Winnemucca to Hwy 395 north of Susanville, Part 1

We began our northern Nevada road trip about a month ago at this blog post about Sulphur, Nevada, a real ghost town located more or less a third of the way along our route. To continue with the trip, we’ll take a step back for a re-start in Winnemucca (The Griddle, above is a good place to stop for breakfast or lunch), though we could just as easily start somewhere to the east, say Elko, although the trip then would become longer. Our goal will be to make it, eventually, to the NV-CA state line west of the Smoke Creek Desert, and from there to U.S. Route 395 north of Susanville. We'll get to 395 by way of a fairly obscure dirt road that will take us from the Smoke Creek Desert in Nevada to a nearly non-place called Viewland, CA. See my Google Maps plot of this route, along with photo locations and other points of interest along the way. I'll add points to the map as our trip progresses.

The Jungo Road (Nevada S.R. 49 and 48) will be our gateway to the Black Rock Desert and points west, and to get on the Jungo Road we'll take U.S. Route 95 north out of the center of Winnemucca a very short distance, where we'll turn left onto the Jungo Road almost immediately after crossing the Humboldt River. Right at the Winnemucca convention center, essentially our starting point, you’ll note a sign stating that the road north (U.S. 95) is part of the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway.

Photo from Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway: An Outcrop.

If you're inclined to travel northward instead of westward, have a look at my 2010 Oregon Trip Series, a series dedicated to road tripping over a portion of the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway and other roads as well.

Lo and behond, the Jungo Road starts out paved as it leaves Winnemucca. That’s Blue Mountain nearly straight down the road.

At this point, just about 6 miles into our journey, we get a good view of Little Tabletop Mountain, which is a basalt-capped mesa south of the road. MOH and I used to call these hills “The Pancakes.” From the south side, they look a little like a tilted stack of pancakes.

"The Pancakes" from the south, as seen in Google Earth.

It’s difficult to get a photo of these hills when driving 80 mph on I-80, unless you happen to be sitting in the left passenger backseat, so I resorted to a G.E. view.

Before long, the paved portion of the Jungo Road ends; it becomes a magnesium-chloride treated road...a magged road. I figured the magged road condition would extend all the way out to the Hycroft gold mine, but I forgot that they are not operating with a large crew like they were a few years ago when the mine was active. Hycroft is still running their heap-leach operation while testing the feasibility of operating a sulfide leach pad, but the large crews are a thing of the past, at least for now (see Hycroft’s January 10th press release [pdf] for more about sulfide leach testing).

Here we are at the same locality as the previous photo, about 9 miles west of Winnemucca, looking back towards Winnemucca and the Sonoma Range.

The magged part of the Jungo Road currently ends at the turnoff to the Blue Mountain geothermal field, aka Blue Mountain Faulkner 1, which is just on the west side of Blue Mountain. Magging prevents dust, so the road is dusty to the west. One good thing about dust: you have a better chance of seeing that someone is heading toward you. A bad thing about dust: breathing it, of course. Magged roads have one particular disadvantage: they are very slippery when wet, almost like driving on greased snot!

Although the sign at the turnoff to the geothermal field says "NGP Blue Mountain 1 LLC," the power plant is now owned by AltaRock (or not - UPDATE 15June2019). The field was discovered during gold exploration conducted in the 1980s or 90s.

I often stop on a small-looking playa near Jungo—it seems to be a good spot for a pit stop, being about 1 coffee from Winnemucca, and when it’s hot, which it was on June 15th when these photos were taken, it’s definitely time for more hydration. It turns out that this playa is the southern part of the larger Desert Valley playa, which extends 46 miles north-northeast from about 6 miles south of Jungo, all the way to the Quinn River about half way between Winnemucca and Denio. Desert Valley is the 10-mile-wide basin between the Jackson Mountains on the west and the Slumbering Hills (a mountain range) on the east. The Sleeper gold mine was named for it's location in the Slumbering Hills (and also because it was a "sleeper?").

