week, I shall tell it all, right here.
The story begins 140 million years ago. Lake County's planetwide show opened with ear-splitting rumbles and titanic shuddering, as Earth’s rocky mantle slid about over the molten core of our planet.
Tectonic plates rose and fell. Sections of the planet shifted and changed the form and shape and location of continents, all during the slow passage of time, like giant playing cards dealt by a sleepy cosmic dealer.
The Pacific Plate began its slow slide beneath the Farallon Plate, where California would one day be, leaving broken and shattered remains. The rocky contest moved northward creating the San Andreas Fault. No people yet. The Grand Theater of Mother Earth played to an empty house, as she continued her endless slow modification and alteration.
Three million years ago, the San Andreas Fault’s massive, slow-motion hiccup caused the land, east of the western edge of the Pacific Plate, to rise up.
The rocks, bunched in sections like pleats of an accordion, formed parallel series of three major mountain ranges: the Outer Coastal Range, that stretches from Mendocino to Bodega Bay; the Mayacamas Mountains that reach from Cow Mountain to Mount St. Helena; and the Inner Coastal Range, which lines the Sacramento Valley like watchmen on eternal duty.
San Andreas woke again two million years ago. This time the fault’s rumble of destruction split the center of Lake County like a wishbone. The Clear Lake Basin, a 50-mile-long volcanic field, was created. That field's center is nine miles wide and 18 miles long.
The bubbling magma cauldron filling the field is a mere four and a third miles beneath our feet, no more than the distance from Upper Lake halfway to Lakeport.
After the quakes came quietus. Four hundred and sixty thousand years passed. The volcanic field, each time it came alive, spouted the semi-liquid viscous rock slowly from beneath in layered stages, like toothpaste oozing from a tube.
The lava continued to worm its molten way through thinner places in the crust to form Cow Mountain, Cobb Mountain, Mount St. Helena, Mount Hannah, Mount Konocti and the rest of the tall sentinels that guard the lake today.
Volcanoes sent their molten messages, sluggishly upward to the surface, every 3,000 to 4,000 years until, with the passing of the centuries, eruptions grew less urgent, less often, and ceased at last.
Unseen by any human eye, Clear Lake slowly filled and began, as it increased in depth, to drain into the Sacramento River.
The last ice age, several thousand years ago, changed the face of the globe.
Centuries of snow and ice had stolen water from the sea. Like a mammoth slow-moving elevator out of control, the western sea fell hundreds of feet.
Land bridges, once a part of the ocean’s bottom, were left naked and exposed. Australia linked Asia. The Bering Straits became Beringia.
The new continent was a tundra land a thousand miles wide cut by roaring streams and scoured with bitter winds.
Next week: The coming of man.
Author, storyteller and illustrator Gene Paleno lives in Witter Springs. He is author of “Lake County History: A Mystical Adventure in Time.” The book costs $32, including tax and shipping, and is available through Pal Publishing, P.O. Box 6, Upper Lake, Ca 95485. Contact Paleno at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit his Web site, www.genepaleno.com .
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CLEARLAKE, Calif. – The Lake County Campus of Woodland Community College in Clearlake offers a wide variety of culinary arts classes for those interested in becoming leaders in the food service and hospitality industry.
SACRAMENTO – The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board and the California State Parks are urging swimmers, boaters and recreational users to avoid direct contact with, or use of, waters containing blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) now blooming in San Luis Reservoir and O’Neill Forebay located in Merced County on the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley.
