Less than five million years ago, the range that we now know as the Sierra Nevada began to rise along its eastern margin. Through a combination of uplift of the Sierran block and down-dropping of the area to the east, the Sierra rose upward. Rising far more steeply to the east than the west, the entire Sierra Nevada can be thought of as an enormous tilted fault block with a long, gentle slope westward to California's Central Valley and steep eastern slope.