Here we are coming into Jungo, which is a railroad siding located at or near the junction of the Jungo Road with the Bottle Creek Road, which heads up toward the Bottle Creek mining district and the main part of Desert Valley. The well-bedded rocks in the hills ahead of us—a northward continuation of the Antelope Range or a southern part of the Jackson Mountains—are part of the Jungo Terrane, a thick pile of turbiditic shales with sandstone and limestone interbeds that were deposited in Late Triassic to Early or Middle Jurassic time (Luddington et al, 1996 and Crafford, 2007).

Not recognizing in the moment the exact location of Jungo, I took a photo of the junction with the dirt road that comes up with Imlay. If you happen to start this trek in Imlay, you'll cross the Humboldt River just above Rye Patch Reservoir, and you'll pass by Haystack Butte, a geographic marker that can be seen from the Applegate Trail.

I don’t do it often, but on this trip I went ahead and took a couple photos of two of the old mining cabins at Mandalay Spring. I’m not sure why these shacks are present (besides the spring) or what era they date from. I’ve been inside at least one of them—for some reason the entire enterprise struck me as depressing (maybe it was the peeling wallpaper or strings of disintegrating clothes; maybe it was just me).

This cabin is located a little closer to the spring and at about the same elevation; whereas the first cabin sits up above overlooking the spring.

I took this photo at one of the first spots to pull over and get a good look at the Black Rock Desert, which on this day was partly obscured by summer haze. Black Rock Point, for which the desert was named, is a small, dark hill just to the left of the road as it points off toward the vast playa; a closer view of the point can be seen here. The little hill in the foreground is part of a Pleistocene Lake Lahontan shoreline. There was another obvious shoreline just 200 m east of this smaller one.

We'll end this part of our trek at Pulpit Rock.

Google Maps location map.

Selected References:
Crafford, A.E.J., 2007, Geologic Map of Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey Data Series 249, 1 CD-ROM, 46 p., 1 plate.

Ludington, Steve, McKee, E.H., Cox, D.P., Moring, B.C., and Leonard, K.R., 1996, Pre-Tertiary geology of Nevada, Chapter 4 in Singer, D.A., ed., An analysis of Nevada's metal-bearing mineral resources: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology Open-File Report 96-2, p. 4.1-4.17, 1 sheet, scale 1:1,000,000.

Tales of the Mojave: An Intro

Intro

I'm going to move into what I hope to be the blog-publication of a few of my old stories, which I began here quite a while ago with several posts that became the Caliente series and other posts that were part of my Finding a Thesis series (which I haven’t finished). I'm not sure how far I'll get into this new project, but it's something I want to start in order to see how my writing has progressed from the first drafts, which I probably began in the late 1990s. I'll no doubt be interspersing this Mojave set of posts with other field notes, road trips, or miscellany like Friday Fault/Fold, etcetera; we'll just have to see how it goes. Also, at this point the old stories have become tied up with some fictional stories or novel I've been playing with. The fictional book or novel doesn’t really have a plot yet, and it also has a lot of completely made-up to deeply modified or wildly intertwined adventures. I'm attempting, here, to remain true to life.

The Mojave

You can check out any time you like,
but you can never leave.[1]

My memory of the Whipple Mountains, where we'll be heading shortly, extends back to 1981, when Allie [2] and I conducted some preliminary geologic reconnaissance (recon) during June for Northern Exploration Company (NEC). It was my first visit to the Mojave Desert of southern California. (I can’t speak for Allie, but I think it was hers, also.)

The Mojave Desert is outlined in red.
Image courtesy USGS, modified from here.

Hell, that's not strictly correct. Looking back carefully, I really can't say that I had never been to the Mojave before 1981—though I do often say that very thing, not usually thinking about the technical boundaries of the Mojave The boundaries, right, largely though not completely faithfully, follow the range of that well-known Mojave denizen, the Joshua tree.

