I'm supposed to be writing about gardens...
I’ve been editing images for what seems like months. In reality it is probably a couple hours a day a few days a week for several weeks. Either way, it is a long time in front of a screen concentrating. This is taxing on my health due my chronic illness.
A few weeks ago I came across two pictures while editing.
These are closeups of giant rock on the beach in Bandon, OR, when I visited in 2017. It was a foggy mystical morning and amongst the craggy outcropping and giant sea stacks of basalt and sandstone were these other-worldly colorful gems. I’m standing at full-height taking these pictures, they are not small rocks, and it was obvious that the “discoloration” in browns/tans/oranges is on areas “more exposed” to oxygen, that is, aging, and areas more protected or where layers of rock have broken away are cream, blue, and greenish.
I’m almost positive this is Josephine Ophiolite, and I’m only being struck with this realization as I’ve rested over the last few weeks due to birthday/holiday/weather fatigue and binge-watching a YouTube channel about PNW geology. I knew about, and had seen, the blue-green rock along the Smith River and parts of the Rogue River, I just hadn’t connected it to what I had seen on that beach in Bandon until now. The middle fork of the Coquille River that empties at Bandon into the Pacific also has this rock! And other viewers of the YouTube channel had sent the guy samples and photos of the same rock at Port Orford, just about 20 miles south of Bandon.
So enjoy this strange and wonderful example of ancient exotic terrane exposed in such an accessible manner in SW Oregon/NW California called Josephine Ophiolite. There are not very many glimpses of this type of rock in North America. Only four US states have some sort of ophiolite exposed at the surface. Both Oregon and Washington have examples, and this is one of them. I also saw a type of ophiolite at Deception Pass State Park in Washington along a rocky beach, where I had gathered a few small colorful rocks that had washed up. These rocks now sit on the back of my toilet where they match the color scheme in my bathroom and they originated in another exposure in the San Juan Islands.
