Twelve Months of LFD (2016)

I'm doing the year-end meme wherein I compile the first sentence of the first post of every month. Meme rules are as follows, as per DrugMonkey:

Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.

I also add the first photo from the same first post. Previous takes on this Twelve Month meme at LFD were posted for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2015.

Aaand...here's the year 2016 for LFD:

January:

I've gathered up a collection of rocks to see which ones will float and which ones will sink.

February:

After checking out the southern route to Mineral Ridge while on my 1976 thesis quest, I headed north out of Silver Peak on then Highway 47 (now S.R. 265), carefully measuring the miles to the left-hand turnoff.

March:

With Mineral Ridge in my rear-view mirror, I stopped briefly at the basalt cinder cone, The Crater, which is located right on the side of the road just a few miles north of Silver Peak.

April:

From the vantage point of the end of the last post, a little southwest of Luning, Nevada, I turned around and pointed my camera northeast across Soda Spring Valley ... and paused to think back to the late 1980s, when we in the Western District of Former Mining Company had finally taken over exploration of the Walker Lane, which until then had been a mostly unexplored part of the Nevada District.

May:
I'm not sure how I got started on checking different words and concepts on Google Books Ngram Viewer yesterday, although my "History" tab suggests to me that it might have been related to some reading I was doing on science fiction.

June:

I collected this hand sample from the Original Bullfrog mine, Nye County, Nevada, sometime back in the mid to late 1980s when doing recon in the area, then cut and polished it—probably with a company saw and grinding wheel.

July:

We're now about two thirds of the way up the hill toward Red Pass on the Titus Canyon road, a one-way road that runs approximately east to west from Nevada into California, starting not far south of the ghost town of Rhyolite.

August:

There I was, preparing a few photos for posting in the ongoing Death Valley Trip – Titus Canyon series, doing my usual thing of marking up photos in MS Paint (I'm too cheap to buy any real photo programs), when I figured that I must have something around the house that might work better than either dragging the cursor across the screen with my trackpad or dragging my finger across the computer's touch screen.

September:

Now we'll leave the parking area near the Leadfield sign and, as I promised last time, we’ll walk out to what I’ve been referring to as the “far west cabin," although maybe that should really be "far northwest cabin."

October:

At the end of our last post—the one about the non-fold—we came into Titus Canyon proper and were looking at this view, down the canyon and to the west

November:

Just a bit of stibnite for your #MineralMonday.

December:

When I drove to the area on the south side of the Whipple Mountains where I ended up camping amidst downpours and nearby lightning, I thought I'd grab a few photos of the Colorado River Aqueduct, which passes through just north of CA Highway 62 on its way to the greater L.A. area, but an RVer was camped just beyond the aqueduct overpass, so I blew it off until I left.

2015 Top Ten Posts at LFD...

...and—as for 2014, 2013, and 2012—a few more. My rules, as modified from last year:

Because of the vagaries of stat reporting (in this case, by Google Analytics), I'm listing both the top ten posts for the year (in large font, with respective Top Ten number), and the top post for month's without a top-ten posting (non-Ten-rated posts are in a smaller font).

And so, here are the top 10 posts, plus 2 extra, along with a few pretty pictures:

January:

• Cliffs of the Ruby Mountains: Some Pretty Pictures #4

February:

• Things You Find in the Field: Old Sedan #6

March:

• Geo-beers: Volcanic Double IPA

April:

• Dust Storm at the Needles Rocks, Pyramid Lake #3

May:

• Siberian Haze in North-Central Nevada #5

June:

• The Beginning of an El Niño Trip: North-Central and Western Nevada #8

July: No posts in July!

August:

• Too Much Smoke — And Pelicans!

September:

• Way Too Much Smoke: Volcanoes (and Rivers and Ridges) in the Pacific Northwest #1

• Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District #10

October:

• A Hike Up Glass Mountain #7

• Finding a Thesis: Into the Palmetto Mountains #9

November:

• Views from Glass Mountain #2

December:

• Lida Summit Roadcut

Lida Summit Roadcut

Here we are, back at Lida Summit, looking west on S.R. 266.