So when did I first visit the Mojave? Well, let me think. Sometime in the late '70s I was in Vegas for an archaeological conference—we had driven all night to get there and had beheld a truly spectacular thunderhead near Tonopah. Before that, I’d seen (and drawn and photographed and summarized) the Charlie Brown Outcrop during the third field trip in Larsen's Geology of Nevada class. On the way down to the Charles Brown Highway, we had camped in the Beatty dump on Thanksgiving night after a particularly mediocre meal at the C-rated Exchange Club. Fortunately for everyone involved, there had been plenty of beer afterward to settle the stomach.70

Beatty is technically just inside the Mojave Desert, and the Charlie Brown Outcrop isn't far from its center. So yes, using almost anyone's definition of that southern desert, I had been there before '81. Nevertheless, I usually think of June, 1981, as my first foray into the area, and indeed it was the first time I had been south of Shoshone on the California side or south of Vegas on the Nevada side...

Our Carryall probably had 4 doors.
Photo credit: CZmarlin.

No wait! Most maps place Baghdad, Arizona, in the Mojave, and I'd been to Baghdad during field camp in '73; that was the place we'd gotten a Carryall stuck in the sand while trying to take a short cut back to Flagstaff. We weren't even supposed to have gone that way, but we'd purposefully drifted to the rear of the caravan and then left the pack. It had taken us an hour to dig out. We had finally made it back to Flag for dinner, only to find that no one had even missed us! The mishap instantly became one of the highlights of field camp, albeit one with apocryphal overtones: We exaggerated our difficulties while building road to get unstuck, we gleefully inflated the story during the two-hour drive back to Flag, and we greatly hyperbolized the event while telling the story over beers later that evening.

This little spate of reminiscing has brought me to the realization that I still don’t always think of the Mojave by its technical definition, and that in 1981 I generally thought of the Mojave as a big hot unknown encompassing the entirety of the southern California desert, or at least the part of it that lies south of the Garlock Fault. Back then I often thought that the SoCal areas north of the Garlock, including the broader Death Valley region, belonged to a kind of never-never land that should really be part of Nevada. I still often think the CA-NV border should run along the crest of the Sierra, though I’m not sure where that line should jog eastward to leave the main bulk of southern California in California, and somehow place Clark County of Nevada in SoCal.[3]  Perhaps the new border would look something like this, with the CA-NV border in white, and the southern CA border in yellow:

Google Earth image with proposed new borders.

Later in my career—later being when I worked at Former Mining Company, AKA Forminco—we, the southern explorationists of Forminco's Western District used the presence of cholla as a key factor when trying to push our district north into Nevada, as far north as the Gilbert mining district in the Monte Cristo Range northwest of Tonopah. The Nevada District had responded with uncharacteristic equanimity and had let us in, mostly because they didn't really want that part of Nevada.

Anyhow, back in the early 80s I liked placing the northern boundary of the Mojave at the Garlock Fault: It made geographic and geologic sense to me at the time, and it affirmed a feeling I had, when driving south across the Garlock, a feeling of dropping off into another, lower land. And as far as I was concerned, the eastern boundary of the Mojave was the Colorado River. My boundaries, however, held as little water as most Mojave washes—for one thing, there really isn't an elevation drop when driving south across the Garlock along U.S. 395 or S.R. 14, and even though there is quite a drop when coming into the Mojave from the west at Tehachapi, one has at that point crossed the southern Sierra Nevada, so a drop is to be expected; and for another thing, the Mojave is really defined as more of an ecologic or biologic-climatologic region than a physiographic region—and I knew that, so I always spoke of the "Mojave Desert of California" when referring broadly to all of the southern California deserts, or even those just south of the Garlock, hoping that the phrase would exonerate my technical sloppiness.[4]

Google Earth image showing part of the western Mojave, a bit of the Garlock Fault (dark blue), and U.S. 395 and S.R. 14. Ignore the road marking for 58; it is inaccurate.

This recon program was completely mine. Prior to that summer, the target areas of grass-roots ventures I'd been involved in had been at least partly chosen by others. I did the research in the spring, generating several targets across the region, from Tehachapi to Barstow to Needles[5], and I decided where to start. We'd begin in a few relatively low areas along the Colorado River—the district boundaries of NEC were such that someone else was in charge of Arizona, so like an aquaphobic saguaro in reverse, I wasn't supposed to cross the Colorado River—and we'd work our ways toward higher elevations, hoping to get ahead of the summer heat.

