Geography
The wilderness is in the Transverse Ranges, east of the junction of the San Rafael Mountains and Sierra Madre Mountains at Big Pine Mountain. Madulce Peak, at 6,541 feet, is the highest mountain completely within the wilderness, and the lowest point is 3,700 feet where Santa Barbara Creek exits to the north. The wilderness contains the divide between two watersheds: the Cuyama River to the north, and the Santa Ynez River to the south. The major streams carrying runoff to those two rivers are Santa Barbara Creek and Mono Creek, respectively.
The Big Pine Fault cuts through the wilderness from west to east, trending northeast after exiting the wilderness, in the direction of the nearby San Andreas Fault, which is only about 12 miles from the wilderness boundary. The Pine Mountain Fault splits off from the Big Pine; it is visible along the southern slope of nearby Reyes Peak. Most rocks in the wilderness are Eocene marine sediments, with some scattered outcrops of Pliocene, Miocene, and Oligocene sediments, especially immediately to the south of the Pine Mountain Fault (the contact between these rock units and the Eocene sediments defines the Big Pine Fault).
Read more about this topic: Dick Smith Wilderness
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)