When I pulled up to Lida Summit two years ago—I was on my way to a property examination and had decided to check out the Lida and Palmetto areas—I stopped right in front of...a roadcut! Well, that’s really no surprise, is it? Where else would a geologist stop, other than at some excellent viewpoint? (Acutally, the spot I selected, as you can see above, also came with a view of the mountains beyond, including the high Sierra.)

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Offhand, I can think of a few places where a geologist might park or pull over other than roadcuts or viewpoints. For one, I would park off a paved road! And while down some dirt road away from traffic, I would park in a place that wouldn't allow my truck to roll forward or backward even without chocking the tires with a rock or chock blocks. That spot might be some random wash or ditch of some kind—if I thought the low area was out of the way of any potential flash flood—or it might be on a hill, provided the truck wouldn't roll when I let out the clutch: a site with a natural declivity or some in-place, roll-resistant rocks. Then I'd chock the truck anyway.

Speaking of ditches, that brings me to a second possible parking position: a hidden spot. While in the field I might not want to advertise my presence for a variety of reasons. For example, I might decide to indulge in some sort of exploration espionage and therefore wouldn't want my presence to be suspected. Mostly, though, I'd chose to conceal my vehicle, and thus my presence and general whereabouts as a means of personal protection: in order to hide myself from random strangers who might prove to be a threat.

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A view of the summit from the west side: summit ahead, roadcut right.

And here's the roadcut. My truck is alongside for scale.

At first glance this is a rather unprepossessing roadcut: The rocks shine white in the sun, they show some jarositic to goethitic iron-staining, I detect a crude layering (am I imagining this?), and there appears to be a vertical jointing pattern. Also, I see a reddish brown soil or slope-forming layer beneath the resistant mini-cliffs.

Is the rock in our roadcut igneous (granitic rock or rhyolite, perhaps), sedimentary (blocky-weathering siltstone, perhaps), or metamorphic (quartzite, maybe)?

It's ash-flow tuff!

I was a little surprised to discover that the roadcut was in ash-flow tuff: I had been thinking more along the lines of granite or siltstone. Also, an elevation of 7400 feet seems a bit high for ash-flow tuff given the much lower current elevations of likely source calderas (Basin-and-Range faulting has no doubt changed the relative elevations of calderas and associated ash-flow sheets in some areas). Possibly, rather than thinking I could tell what the rock type was before I had even slowed down to look (I was going warp what?), I should have been a responsible geologist and selected a designated driver. or I maybe I should have somehow known to drive slow enough to see the micro-texture. I guess I was focused on the larger picture.

Vertical jointing stands out clearly in these photos. I’m not sure from this one exposure if the jointing qualifies as poorly formed columnar jointing, but it looks quite possible. Columnar jointing is fairly common in some parts of ash-flow tuff sheets, especially in the strongly welded zone. The jointing is often rectangular to square (Ross and Smith, 1961), though it can also be five- or six-sided, as is common in basalts. Consequently, it's not always possible to tell the difference between basalts and dark-weathering, columnar-jointed ash-flow tuffs from a distance.

Hints of the strong eutaxitic texture present in this exposure can be seen cutting subhorizontally across the photos, with the planar feature dipping more or less to the right (that would be in an easterly direction).

In this photo, the eutaxitic texture becomes, perhaps, slightly more visible.

Strongly or densely welded vitric ash-flow tuff.

Most of the rock lying along side the road below the roadcut looked like the rock above: white or very light gray to very pale yellowish gray strongly welded vitric ash-flow tuff, with a eutaxitic texture defined by highly compacted (or collapsed) light pinkish gray pumice fragments: the elongate, lens-shaped fragments with tapered or pointed ends: fiamme. The rock contains tiny crystals not easily seen in the photo, and lithic fragments that are small and sparse (at least in the hand samples I examined).

