404 



University of California Publications. 



[Geology 



Beyond Tobias Creek for the next twenty miles to the month 

 of the Little Kern, no such alluvial cones are found on this side 

 of the Kern. The trail for this stretch of the canon passes over 

 a rolling terrace, the more expansive portions of which are known 

 as Dry Meadows, Peppermint Meadows, and Kern Flats, the last 

 being the high terrace of the Little Kern described in a former 

 paper.* This rolling terrace is mantled with a heavy regolith of 

 decomposed granite. Occasionally residual hills rise above its 

 average surface and the streams which cross it from the high 

 ground behind it do so in open swails and then plunge suddenly 

 through chasms to the Kern which flows at from 1200 to 1500 

 feet below. It is evident that this rolling terrace is a remnant 

 of a very mature valley land which has been dissected by the 

 down-cutting of the Kern, and is to be correlated with little 

 question with the high valleys of the upper Kern. At the conflu- 

 ence of the Kern and Little Kern this high valley is mantled 

 with lava as more fully described in the papert above referred to. 

 It appears, however, that the writer did not from his former 

 observations fully appreciate the degree of inequality of the lava- 

 mantled surface. The dissection of the Kern Flats by the Little 

 Kern shows that the lava is in places 400 feet thick. This would 

 indicate that the surface prior to the outflow of lava was similar 

 in its degree of relief to the very mature but rolling valley rem- 

 nants at Dry Meadows and Peppermint Meadows. There can be 

 little doubt that these high valley remnants once formed a 

 continuous valley through which the Kern flowed anterior to the 

 general uplift of the Sierra Nevada which inaugurated its dis- 

 section. It was, however, a more or less sinuous valley and in its 

 dissection one portion has been isolated from another. Thus 

 Kern Flats are separated from Peppermint Meadows by a moun- 

 tain spur, known as the Needle Rock, which extends out to the 

 west wall of the deeper portion of the canon. Similarly a mature 

 rounded divide which separates Peppermint Meadows from Dry 

 Meadows reaches the deeper part of the canon and the trail from 

 one meadow to the other has to cross this divide. The notable 

 features, then, of this side of the Kern canon between Kernville 



* Bull. Dept. Geol. Univ. Cal. Vol. 3, No. 15. 

 t Op. Cit. 



