Brief Explanation of the Geology of the Santa Clarita Valley
The Santa Clarita Valley has a very diverse geologic history and makeup. Fossils abound here, as well as gold, howlite, and oil. During the mid to late 1800's, there was gold fever here. Acton, Soledad City (now Ravenna), and Placerita Canyon were the hubs of the mining activities. Only Acton remains as a gold producing area today. There was an actual gold rush in Placerita Canyon starting in 1842 - six years before the discovery at Sutter's Mill. Oil was also discovered here during the same time period. During the 1870's and 1880's, oil was king here. Mentryville, a town about 3 miles west of Newhall, was an oil boom town. It was founded in the mid 1870's. Oil is still being pumped from the ground around here, only now the main operations are in Placerita Canyon and near Castaic.
Most of the valley is composed of sedimentary rocks ranging from 30 million years old to about 1.8 million years old. The valley floor is composed of alluvium from rivers and streams. Some of the oldest rocks in Southern California are located just five miles from here. They are a part of the San Gabriel Basement Complex and have been dated to about 1.7 billion years old. However, the last five million years here are the ones I will concentrate on, as this is when this valley began to take its present form.
During the Pliocene Epoch, much of this area was covered by the Pacific Ocean. It was shallow and was teeming with life. The life that once was here has left numerous fossils. These fossils include gastropods, clams, oysters, plants, and even fish. The waters that were here were warm but not warm enough to support more tropical forms of life such as coral. This whole area underwent drastic changes starting at around 1.5-2 million years ago. All the way up the coast, mountains were forming. These mountains exist today as the Coast Ranges. The sea receded and the land rose from below sea level to over 5000 feet in some places. This valley also took on a very different appearance. During the early Pleistocene, the Santa Clarita Valley was a much broader and shallower valley. The uplift that help to create the Coast Ranges also caused the dissection of the older valley floor creating the many stream terraces visible today along the sides of the canyons. Not all the mountains were formed around this time, however. The San Gabriel Mountains started forming 60 million years earlier during the Paleocene Epoch. Most of their uplift has occurred only in the last three million years.
So an uplift of the sea floor caused multi-layered stream beds? Would that not cause the water to run off, not lay down bed of gravel? Would that not cause the gold to be washed from the source to follow the stream bed and not be deposited and dispersedon one side of the canyon vs none on the other? The only way that could happen is if the existing water shed was over run with a flood of water with a direction that caused the gold to settle out on the source side of the water. Water that was so high that it was not channeled by the watershed but OVERRAN the water shed SIDEWAYS.
Now I have spend many a year walking the canyons of Santa Clarita, tell me, how does a stream bed become layed on the TOP of the hills? Does not water flow DOWN HILL? How does an uplift cause dozens of streambeds in a single canyon? If a stream bed is 15 foot thick, and is intersected by 4 others that are 5 to 15 foot thick how did a cut that intersect them (how did they get formed under the sea to be intersected in the first place) create 5 layers that are not PART of the cut. A cut is a cut, a stream bed is a build up. You want to have your cake and eat it too!
There are round placer boulders the size of cars placed in the side stream beds. That is impossible by your explaination. The cut that was the big one is the one that created the boulders, how then are they left in beds on the side of the hills? big rocks go down. They don't float.
Read your own story line and weep.
Just for the fun of it, tell me how to take a bird and make it into a fossil without it rotting first? What keeps the feathers in perfect shape? Want to know? I found the answer once in my goldpan.
It is pretty strange to see a north south stream bed coring a hill that is cut and exposed high on the hillside that is bysected by an east west streambed. All this from a single raised bed event? I will tell you one thing, go for it, north-southers got good gold, and you can tell them by the rocks. The rocks in them are down right pretty. They are pre-Noah stream beds and they almost always have good gold. The rocks are strangly translucent with color marbling that is not matched by modern streambeds.
About the only area that I could point to that I could tell you how to find one of those streambeds easily is the Tabletop mountain formation in Touloumne County in Northern California. It is an ancient streambed that was filled with lava before Noahs flood cut through the area. It wiped away the Basalt baserock the streambed was in but could not cut to the streambed due to the much harder lava. The result was the only underground streambed that is, uh above ground. The old timers dug slanted tunnels up into the base of the old stream bed in the motherload days and pulled out goose egg sized nuggets. The water was flowing so strong from the tunnels that they would dig till they just could not stand in the force of the water. Then they would move to the side and dig another intersecting tunnel.
The streambed was composed of large placer rocks that have that unusual coloration in many of them. Just look in the tailing piles and compare them to normal steambed rocks. When you develop an eye for the difference, you got a real hand up on your fellow gold seekers.
"In the last days, the earth will be a shadow of its former glory". Works even for the rocks...
Now if you want to find a few little nuggets not just flakes like the tourists in that area you need to get a pry bar and work the shale plates in the motherload streambeds. All of maraposa and Toulumne countys were washed over with a green clay during the flood. When you pry a plate and find the clay work it well, clay is greasy and you have to really break it up with your fingers. But you will find the Noah's gold. The color of the gold is a straw yellow, it is very pure and has less of the copper from the vien gold of most of the local structures. The point is that the green clay is in ALL the stream beds. Not one or two. Yet the source is not to be found upstream. It just is there. What ever deposited that clay sealing those cracks was a multiple COUNTY wide flood. As the clay is up above 4500 feet, that means the flood was higher than, you guessed it, 4500 feet. I have worked the hills of California from north to south, and every where I go the flood was there.
Now I really am not trying to convince you about God. That is up to you, and frankly not my problem. But I am trying to show you that your viewpoint of creationists is pretty narrow and not a bit accurate. I have been there, done that. I was not born believing in God, I just came to that conclusion because there was no other excuses left. I was, like you, raised in the evolutionary faith, but sorry, that dog don't hunt.
I have no desire to demean you either, and my skin is asbestos mostly so take what I got to say or leave it. But you leaving it will not make it any less true. What is, just is. Face it.