Sunday, June 3, 2007

San Andreas Fault Trail at Los Trancos Open Space Preserve

If you look closely at the photo (or embiggen) you'll see two posts. These two posts mark the San Andreas fault.

I stood on the fault to take the photo. When we walked along the trail, we randomly spoke to the fault. Mostly we said things like "stay quiet!" and "please don't rupture."

Another photo is of a fence with one chunk of it moved four feet in front of the other.

To quote from the information at the Los Trancos web site: "This is how a fence built across the fault might have looked immediately after the 1906 earthquake. The fence has been reconstructed from century-old materials found on the preserve. ... During the 1906 quake, faulting may have moved the far (right hand) segment as much as 3 feet in a northwesterly direction. In 1906, about 400 miles of the San Andreas Fault slipped, from San Juan Bautista to Cape Mendocino. Starting off the Golden Gate, the fault unzipped itself at over 5,000 miles per hour, taking 20 seconds to reach this point."

wow.

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