Early Summer Early Evening Foothills Walk

The summer solstice passed but a few days ago and the days are slowly getting shorter, but there is plenty of light after the workday ends to get some nice walks in the foothills around Auburn. And the angle of the sunlight on the hillsides provides some good photographs.

Here are some photos taken today along Stagecoach Trail, part of a toll road built in the 1850s to connect the county seat of Auburn and the mining town of Iowa Hill.

Unfortunately on this walk, the sunlight did not allow for a good photograph of a particular outcrop of metavolcanic rocks. (I'll get a photo later.) The folding and twisting of these rocks attest to the incredible subduction forces that created these parts. The rocks began as oceanic volcanoes hundreds of miles to the west, and were jammed into place here in the Jurassic Period, some 145 to 199 million years ago.

Or, if you take a fundamentalist view of things, just a few thousand years ago.

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Update: I returned to Stagecoach Trail to get photos of the outcrop of metavolcanic rocks. Here's the outcrop from a distance.

And here are closer views.