Back in the semi-dark ages, I learned, somewhat incorrectly, that the term "fiamme" refers to the tiny flame shapes at the end of flattened pumice lenses in rocks like these. I also learned to call the lenses "flattened (or collapsed) pumice," rather than "fiamme." The lenses are definitely fiamme, even though Ross and Smith (1961) used a definition that might seem more specific than the one commonly used today. They defined fiamme as

"the Italian name used to describe black glassy inclusions in piperno and which have a cross section shaped like the tongues of flame. These are often several centimeters in length, but may range from microscopic size to several feet in length,"

where "piperno" is a rock characterized by lenses of glass.

The definition and genetic interpretation of fiamme is addressed at length by Bull and McPhie (2007). They point out that the presence of fiamme is not diagnostic of welded ash-flow tuff (the same way that the absence of fiamme is not diagnostic that you are looking at something besides a welded ash-flow tuff).

Moderately or strongly welded lithic-rich vitric ash-flow tuff.

I'm not sure if this rock is part of the same unit or if I've picked up a piece of some float from some other ash-flow tuff. It's pinkish, rather than whitish, although color doesn't technically matter in correlation; it contains a considerably higher proportion of lithic fragments, although that could be a function of being somewhat less welded, and lithics can be concentrated in layers or swarms within an ash-flow sheet. The matrix of the rock shows some similarity to the matrix of the first rock sample: it consists of devitrified glass with collapsed pumice, but it appears to contain a higher percentage of tiny crystals.

We can examine these rocks a little more closely.

An enlargement from ash-flow tuff #1.

An enlargement from ash-flow tuff #2.

For my part, I go for them being from separate units at this point, but further examination, some mapping, and thin sections would be required to be sure.

Related Posts:
Thesis: Finding an Area
Finding a Thesis: Battle Mountain to Austin to Gabbs
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line Road
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line to Belmont
Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District
Finding a Thesis: A Joshua Tree Aside
Finding a Thesis: Into the Palmetto Mountains
Finding a Thesis: Farther into the Palmetto Mountains
Finding a Thesis: A Bit O' Geology in the Palmetto Mountains
Finding a Thesis: Future Stories from the Palmetto Mountains

Post updated 2Dec2015 to add related posts.

Future Stories from the Palmetto Moutains

It's 58 miles to the next gas station at Lida Junction on S.R. 266, looking west.

In later years—in the future of the 1976 "present" of these ongoing thesis-hunt stories—I made my way back into the Palmetto-Magruder area barely a handful of times. Once, while taking a back way into Death Valley in the fall of 1986, we made some stops between Lida Junction and Lida to find some blackbrush. This notably unsuccessful endeavor was instigated by a palynologist—he preferred the pronunciation "pollenologist"—who swore he would surely be able to show us some fine examples of the cryptic bush (cryptic to us). At the time, however, most of the bushes lacked leaves (it was fall, or extra dry, or both), and while many had the dark grayish woody stems and trunks reportedly diagnostic of blackbrush, it was nigh impossible to tell one bush from another. Our palynologist couldn't positively identify a single bush! I’ve consequently never been able to ID the plant.

Corral near the junction of SRs 266 and 174, the road to Gold Point. Halogetin in the foreground, unidentified scrub beyond the fences. 

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And now I'm going to deviate from my usual format to tell a story that may or may not have occurred in the Palmetto Mountains, one which I am assured by a certain geo-type, who may or may not have been present, not only did not occur, but could not possibly have occurred. Some details may or may not have been changed in this retelling. Any similarities to certain Former Mining Company trips made in the area during the mid- to late 1980s are unquestionably coincidental.

There were four of us geo-types, four geos on a 2-truck expedition into an area of old mining prospects on the south side of an east-west-trending mountain range in a relatively arid area. The sun was high in the sky, as it often is at about midday. The white Chevy pickup (this part is clear in my mind) was ahead of me, going more slowly than would have been comfortable in my company truck, which was a half-ton, 4WD Ford pickup, probably an '85. The Ford could take the deep washboard that was pervasively present through the area at higher speeds than the Chevy because of its better sway bars and other off-road accoutrements. (I know, I know; this sounds like a trite Chevy-Ford rivalry.) Consequently, I was staying a ways back, letting "the guys" go ahead. (In my truck, we were two youngish women, both geologists.)