Because of a delayed start to my recon targeting, it was late in the field season, probably the first of June, when Allie and I finally left Reno to drive as far south as Parker, Arizona. I wondered how long we'd last down there in the heat of early summer; we knew it wasn't the most auspicious time to begin field work in the Mojave, but we hoped we could stick it out and find a property or two to stake.

My first recon program! I was both excited and apprehensive.

To be continued...

Notes

^[1] Felder, Don, Henley, Don, and Frey, Glen. "Hotel California" (lyrics) perf. by the Eagles. Hotel California (album), Asylum Records, 1976.↩

^[2] Names have been changed.↩

^[3]Northern boundary of Southern California, at Wikipedia.↩

^[4] In reality the Mojave Desert is an ecologic area defined by plants and climate, which extends as far north as Beatty, Nevada, and which doesn't include all of southern California's desert, because some of that area belongs to the Sonoran Desert. Whether the Whipple Mountains is in the Mojave proper seems to depend on who draws the map. These stories will take place mostly in the deserts of southern California, and I'll usually refer to that area as "the Mojave." ↩

^[5] A target area can consist of a whole region (like the Mojave Desert itself), an entire mountain range (like the Whipple Mountains in the eastern Mojave Desert or western Sonora Desert), a large or small mining district (like the Savahia Peak area in the Whipple Mountains), or a smaller area around one old mine or prospect (like the Dollar Bill Mine on the south side of Savahia Peak.).↩

The Left-Lateral Strike-Slip Garlock Fault Near Highway 395

While out on the last road trip, I started taking pictures from places where roads crossed the Great Basin Divide. Unfortunately, I soon gave that up because freeways, which I traveled not exclusively but considerably, are lousy places from which to take pictures. But thinking about divides also made me think about the Garlock Fault, and how I'd be crossing it on 395 heading south into the Mojave. Here I've pulled over as I'm about to cross the fault.

I've drawn the Garlock fault with a thick blue line, and a secondary strand (air-photo linear) with a thinner blue line.

Besides the two fault strands, you can see the towns of Randsburg and Johannesburg, which were founded in 1896. The Yellow Aster open-pit gold mine was operated by Glamis Gold from about 1987 to 1997.

The haze was thick and the day overcast, and it looked like the photos I was taking would be fairly lousy, but MS Photos was surprisingly able to revive the dark, lackluster originals (I usually don't rely on the Photos app, but in this case it worked better than my other free programs).

After crossing the fault on 395, I took the road toward Goler Heights and Garlock. (Goler Gulch in the El Paso Mountains at Goler Heights is unrelated to Goler Wash in the Panamint Range at the edge of Death Valley National Park.)

Looking west along the southern range front of the El Paso Mountains toward Goler Heights.

The Garlock Fault is mostly behind low hills in this shot, and it runs to the right of us about three quarters of a mile to the north.

I've drawn in two (or three) apparent strands (or air-photo linears―my interpretation may not be precise in all cases) in dashed blue lines; where thin, the fault is behind hills or out of view.

We're now back near the junction of the Goler Road with Highway 395, looking to the northeast.

I took this photo thinking that we might be seeing part of the Garlock Fault, when in fact what we're seeing is a couple of fault strands parallel to the Garlock (air-photo linears).

The Garlock Fault proper is out of view beyond the low hills.

A little more than a mile to the NNE from the place I took that last photo (above), there's a great example of a shutter ridge and offset drainages.

Google Earth image with a blue line I added using the "Path" function.

The same image with more scribbles.

This marked up Google Earth image shows a small portion of the left-lateral Garlock Fault (long blue line). The fault line is basically the same as shown here (Roder, 2012). If you blur yours eyes a little (and even if you don't), you'll probably see several lines or linears that are running parallel to the main fault trace. I drew a few of these in with thinner dark blue lines. I can easily spot a few more.

The fault has offset two drainages in a left-lateral sense; that is, the south side of the fault, moving to the northeast (right) has brought in a ridge that has blocked the dry wash in the center of the image, forcing it to flow to the northeast to get around the ridge. That ridge is labeled "shutter ridge," which is the term for a ridge that blocks a drainage in this fashion along any strike-slip fault, whether it's right lateral, like the San Andreas, or left lateral like the Garlock. A second drainage way off in the upper right corner of the image has been blocked and offset in the same fashion. That drainage appears to have two shutter ridges, one that is north of the main trace of the fault, and another that looks like it's south of the main trace (at least the way the main trace has been drawn; we can see by drawing in just a few air-photo linears that there may be a few complications, and faults often meander around a bit).

