The Mars Crew InOwens Valley

We drove the narrow, winding roads above Sierra Madre to the foot of Mount Wilson, parked, crossed a footbridge over a babbling gully, and walked into Antonin’s greenhouse.

Antonin is a planetary scientist who splits his time among the observatories of Hawaii, Alaska, Arizona and California. In a few weeks he is off to the Keck Observatory on the Big Island, and then to NASA in San Jose, where he will spend 120 nights watching Io, the volcanic moon of Jupiter. “You can’t actually see an eruption,” he says. “I’ll be looking for gray rings of sulfur, and watching how they spread.” Soon we were crossing the northern Mojave. Somewhere past Lancaster, Antonin pointed out a steep ledge. “The Garlock fault,” he said. “The second-longest fault in California.”

Past Acton, we climbed a slight incline dotted with new homes and billboards advertising developments with fancy names. “This is the San Andreas Fault,” Antonin said, and we stared out the window at the roadcut, layers of old sediment folded and twisted like taffy. Lily said, “I bet none of these people have a clue what they’re standing on.”

At Red Rock Canyon State Park, we lounged for a few minutes under the red, Mars-like formations. “Does anybody know the history of these rocks?” I asked. “I’ll give it a try. Petrified sand from the Triassic.”

“Unlikely,” Antonin said. “There’s hardly any Triassic rock in California. This looks more like lake sediments.”

Then he told us that the JPL Mars airplane team had been out here testing their equipment only a few weeks before.

“They test here because it looks like Mars,” he said.

The airplane, he explained, was a prototype for a NASA proposal: it would drop out of a pod, shed its parachute, unfold its wings and fly over more of the Martian surface than any rover could ever cover. By the time we neared the Owens Valley, everyone in the car was talking about how the land outside the window had been made.

Two Unrelated Ranges

The Owens Valley is a long trough dropped between two blocks of the earth’s crust, the Sierra Nevada to the west and the Inyo Mountains to the east. The crust here is being pulled apart, and the valley floor is still sinking; in 1872, an earthquake near Lone Pine dropped parts of it by several feet in a single night.

The Sierra Nevada is one enormous block of granite, tilted up along its eastern edge, which is why it rises from this side like a wall. At Lone Pine we drove up the Whitney Portal Road and into the contortions of the Alabama Hills, circling through the rock formations until I feared for the Jeep. Then it was up, to the base of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower forty-eight.

The Jeep overheated on the climb. We turned the heater on full to pull the heat out of the engine and poured water over the grille, and it started again with a hiss. Soon we were braking downhill, the engine puffing and whirring, toward the town of Independence.

We talked about the Sierra Nevada and its place in American mythology: the forty-niners, guns, rough living and murder, the world the Grateful Dead sang about in “Brown-Eyed Women,” whiskey stills and hard men.

In Independence we visited the museum. A mammoth bone. Pistols. Paiute baskets. And a collection of small bottles, one of them labeled “chocolate-covered nitroglycerin tablets.”

We passed the Caltech radio observatory and crossed into Mono County. “We’re everywhere,” Antonin said. This was the Eastern Sierra, one of America’s wildest mountain ranges: gnarled pines gripping for life, year-round snowcaps and countless jagged spires.

This was the land that never fit into Sequoia or Yosemite, just endless public acres. It was a poster child for the Turner Thesis, the turn-of-the-century idea that America became a practical, inventive nation by moving west, reinventing old tools to meet new country.

Here, the inventing was all about gold. The famous strikes came out of the Mother Lode on the Sierra’s western slope; this side got the later rushes, the silver of Cerro Gordo and the gold of Bodie up north. It began with a sheath knife jabbing at rocks. Then, just as Turner would have it, came the pan, then the rocker and finally the sluice. Prospectors came from everywhere: China, France, Mexico, free Black men from the South and Scandinavians from the north.

Without law, there was only the vigilante. A man could be noosed and dragged in plain sight of town for stealing flour.

