glaznertaro Now that I know the joys of hiking with dogs in pristine wilderness, I cannot imagine leashing one up and heading down a paved street with a poop bag in my pocket.

A dog on a good run entices me to go deeper into the landscape than I would on my own. When I follow Taro, my favorite Aussie shepherd, into the Tungsten Hills in search of a little exercise, I get to experience petrified frogs and stink bugs, plus the peek-a-boo outline of a distant mountain, or a strange shadow cast by a cloud, or an odd rock that makes me ask out loud from whence it came. Sometimes I go home and pull books from my shelf in search of answers to the questions I bounce off the dog, and the book I resort to most often was written by my brother, Allen, a geologist who happens to be an expert on the geology around Bishop.

I did not know this when I decided to move to the Eastern Sierras from the Long Beach/Orange County area, where I had lived for 16 years before January 2009. I mean, I knew Allen had skipped the fourth grade, but that he would eventually upend conventional beliefs about the geologic history of the Owens and Yosemite valleys, and publish a couple of books about this stuff, was kind of being lost on me. I came up here because I wanted to live as simply and beautifully as I could in a mean economy. It’s a bonus that I get to see my brother regularly during his field work.

While he was here recently, I decided to take advantage of Allen’s expertise, so I invited him on a hike with Taro to our favorite spot just north of Ed Powers Road between the highways. Stepping out of the car, I asked him to label everything within our 360-degree view, while the dog peed on some buckwheat and stuck his nose in the wind.

Allen pointed out a humble hill just south of the road. “Usually there’s a reason why things are hills,” he began. I had never questioned a hill’s grounds for existence – just its choice in placing itself at the end of a long hike when I am already tuckered out. But this hill, a basalt flow, hinted at the origin of the area. Comprised of some dark lava, it may be the result of a little fault squeeze-up, according to my brother.

In fact there are faults all over the place, and where there is faulting, there are going to be some spectacular land formations for the layperson to enjoy. It is faulting that is lifting up the White Mountains to the south of us. Faults cut in to the alluvial fans at the base of the range, notably at Silver Canyon, where we can actually detect from our vantage point the glint of a vehicle parked on a switchback clear across the valley.

But what I want to know about most is right in front of us: these Tungsten Hills, and the cool, clear water flowing through the landscape like a Disneyland water feature. It is in fact a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power irrigation canal, but Taro hardly cares. As my brother raises the question of whether or not the hills are actually a giant landslide, the dog submerges himself where the canal widens into a bona fide swimming hole, before it disappears beneath the road that leads to the top of the highest slope.

The canal flows right down the side of the alluvial fan we are walking across, and from the top of the hill, we can see its expanse. The hilltop is laden with big, rugged, stained-granite boulders full of vertical cracks, and judging by the shards of amber beer bottles around their base, it’s clear this unique place is a party spot for some locals. Looking more closely, Allen pointed out distinct black “stripes” cutting through the rock. These are dikes, magma-filled cracks of older granite, and they cover the hillside. The road we walked down followed along one of these large stripes.

The tungsten in our view of the Tungsten Hills is not as plentiful as deposits further up the right flank of Mt. Tom, where the world’s main source of it was mined until 20 years ago. The rock here is mostly granite—the pretty nuggets I am forever picking up and examining in the afternoon light. This is the stuff my brother is most interested in, trying to find out why it is here. The answers to some of his complex questions reveal larger truths, most importantly about climate change.

“This is an area where a lot of those theories have been tested,” Allen said. “The stuff I deal with more directly, on granite formation and vulcanism, these are sort of world-class examples of that.” And because the United States Geological Service has carried out the basic groundwork studies of the area so completely over the years, scientists like Allen can come in and focus on more topical problems.

Looking out toward Highway 168, a clump of trees just north of Ed Powers Road barely obscures a famous geologic field trip stop. It’s an unusual six-sided basalt dike known as Knopf’s Knob, named in the 1890s after geologist Adolph Knopf, who first studied it. Of all the emergent phenomena in our midst, Taro cannot resist its pull; just last week, he found a foot-and-a-half section of dried up rattlesnake in its shadow.

This essay appears in the current issue of Eastside magazine and is republished here with gracious permission.

Allen Glazner’s book, “Geology Underfoot in Yosemite National Park,” has just been published by Mountain Press.