I got back onto Highway 395 and continued south toward my destination, figuring that I could get a photo looking back toward the Garlock from somewhere up near the turn-off to Randsburg. I finally found a pullout on the east side of the highway; it offered me a four-wheeling opportunity to drive a very narrow, rocky road to the top of a small hill. The photos I took from there looked really lackluster, so I didn't spend a lot of time trying to get a really good panorama. Consequently, the two photos I've stitched together below do meet up on the horizon, but they are way off in the foreground, primarily because I ended up moving to keep the dirt road I was on out of the picture. We can, nevertheless see where the Garlock and a couple parallel strands or linears are located.

Stitched photo. The center of the photo is looking just west of north.

The same photo with a few labels.

And that's basically it for the Garlock Fault, but there's a location near Goler Heights that might be a good spot to look around the fault, and there are probably some good locations near Garlock.

Looking northeast from Goler Heights along the Garlock Fault.

UPDATE: Be sure to view Ron Schott's GigaPan of this portion of the Garlock Fault.

From the Road: Mt. Whitney

Here's a quick pic of Mt. Whitney and a little bit of the Alabama Hills. Whitney is the bright rocky peak (or maybe you could just call it a large rock) behind the shadowed mountain, a little left of center. The Alabama Hills are the brown, granitic hills in the middle ground. Lots of movies have been shot at least partly in this area (Wikipedia lists some; IMDB lists many, but the list may includes Lone Pine itself).

From the Road: Conway Summit

I'm having a little trouble keeping up with the road trip--for one thing, the mobile app thingy doesn't really work very well, so it's easier to just wait until I have wifi, and I don't get any of that when camping (!)--but here are two photos from Conway Summit.

The first looks south at Mono Lake. The Sierra Nevada is on the right, and the White Mountains are on the far left (they don't look impressive in this photo, but they are). The Mono-Inyo Craters, with the caldera rim of the Long Valley Caldera beyond it (they are indistinguishable in this photo) form the hills that provide a nice backdrop to Mono Lake. You can barely see Paoha Island in this photo; it's the light-colored island behind the dark land mass left of center. The dark land mass is Black Point, a 13,300 year old basaltic cone. Negit Island is easy to see: it's the smallish, dark-colored band to the left of Paoha and Black Point. Paoha and Negit are both volcanic islands, although it looks like the lake is low enough that Negit is not currently an island. The lake looks really low--I thought they were maintaining it at a higher level; maybe it's the drought, maybe the water accord has failed.

The roadcut across from the Conway Summit pullout (just below Conway Summit, actually) exposes grusy, unglaciated granite. There's also quite an exposure of glacial till in the hill above the granite, and in the hill and roadcut leading up to the summit proper, which you can see when driving north or south on 395.

From the Road: Fall Color along the West Walker River, CA

We're looking southwest at mountainous terrain along the West Walker River, with what looks like granitic rock—the light-colored rocks in the foreground and on the tree-covered high slopes in the background—and some dark-colored, mafic-looking rocks exposed in the middle-distance ridge that slopes down toward the river from right to left. These mountains, which are on the west side of Highway 395, are technically part of the Sierra Nevada.

A New Road Trip in the Making!

Well, I'll be on the road for the next 10 to 14 days, so I'll try to have a couple posts by way of phone photos, provided that I can edit them to get the phone-photo size to match my blog size. It will be an experiment.

Photo from Whitney Portal Road looking east toward the White-Into Mountains (taken in early March, 2016). Sierran granite in shadows on the right.

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Wave Clouds beyond the Sierra

Our trip began like this, although I didn't get any photos the first day, as we drove south, then east, then south again under fabulous wave clouds. It began with a bit of a rumble: The Jeep went into a noisy, rattling shimmy upon reaching 45 mph, and we had to pull into a tire shop. We got the tires balanced, ate lunch at a local diner—a lunch that included two large, old fashioned chocolate milk shakes—and went on.