And now we come to the controversial part of this possibly apocryphal story.

The two ahead of us—those two in that white Chevy pickup, the truck that also lacked enough gumption to go up hills in anything higher than middle gear (I won't mention here its barely SFW nickname)—took off on a hummocky-looking, powdery-textured two-track that was running straight up a steep hill. I won’t exaggerate and say this was the steepest dirt road I’d ever seen (or driven on), but something about it, besides my aversion to being right behind someone on a dirt road—ugh, the dust!—made me stay at the bottom of the hill while I watched them ascend steeply and make a sharp, overly banked turn to the right.

Up ahead in the distance, they stopped. By now we could either barely see them, or they were beyond our sight. We, who had stayed below, walked on up: it wouldn't be that far to the next prospect, and we wanted to check out the road. Oh, look! Beyond the curve the road cuts straight across the hill at a complete sidehill! Any forward or backward movement and the rear end will slide out! (The rear end is usually the part to go first; a complete roll down the side of the mountain is less common).

Disclaimer: The driver of the white truck maintains that there was no sidehill too steep for the truck at this particular locale (which I remember as being in the Palmetto Mountains), and that there was no winching uphill to a Joshua tree in progress when I showed up on foot (and no winching to any Joshua tree ever, anywhere). And the usual statement—pictures, or it didn't happen—could apply. There definitely were no pictures.

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I’ll stop for now, not to leave anyone hanging or anything, and will come back to the Palmettos once more, with some roadside geology.

Related Posts:
Thesis: Finding an Area
Finding a Thesis: Battle Mountain to Austin to Gabbs
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line Road
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line to Belmont
Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District
Finding a Thesis: A Joshua Tree Aside
Finding a Thesis: Into the Palmetto Mountains
Finding a Thesis: Farther into the Palmetto Mountains
Finding a Thesis: A Bit O' Geology in the Palmetto Mountains

Finding a Thesis: Farther into the Palmetto Mountains

Magruder Mountain from Lida Summit.

The sun went down on that 1976 campsite perched somewhere on the south side of the Palmetto Mountains, and I eventually fell asleep, curled up in my barely adequate sleeping bag on the ground near my '76 Opel. Fortunately, by this time on my thesis hunt the evenings were almost balmy, so I didn't freeze the way I had during that earlier, colder stop a few miles north of Belmont. Was this trip later in the spring?—or was it really that much warmer at the same elevation but 75 miles to the south?

I arose the next morning and dinked around a few nearby workings (possibly near the Blue Dick Mine) while I grabbed a quick bite. Then I once again got out my paper topo sheets—this time it would be the Goldfield 2° sheet and the Magruder Mountain and Lida Wash 15' maps—and determined my course for the day. I would at least plan to get up to some of the prospects and workings near Excelsior Spring, and I'd try to hit a few prospects to the northwest near the Palmetto Mine.

A portion of the Magruder Mtn 15' quad courtesy of the USGS
via their Map Locator & Downloader.

I relaxed a bit as I drove down the alluvial fan road, feeling not nearly as tense as I had the day before, and then I made my way up and over Lida Summit, which sits at an elevation of 7460 feet (although it apparently was at 7400 feet as recently as 2004!).

Lida Summit looking west.

The view looks about 55 miles across the relatively low hills of the Sylvania Mountains, across intervening Eureka Valley, across a low northern part of the Inyo Mountains, and across Owens Valley south of Big Pine, at the distant peaks of the Sierra Nevada. The highest peaks in the view, toward the right approaching a dark hill beyond and below the sign, are Mount Pinchot at 13,494 feet (4113 m) and Striped Mountain at 13,179 feet (4017 m).

When I had planned my stops early in the morning, I didn't know I'd be passing by the old site of Palmetto, formerly a silver-mining community, now a complete ghost town.

The Palmetto historical marker (also read it here), in front of an old millsite.

The rock work of the millsite.

Abandoned stone building.

Looking through the old ruin up toward the highest point of the Palmetto Mountains, 9285 feet (often called the "Blue Dick Benchmark").

