Save Del Puerto Canyon!

Deep in the Diablo Range, someone wants to flood a mysterious door that leads to 1) the Earth's mantle, 2) Mars, 3) pre-Columbian California, 4) the Cretaceous Era, and 5) a parallel dimension in which the Beatles never broke up. Plus, why California doesn’t need any more dams.

by Ryan Masters, August 13, 2020

Long referred to as “the door,” Del Puerto Canyon is a mysterious furrow that descends 2,000 feet and 22 miles through the eastern Diablo Range. It begins with the mighty Tule elk herds of San Antonio Valley, spills through the Gateway, a place of sweeping beauty where the ancestral spirits of the Yokuts are as much a part of the land as the trees, and out into San Joaquin Valley, near the City of Patterson. It’s a remarkable gorge of otherworldly reds and ochres, of quartz turrets, eerie magnesite mines, and legendary mineral springs.

Unfortunately, the lower five miles of magical Del Puerto Canyon are under serious threat. The Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir Project proposes a 260-foot high earthen dam and three saddle dams. The subsequent 800-acre reservoir would be connected by pipeline to the Delta-Mendota Canal and the water would mostly be used for Central Valley agriculture.

Every river in California deemed worthy of a dam already has one. For those keeping score, that’s about 1,500 dammed rivers. Del Puerto Canyon doesn’t already have a dam because it’s a terrible location for a dam. For one, it’s perched on the San Joaquin Fault Line, which hasn’t really let off any steam since the 1860s. For two, the Del Puerto Reservoir would flood the Del Puerto Creek drainage, already infamous for its landslides and record rates of erosion. And three, it could destroy a rich fossil record. The first dinosaur fossil ever discovered in California was found on a slope just above the inundation zone of the proposed reservoir, a fact conveniently left out from the project’s dubious Environmental Impact Review.

In short, the ill-conceived and reckless Del Puerto Canyon dam project would drown the Gateway, destroying one of the most important geologic and cultural sites in the state.

Through the Gateway

I begin my journey up Del Puerto Canyon from the east, turning off Interstate 5 near Patterson and heading into the golden hills of the Diablo Range. Beginning in the late 1700s, this place served as an oasis on the long, dry El Camino Viejo, the interior alternative to the coastal El Camino Real. The Diablos don’t invite the casual visitor. The Gateway to Del Puerto is a monumental front door that shields a labyrinth of winding box canyons. Beginning in the 1820s, Mexican vaqueros from Sonora corralled wild mustangs in these steep grottos before driving them south en masse to Mexico.

Turkey vultures perch in the enormous branches of valley oak, which stand like majestic sentinels along the sublime contours of the Gateway’s benchlands. These carrion birds sun their wings and compete for roadkill with crows the size of dogs. Enormous boulders dot fields of wild grasses. A copse of sacred cottonwood sways in the breeze, drinking up the creek with their thirsty roots. A kit fox disappears into its burrow with lunch still squirming in its mouth.

Long before the Spanish, the Hoyumne and Miumne Yokuts Indians belonged to all of this. Bedrock mortars and smaller grinding stones, cooking hearths, dwellings, and burial grounds imprint the landscape. The creek that runs through Del Puerto Canyon was once a swift and dangerous river. Near its narrow mouth, an ancient trail is weathered into the steep canyon wall. The pathway’s handholds and steps helped the Yokuts, the Spanish, Mexican vaqueros, and eventually American miners access the canyon safely for centuries. From an archaeological perspective, the Gateway is precious. It’s also hallowed ground. The bones of Yokuts ancestors rest in many of the caves that pock the canyon walls

Of course, if the dam project goes forward, all of this will disappear beneath the subsequent reservoir, which will impact roughly 22 percent of the Del Puerto Canyon, including its Gateway.

Do Not Mess With Chuy’s Girl

The unofficial entrance to the canyon is Graffiti Rock, an enormous roadside boulder aflame with professions of teenage angst and love, threats of great violence, and the poetry of the stoned and joyful. The graffiti has migrated off the boulder and begun to creep across the asphalt of Del Puerto Canyon Road. If he is to be taken at his word, “Chuy” will fuck up anyone he finds here with his girl. Consider yourself warned.

The bright, chaotic paint makes the boulder look like an exploratory spacecraft on a mission to Mars from the planet Oakland. Del Puerto Canyon has long been a popular spot for UFO sightings. In fact, until 2006, a cult that worshiped extraterrestrials lived in the canyon. Neighbors reported that cult members regularly performed elaborate ceremonies in flamboyant costumes and communicated with aliens using transmitters fashioned from minerals found in the canyon.

I leave Graffiti Rock behind and continue up Del Puerto Canyon Road. As I make my way through the Gateway, I am — from a geologic perspective — climbing through ancient oceanic sediments towards the Earth’s mantle. This crust, known as Coast Range Ophiolite, bursts with marine fossils. As I ascend, I imagine the organisms squirting and slipping through its striations on either side of the road. Around a bend, I find an enormous turret of quartz jutting up from the Ophiolite like a white rooster comb. The massive band of quartz plummets down the canyon wall for 200 feet before disappearing under the road before me.

Astonished to find a massive steel door set into this vein of quartz, I pull over. With some effort, I swing open the mine’s heavy, unlocked steel door and step into a shadowy chamber. Gold miners worked this vein years, unsuccessfully from what I understand. Yet a room of natural quartz, even quartz covered in cartoonish graffiti, feels like a win. It’s energized in here. I feel transported. Del Puerto Canyon is one of those special places where the walls between dimensions or realities appear flimsy, even permeable. Over the years, stories have emerged, tales of people who stepped through other kinds of doors, doors without visible frames or thresholds.