We drove south with the high wind aloft evidenced by continuous and co-mingling stacks of wave clouds coming off the long linear range to the west. The waves were stacked almost indefinitely out over the Honey Lake basin and beyond, where they were coalescing into a high, thick stratus layer.

Approaching the first Red Rock turnoff, with Peavine not yet in view, the lenticulars came into their own, at first disintegrating from a near mass into many wispy and shredded lenses, and then turning into three or more parallel roads in the sky: the primary wave off the Sierra Nevada and the Carson Range, the secondary wave perfectly parallel to the first and a little ways off to the east, and the tertiary and quaternary waves ... well, they were there, but they were beginning to merge together, or to merge with the primary and secondary waves off the Virginia Range—close in they would appear as individual sets of stacked waves, farther out they would pile up against each other in a kind of jumbled mass, and even farther still they would metamorphose into a fluffy, wavy blanket.

The way it looked, sans color, when we began our trip down to Death Valley, looking south near Reno or Carson, 27Feb2016.

A couple times, as we drove south and then east, I reached a state of mind that I first noticed a long time ago when flying in some airplane: In this case, sitting in a Jeep while effortlessly driving, I seemed to be standing still while the mountains, clouds, roadcuts, and other drivers moved—instead—around me, as though I was in the middle of some 3-dimensional movie with the props being rapidly changed for my benefit. When I feel this way in an airliner, it seems as though I'm not going anywhere; instead, I'm just in some giant, crowded box, and people outside, who I can't see, are somehow shaking the box to simulate vibrations and turbulence, while they also somehow roll a scenery tape by my window. Before I got on the plane, the props (buildings, streets, people, everything) made the place look like Reno; by the time I got off, all the props had been changed to make it look like Alaska (they changed the buildings, streets, and people, and added steeper mountains and maybe some snow).

At Dayton, we drove under the secondary wave off the Carson Range, which was now a vivid, grayed yellow, almost the color I associate with incipient funnel clouds.

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The cloud overhead was colored something like this.

A few tiny sprinkles hit the windshield of the Jeep, barely dusting it. The stacked lenticulars to the southeast, out over the Pine Nuts and beyond the river route to Ft. Churchill and Weeks, turned bright golden yellow, then faded to soft peach mixed with salmon, then faded even more to a soft pink. The distant hills past Talapoosa turned bright pink, lit by the last bit of alpenglow.

The river route from Dayton to Weeks (Weeks is the spot where the Carson meets Alt-95). The map is courtesy USGS. We didn't take the route, though it can be a nice drive. It can also be long and washboardy and is best driven during the day (unless you know the road).

Dark colors took over the skies as we turned SE onto the Ramsey-Weeks cutoff, and darkness set in. We drove into headlights, coming finally to a town we hadn't intended to stay in (we thought we would reach Tonopah the first night, but our delay at the tire shop changed our expectations). We had an average Mexican dinner, accompanied by exceptionally hot salsa and lackluster margaritas. We found a nice, cheap room and settled in for the night.

You can see the first part of our trip on this map, although the default view will change with more recent posts, so you might have to page around to find the first, northern leg. The two photos were taken at Honey Lake rest stop on 3Mar2016.

Related Posts (in order of posting):
Death Valley, "Super" Blooms, Turtlebacks, and Detachments
Death Valley Trip, Part 2: More of the Badwater Turtleback Fault
Death Valley Trip, Part 3: Northward, and over Daylight Pass

My "New" Toy

Yes, that's an 18-200 mm zoom.

This isn't really a new camera, but it's new to me. It's old, probably from 2006 or 2007. I inherited it from Alaska Al. You saw some of my first photos from this DSLR a couple weeks ago.

I struggle some with accurate color balance when posting on the web. Cameras in general don't shoot accurate color by themselves, hence enhancement or editing. Hence white and gray cards, e.g., this one. Maybe I'll get one. (Any white balance setting on a digital camera is a type of programming—except, perhaps, the PRE or custom setting. Any choice you make is, imo, a type of editing.)

