There are plenty of reasons to drive two hours north of San Francisco into the heart of Sonoma County, and most of them involve sipping wine in Instagram-friendly light on a be-vinèd terrace with three photogenic friends until you're drunk enough to start pondering the fleeting nature of our existence and how your #WineCountry selfie will look on Facebook. But if you, like me, have developed in your 30s an inexplicable allergy to wine, you might find yourself instead touring a geothermal power plant nestled in the Mayacamas mountain range and pondering the concrete realities of deeper things like molten rock, condensation, and how electricity works.
The Geysers — the Calpine Corporation power plant in question — pumps about 20 million gallons of treated wastewater each day deep into the ground. There, it's converted into steam by the heat of nearby molten rock, then piped back up into power plants where it is transformed into electricity. If you don't really understand how that works, the free community tour provided once a month by the Geysers staff probably won't help. This is a field trip for the power plant enthusiast. Best to bone up on the mechanics of turbines, drills, and pumps before you come.
We congregate at the Calpine Visitor's Center — a modern building festooned with information on renewable energy and letters from children thanking the company for purchasing their livestock at the 4H fair — in Middletown. After supplying us with hard hats, safety goggles, and earplugs, Calpine representatives welcome us onto a chartered bus and drive us up into the mountains. The scenery is beautiful, though somewhat blighted — much of the forest is now standing deadwood, a casualty of the drought that has allowed the dreaded bark beetle to take hold — but most of the guests on the bus save their ooohs and aaahs for the giant steam pipes lining the narrow roads.
Our first stop is a gravel parking lot/lookout where we gather around our tour guide and listen to his tales of engineering feats. Tim Conant has worked at the Geysers for 32 years — he's now the director of geothermal engineering for the plant — and he has a wealth of knowledge about the history of the site and the workings of the machinery. He tells us that the white man who first "discovered" the geothermal wonders of the Geysers (centuries after Native Americans discovered them, of course) returned to his village to proclaim that he had stumbled upon the gates of hell.
Later, we see a machine that removes solid sulfur from the steam, walk through a power plant with its imposing metal turbines, and drive by a well field and cooling tower. We don't see any natural signs of geothermal activity, such as the titular geysers (a misnomer; there never were any) or the fumaroles that once spewed steam into the open. All of that is hidden now, subsumed to the mechanisms of machinery.
If you do want to see the earth belch and can't make it to Yellowstone, there is an actual geyser about 20 minutes to the south. Old Faithful of California is just outside of Calistoga. For a mere $14, you can enter the grounds and wait for the geyser — artificially created when a rancher attempted to dig a well — to erupt every 40 minutes or so. The attraction also features bocce ball, a goat farm, a mini-museum housed in a shack, and shaded tiki huts where you can recline and ponder the nature of capitalism.
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