In perhaps the most infamous incident, a Livermore man traveled to a parallel universe and returned with a previously unreleased Beatles album. While chasing his dog through Del Puerto Canyon on Sept. 9, 2009, James Richards stumbled and knocked himself unconscious, unwittingly transporting himself into an alternate universe. In this other reality, Del Puerto Canyon is densely populated, ketchup is purple, and the Beatles followed up Let It Be with an album called Everyday Chemistry. What’s more, Richards managed to smuggle a copy back to this dimension.

And on a 90-degree day in 1936, a day very much like today, 18-year-old Allan Bennison of Patterson stepped through a portal into the Cretaceous Period. The amateur paleontologist pedaled 30 miles into Del Puerto Canyon on a second-hand bicycle in search of ammonites, or fossilized snails, but found the vertebrae and hindquarters of a hadrosaur instead. Disparaged as “cretaceous cattle” by paleontologists, the 20-foot duck-billed dinosaurs gathered in huge flocks here more than 65 million years ago. As a result, Bennison’s discovery failed to generate much interest (and, as I mentioned, didn’t make it into the Del Puerto Canyon dam project’s EIR.)

Ultramafic Overdrive

Del Puerto Canyon is one of the few places in the U.S. where fragments of the Earth's mantle have been thrust to the surface. An enormous and mysterious entity, the Earth’s mantle is 1,900 miles thick and makes up 80 percent of the volume of the planet. It’s so deep humans haven’t drilled to it yet. So far, the Earth’s mantle is deeper than greed, which is saying something.

The ultramafic rocks of the mantle are masterpieces of form and function. Composed of gemstones, including olivine (peridot), as well as bronzite pyroxene, and diopside, they also serve as ores for chrome, mercury, magnesium, platinum, nickel and other rare metals.

“Looking at these shattered broken rocks from very deep in the Earth, one imagines hell freezing over,” writes longtime Del Puerto Canyon devotee and Modesto College geology professor Garry Hayes. “The forges of the demons and devils lie frozen in place, to be slowly removed by earthly weathering. They try to invade the surface realm, but they are defeated by the forces of the heavens, the water and ice falling from the sky.”

As I near the Earth’s mantle in Del Puerto Canyon, the iron-rich earth is stained Mars red. Most of the rock is serpentine, a brittle stone that looks like dragon scale with psoriasis. When I clamber high up the steep, ochre walls into hidden rivulets and niches, I find the canyon is riddled with old mine shafts. Most are back-filled and shallow, but others wend deep into the earth. During much of the last century, chromite, the source of chrome, and magnesite, was sourced from a vast network of underground mines.

New Age mystics believe magnesite aids the “development of psychic visions of exceptional clarity.” The UFO cult used it as an extraterrestrial transmitter. Before scoffing, bear in mind magnesite was detected in both meteorite ALH84001 and on Mars.

Historically, magnesite is known for its role in wholesale slaughter. It was key to manufacturing the hurricane of flying steel known as World War I. Before Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot in the head by an otherwise incompetent Serbian revolutionary, 70 percent of all magnesite was imported from Austria and Greece. World War I changed all of that. When America decided to join the Great War in 1917, the nation suddenly needed vast amounts of steel. Del Puerto Canyon and the surrounding area became ground zero for a global magnesite rush.

In Frank Raines Regional Park, named after an otherwise unremarkable turn-of-the-century Stanislaus County supervisor, a plaque memorializes the Patterson and Western Railroad, which transported magnesite, manganese chrome, and quicksilver down Del Puerto Canyon from Sept. 20, 1916 to Aug. 14, 1920. To reach one mine, a 3,000-foot tramway was constructed up the side of the canyon.

Just east of Frank Raines Regional Park, I take a long walk through the Minniear Day Use Area, which is accessible through a series of gates. I find gorgeous chunks of jasper — colorful chert stone that can be polished to a jewel-like luster — littered across the riverbed. It’s a stretch to call jasper even “semi-precious,” but its rich, unique colors are irresistible. After two hours, I return to the car with my pockets full.

Otherworldly Treasure

Further up the canyon, magnesium-rich Old Adobe Springs seeps from the earth’s mantle. When Native American and Mexican travelers wanted to traverse the state undetected, they traveled “La Vereda del Monte”, which passed through the Diablo Range. Adobe Springs was an important way station on that vital mountain trail.

Today, the spring is on private property. The owner, Paul Mason, routinely touts the health benefits of magnesium bicarbonate in his water. You can fill a water truck up for a fee or just gorge yourself at the free spigot. It tastes heavenly.

The ultramafic rock gives the Adobe and Del Puerto Creeks their rich Mg-Ca carbonate content. It’s also a great stand-in for both the surface of a primorial earth and the current surface of the planet freaking Mars. Get this: Astro-biologists are studying the bacteria in the Adobe Springs Water as potential predictors of Life on Mars.

That’s right, we’re just beginning to tap the extraordinary secrets hidden within Del Puerto Canyon’s 22 miles. Doors within doors within doors.

Sources & Further Reading

Alves, Shivaugn. No Del Puerto Reservoir petition. The Action Network.

Barrows, Matt. “Del Puerto Canyon.” PALEONEWS. June 8, 2000.

Desjardins, Deidre. “Groups criticize Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir site, environmental report.” California Water Research. Jan. 30, 2020.

Funez, Elias. “Del Puerto Canyon: Then and Now, a Controversy.” The Valley Citizen. Feb. 5, 2020.

Hayes Garry. “Damning Del Puerto Canyon, a Geological and Natural Treasure in our County.” Dec. 17, 2019.

Skelton, George. “California should stop thinking about more dams. The state is brimming with them.” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2019.

For more information about how you can get involved with saving Del Puerto Canyon, join the Save Del Puerto Canyon Facebook group.