Both Peakbagger and SummitPost list the elevation of the Blue Dick Benchmark as 9289 feet (2831 m). SummitPost has a good story about oldtimer Blue Dick Hartman, for whom the nearby Blue Dick Mine was named. A somewhat more detailed version of him faking his own death can be read awkwardly in this Newspapers.com view of the 1954 Tucson Daily Citizen.

Another view from the ruin (Google Maps location).

And so, on that long-ago day, I pulled myself away from the site of Palmetto and drove up a good, bladed road into the main part of the Palmetto mining district. The sun was warm as it shone through the windows of my non–air-conditioned, little blue car. I wound my way upward into the piñon-juniper zone, which to this day often feels hotter to me than the lowlands of the same area. Maybe the air is stagnant in the trees, maybe it's something about expecting more coolth from the shade than could possibly be created by these desert trees, maybe it's the sun reflecting off the dirt of the road and the dirt between the trees. I'm not sure, but I still don't look forward to hikes in the trees, especially those of the juniper persuasion, preferring the sagebrush zone below or the alpine zone above.

I stopped at a place, maybe at the end of one of the roads, where there was an old shack (or two? or three?), a wooden framed adit or two, many rusty tin cans, a couple shot-up 55 gallon drums, old and new shards of glass, garbage and rubbish, jumbles and scrap—in sum, the usual stuff and old junk often found in old mining areas, always variable from place, always worth looking through or at least taking pictures of. I ate lunch and then wandered around, looking at the old workings and mine dumps, finding a boat load of orange shaly chips, probably float from the Ordovician Palmetto Formation.

As for the broad geology of the area, I'll try to get into that next time...

Previous Posts in this Series:
Thesis: Finding an Area
Finding a Thesis: Battle Mountain to Austin to Gabbs
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line Road
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line to Belmont
Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District
Finding a Thesis: A Joshua Tree Aside
Finding a Thesis: Into the Palmetto Mountains

Finding a Thesis: Into the Palmetto Mountains

Looking southeast from Goldfield Summit. Stonewall Mountain is barely peeking through the gap.

South from Goldfield, the country drops off fairly abruptly, as if preparing the traveler for their eventual departure from the Great Basin, which would happen about 127 miles to the southeast and 3020 feet downhill if the traveler continued in a southerly direction, approximately here at an obscure pass north of Vegas. In other directions, egress from the Great Basin would occur about 104 miles to the ESE and 4741 feet slightly uphill (downhill, uphill, downhill, and uphill several times) at Hancock Summit on S.R. 375, the E.T. Highway, or about 79 miles southwest and 7480 feet uphill (downhill, then uphill, then downhill, then back uphill) at "Ed Lane Peak" on the crest of the Sierra. These measurements would be as the crow flies.

The country dropping off south of Goldfield Summit. The mountains in the far distance are the northern part of the Amargosa Range on the Nevada-California boundary at the edge of Death Valley. 

By road from Goldfield Summit to Lida Junction, Highway 95 falls away 1401 feet in about 13 miles (a 2% grade); from Goldfield Summit to Beatty, it sinks another 1389 feet in about 52 miles (0.5% grade). About 86 more miles south of Beatty, the road arrives at its intersection with the Great Basin Divide, located at a vague point on an alluvial fan approximately corresponding with the junction of 95 and S.R. 156. The grade from Beatty to this point on 95 north of Vegas is almost nil. It's no wonder that the decline south of Goldfield seems noteworthy.

Lida Junction and the now defunct Cottontail Ranch.

The Cottontail Ranch was for sale when I took this picture in August, 2010. Other photos from that era can be viewed here.

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Back to finding a thesis: Upon leaving the Kondyke District back in 1976, I drove south through Goldfield and then west on old Highway 3 (now S.R. 266), a paved road that shoots off of Highway 95 at Lida Junction toward the Palmetto Mountains, my next stop.

The road to Lida.

After about 19 miles of paved road, I came to the small town of Lida. Lida, currently inhabited by a smallish number of ranchers and probable retirees, is often referred to as a ghost town because of its old, abandoned buildings and townsite dating back to its short heyday in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

An old building in Lida (Google Maps location).

