California’s Devils Postpile Was Finally Caught in the Act

California’s Devils Postpile Was Finally Caught in the Act Three stone columns at Devils Postpile leaned away from the wall for seventy one years, recorded since at least 1909, and then came down on the seventh of July 1980. In this one I go through what that wall actually is, a lava lake four hundred feet deep that cracked while still glowing at around sixteen hundred degrees, plus the glacier that sliced it open and exposed columns nobody would ever have seen otherwise. The part that gets me is how close it came to being dynamited in 1910 and dumped in the river as fill for a mining dam, and the prospecting that got it pulled out of Yosemite turned up nothing of value at all. I will be honest, the detail that unsettles me is from 1952, when a ranger looked at the wall after big earthquakes, saw no visible damage and called it stable, because the 1980 quakes left other columns cracked and resting on their own severed bases. Fifty five percent of those posts are perfect hexagons, which beats Giant's Causeway.