Of Sand Dunes and the birth of the Silicon Valley

A valley shaped by ancient forces

Ancient history
Sixty-five million years ago began the Cenozoic period, a time in which the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west of Silicon Valley and the Mount Diablo Range to the east were thrust onto the scene. As such, the valley became a "structure valley" because of that building action, as opposed to an "erosional valley."

This ancient, snarling, violent birth yielded a valley sheltered and fertile, a place the Spanish explorers considered to have the best climate in the world. And its origin as a structure valley arguably turns out to be more than just metaphoric.

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The frontier
In 1893, a Wisconsin academic, Frederick Jackson Turner, presented a paper in Chicago describing the frontier's seminal impact on the development of America and the American character. Turner feared that the closing of the frontier might hamstring or destroy American dynamism.

Around the same time, San Jose's population was exploding 50 years after the discovery of gold in California. More than 18,000 people lived in the Santa Clara Valley, and the population was increasing at 30 and 40 percent per year. But California was the end of the road for this massive, historical migration west. Just over the Santa Cruz Mountains lay the shimmering blue of the Pacific Ocean, the end of the continent. There was no more land to explore, conquer, develop and farm. The frontier was closed. Yet wagon- and train-loads full of people continued to crash into California, the end of the trail.


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Swirling eddies
Geologists describe something called the aeolian effect. Wind whisks up the top layer of earth--its finest particles--and sweeps them off somewhere to be deposited in some form. Often those depositions undergo another aeolian effect and end up somewhere else or scattered, literally, to the four winds.

In Eureka Valley, the aeolian process swept up the parched, scorched cover layer of an otherwise rocky terrain and has created a natural wonderland in the Eureka Sand Dunes. When the wind picks up here, you can hear is the sound of trillions of sand pebbles whisking across the desert floor or across each other.

The smooth white dunes have never dissipated because of their location: The dunes, surrounded on three sides by mountains, have nowhere to go. Over time, the wind, rather than just blowing the huge sand hills into memory or the next county, reforms them as part of this aeolian process....a sand eddy if you will. The big white elephant shifts, grows, shrinks, wiggles a little this way or that. But it's always there.

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Tale of two valleys
Fred Terman is considered the father of the Silicon Valley or at least of the dynamic we associate with the Silicon Valley--that relentless drive to innovate, try, fail, try succeed, and improve, tweak, tinker, revolutionize. History is dotted with Fred Termans whose genius and influence migrated away from their place. But there's something different about this place, a valley shaped by ancient forces...aoelian and Cenozoic forces.


Click on image to enlarge.
The forces of nature have, for generations since the 19th century, swept up a certain type of people and transported them to the western edge of the North American continent where they hit a valley bounded on three sides by mountains -- a "building" valley, not an erosional valley. There, an eddy of ingenuity, of invention and innovation began and continues to swirl today, just like the Eureka Sand Dunes. The energy, the ideas and the people swirl around, reforming, rising, fall and rising again but never, ever, vanishing.