Populated areas, even those with a very small number of people, kind of spooked me back then – and I continue to prefer unpopulated areas when doing field work – so I made some hurried, almost furtive passes through town and then turned northward onto a dirt road, heading for one of the prospects I planned to visit the next day. The road ascended a fairly steep alluvial fan on the south side of the Palmetto Mountains. I'm no longer sure which road I took, and though I remember it being one that took off from the highway near Lida, it could have been one of a few on the west side of Lida Summit.

I make my way up the fan: I’m on a narrow, two-track dirt road in my '72 Opel. I cross a sand wash and drive past a cottonwood tree, at which point the road turns sharply and pushes itself upward. Sitting in my Opel, I am below the tops of head-high sagebrush. There is nowhere to turn around should I need to, and I’m not sure I could back through the turn and sand near the cottonwood tree. As I proceed up the fan, I notice a light-colored 4WD pickup coming down the road toward me. A little apprehension sets in: other than continuing on this road without stopping, there isn’t much I can do. I’m sure that if I stop, I will not be able to start up the hill again, but will have to attempt backing down. I look nervoulsy for places to pull over, but there aren’t any, just more and more waist- to head-high sagebrush. As I approach the truck, it pulls off the road and stops, flattening the big sage without effort. I smile and wave a little, and drive on by, not stopping. What could these more experienced people think of a young woman driving up this road in a clearly unsuitable car?

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At this juncture, while I’m driving past the pulled-over truck, it’s worth pointing out that there is a thing called The Code of the West, which consists of a variable number of generally unwritten rules. One of the codes is about not asking where other people are from or much of anything about their past. Back then, I took to this first Code of the West – "Don't inquire into a person's past. Take the measure of a man [sic] for what he is today." – quite heartily: I didn’t like being asked questions about myself, and I didn’t like talking about myself. This part of the code, developed in the time of the early west when people would escape misfortune, debt, and calamity in the east by coming west and making some clean start, could allow me to continue to be semi-anonymous even amongst people I knew, and allowed me to go unnoticed, something I preferred back then.

Another, possibly newer part of the code says that the person going uphill has the right-of-way. This rule applies whether you are hiking, riding a horse, driving a carriage, or driving a vehicle. It’s especially true on dirt roads and in all mountainous country. It is incumbent upon the person going downhill to find a place to pull-over or to back up to the last pullout point. I mention this not lightly. A few years ago in northern Idaho, I found that the locals would not give way to a non-local going uphill (me) under any circumstances, even on private land not belonging to them but leased to the company I was working for. Possibly the CA plates I was runnning didn’t help matters any, and so I vowed to retrieve some old AK or NV plates for use if I ever went back. I don’t know if that would have corrected their rude, non-western behavior.

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Back to the Palmettos. I continued up the road, not knowing if I would come to a dead end or if I would find a turnaround point. At the rocky base of the mountains, the road turned sharply to the left, culminating in a flat area large enough for me to turn around by making a full circle rather than by making one of those awkward, multi-point turns. A charred circle of rocks marked the place as a campsite, so I gratefully settled in, ending the day on a flat point overlooking the valley and mountain to the south. The campsite was more comfortable than my previous one near Belmont, and the weather was warmer. I watched the sun set while eating a camp-made dinner.

The view from my campsite may have looked something like this before the sun went down, although it was taken from Lida Summit, looking east.

I would spend most of the next day looking at various prospects on the south side of the Palmettos, driving up this road and then that. Fortunately, the roads had been bladed, so I wouldn't have to concern myself with the logistics of stopping, backing up, or turning around.

To be continued...

Previous Posts in this Series:
Thesis: Finding an Area
Finding a Thesis: Battle Mountain to Austin to Gabbs
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line Road
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line to Belmont
Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District
Finding a Thesis: A Joshua Tree Aside

NOTE: Some of these reconnoiters may have occurred during more than one trip, although the trips would make one fairly nice loop or out-and-back from my back-then location north of Reno.