Inside the Caldera

We passed into a giant caldera, miles wide. “See that pinkish-white rock on the side of the road,” Antonin said. “That’s famous among geologists. It’s called the Bishop Tuff. When this volcano blew 760,000 years ago, it threw out more than a hundred cubic miles of ash and pumice. What landed here was so hot it welded itself into rock. You can find the ash as far away as Nebraska; the wind just picked it up and deposited it there.”

In the heart of Long Valley, inside the caldera, we turned east along winding BLM roads to the upper Owens River, where we met two Berkeley graduate students. One studies Latin American literature; she is soft-spoken and sharp, and a serious outdoorswoman. A year earlier she had ridden a tandem bicycle with a friend from San Jose to Colorado, without a tent.

Her companion, according to Antonin, is “not difficult to find hiking around out here in the Sierra.” We passed signs that said “Warning, scalding water” and jumped into the hot springs along Hot Creek. The water was as hot as a bath, the creek winding and beautiful. “It’s just not a good idea to be here during an earthquake,” Antonin said.

We headed out on a narrower, rockier road to a remote grassy valley, a Bureau of Land Management cattle passage. A thermal creek ran through it like a steaming spine; we were, after all, inside a volcano. The high ledges above the valley were once hunting grounds, and obsidian Paiute arrowheads still turn up here.

S’mores with the Mars Team

We set up camp in the valley grass while members of Caltech’s Mars research group rambled in with beer, port wine, sausages and curry. To them, camping meant a sleeping bag in the grass. “All the better to see the stars,” said the Englishman, a Cambridge student who had arrived in America only a week before and had never seen the West Coast.

This interested the rest of the scientists, and the weatherman took it upon himself to explain s’mores.

“Some more. Get it?”

“Yes,” the Englishman said. “But what are graham crackers?” “Graham was a Presbyterian preacher, a really religious type,” the weatherman said.

“He invented them to curb sexual appetites.”

“They’re that good?” the Englishman asked. “Well, Graham thought so.”

Leya and I left camp and hiked along the Owens River at sunset, watching a lone, white-bearded fly-fisherman cast his line through the air. What a stereotype, I thought, and asked him if he ever caught anything. “They’ll start biting in half an hour.”

On the way back to camp, we passed a troupe of aging naked hippies lounging in a makeshift hot tub, diverted from the creek.

Seeds from Mars

Later, by the fire, I asked the question I had been saving all day. “If you do find life on Mars, it doesn’t really prove anything about life elsewhere in the universe, does it?”

“Right, that’s becoming more apparent.” “I mean, if we find life on Mars, isn’t it obvious it would come from the same source as life on Earth?”

“Probably, unless the chemistry turns out to be completely different. But we just finished tests on a satellite that spent years in orbit, and the bacteria on its outside survived. And we’ve worked out that the inside of a rock blasted off Mars could stay cool enough for life to ride along. With an atmosphere as thin as Mars has, though, anything living there now is more likely to be underground.”

“So life on Earth might have come from Mars?”

“Or the other way around. Bacteria can stay dormant for thousands of years.” Over the barbecue, I asked the weatherman what he thought of the movie Contact. He said it was an accurate picture of the scientific community: the passion, the politics, the fights for grant money, the egos.

The weatherman, it turned out, forecasts the weather on Mars. In the morning, I walked up the creek, hopping the boiling water until I reached its source, a parched spot with a strong sulfur smell and vents of steam. Then our caravan drove south and up into the Eastern Sierra. Below the road ran a river, and every hundred yards or so stood a fly-fisherman, alone, casting his line; I counted ten of them. “You know my problem with fly-fishing,” I said. “They’re trying a little too hard to be a certain kind of person.” “Well, fly-fishing was a quarter of what it is now before A River Runs Through It.”

“Makes sense. Bonefishing is the last fishing sport with some integrity.”

“The worst is deep-sea fishing. The big engines, the uniforms, the automated lines.”

“Agreed. What kind of sport is it to hunt for the biggest fish when all the big ones have already been killed?”

We started our hike at the foot of a big lake under a towering snowy peak and followed the group for a while, but our workweek legs weren’t ready for it. We said our goodbyes and drove home to Los Angeles through the hot Mojave, still talking about bacteria riding meteorites between the planets.