Water Wheel Creek: Waterfalls and More...

Checking out the top end of the waterfall canyon on Water Wheel Creek. This is located near the bottom of the switchbacks on the Grizzly Flat Trail where it drops down to cross Stevens Creek.

This is the upper most fall in the lower canyon. Water is pouring out down here even though the above ground channel is dry. Lots of flowstone in here with a couple of stalactites. Stay tuned to the end for a cool shot of an infinity pool fed by a waterfall!

This whole area seems to be part of a 1/2 mile long tectonic block that's been tilted by the San Andreas fault. It seems to have slid down the northern slope of the canyon and tilted noticeably as well as being displaced in the direction of the Pacific plate motion.

This would be an excellent area to study for a graduate student in geology. It should be possible to get some dating information from the abundant travertine deposits.

According to the USGS maps, there's no creek here. On the USGS maps, what I'm calling Waterwheel Creek flows down to the east from here, not to the west.

Normally, a Speleothem is in a cave (a.k.a. a Karst), but this Speleothem is flowing over a Karst. There's a large Speleothem along the paved portion of Stevens Canyon Road.

Speleothem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speleothem

Location:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2968397,-122.141266,17.17z

Another tidbit, the 1838 earthquake epicenter was located almost at this location:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_San_Andreas_earthquake
Magnitude estimated in the 6.8 - 7.2 range, surrounding areas saw over 5 ft/1.6 m displacement. Found this out with the Wikipedia layer in the OSMand mapping app.

More to come...
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