So far with this camera, I've been using auto white balance (AWB), although I know the camera will shoot warm under indoor lighting, and so it will usually require a change to tungsten or something else when indoors. With AWB, the color on the LCD screen has, so far, fairly well matched the color of what I see when shooting, or maybe it's too reddish or bluish on occasion. Of course, when using a DSLR one can't actually see anything on the LCD screen until after taking a shot, because the process of DSLR is different, and one looks into the viewfinder to see exactly what the camera is seeing.

These first pictures below were taken from 395 north of Reno on a fairly gray day. I've enhanced the photos such that they look to me the way they looked on the LCD screen, although they are all probably off, in color, by a hair. I think the next picture could be slightly yellower, but my opinion of it seems to vary depending on what I looked at last.

Sunlight hitting the west part of Seven Lakes Mountain, the part that's in California.

The next photo was shot from a moving vehicle with ISO 800 (not really fast enough for the conditions) at 200 mm zoom (35mm equivalent of 300mm). It was slightly unsharp, though not from the motion; I've since modified the D80's sharpness settings. I've cropped the photo slightly to suit my idea of best composition (hence, it's been enlarged very slightly).

Some rocky crags on Petersen Mountain (MyTopo location).

Petersen Mountain, on the crest of the range not far to the right of the photo, is the site of active quartz crystal mining.

Petersen Mountain from a little farther south.

The photo was taken from about here (Google Maps location), looking southeast toward the high point of the Petersen Mountain (range): Petersen Mountain (summit).

And here's a shot of one of the northern peaks on Peavine, looking southeast from about the stateline near Bordertown.

The camera shows quite a bit of vignetting at 200 mm.

I have, in the meantime, taken a lot of nice photos, particularly some zoomed-in photos of birds. But I'm still figuring out the many settings and possibilities, and am finding the color a little odd in shadowy settings.

El Niño Near Long Valley Creek, Lassen County, CA

I've got a few more pictures from that rainy May day, the 21st, when MOH and I were on what was really the first leg of a trip to Colorado and back.

A downpour over unnamed hills just off the north end of the Bald Mountain Range and just south of Beckwourth Pass. Photo taken May 21st, 12:44 pm.

Looking up Dinwiddie Arm (of Long Valley Creek?) into the area of Roberts and Coulee Canyons. Mount Ina Coolbrith, with summit at 8051 ft (2454 m), is the long sloping mountain in the mist; Little Haskell Peak, at 6135 ft (1870 m), is the dark hill on the far left.

More hills in the foreground, more peaks of the Bald Mountain Range in the background, as the downpour continues.

Note in these pictures how green everything already was! It's been a green spring because of the unusually rainy May, though I haven't noticed any particularly unusual areas of high wildflower density. It is starting to brown up now, with the halogeton and tansy mustard being the last to fade to brown, although bushes such as sagebrush, rabbit brush, and fourwing saltbush are still plenty green.

These particular photos are all from Long Valley in Lassen County, and they were taken from the south-bound lanes of Highway 395 between Hallelujah Junction, CA, and Border Town, NV.

Related Posts:
El Niño at Honey Lake
The Beginning of an El Niño Trip: North-Central and Western Nevada

El Niño at Honey Lake

After our brief stay at The Nugget during the first part of our journey last month, we made a brief foray north on Highway 395, then quickly retreated southward along the same road. When we stopped at the Honey Lake Rest Area, it was raining hard in a localized but intense shower.

Looking across the partly muddy Honey Lake toward the Skedaddle and Amedee Mountains; May 21st, 11:56 pm.

Well, no that looks like a bit of hail!

As a bit of reference, the next photo was taken two weeks later when things had greened up and clouds were still prevalent (they are currently mostly out of the picture--it's summer!). That's the same mountains, same tree, different phone pole.

Photo taken June 4th, 2:38 pm.

The nearshore part of the lake in its northwesternmost lobe is considerably greener than usual in these pictures. Beyond the nearshore green swath, which grades into a brown, muddy-looking patch, a dark line and another green patch marks an area where water has been standing off and on this past year.

Photo taken June 4th, 2:37 pm.

A seagull poses for its picture, May 21st, 12:02 pm..