At any loca­tion on earth, as the rock record goes down into time and out into ear­lier geo­gra­phies it touches upon tens of hun­dreds of sto­ries, wherein the face of the earth often changed, changed utterly, and changed again, like the face of a crack­ling fire. The rock beside the road exposes one or two lev­els of the col­umn of time and gen­er­ally implies what went on imme­di­ately below and what occurred (or never occurred) above. I wish to make no attempt to speak for all geol­ogy or to sweep in every fact that came along. I want to choose some things that inter­ested me and through them to sug­gest the gen­eral his­tory of the con­ti­nent by describ­ing events and land­scapes that geol­o­gists see writ­ten in rocks.

– John McPhee, Basin and Range, in Annals of the For­mer World, New York: Far­rar, Straus and Giroux, 1998: 37.

In my research, I want to sug­gest, as McPhee does, some­thing about the nature of places by describ­ing the the events and land­scapes — both nat­ural and human — recorded in the rocks, cli­mate, soil, flora, fire, fauna, and sub­ur­bia found in the Puente Hills of South­ern California.