Things You Find in the Field: Old Sedan

I found this old sedan a few years back while out doing a tiny bit of off-roading south of Railroad Pass (one of at least five Railroad Passes in Nevada) along S.R. 722, formerly known as S.R. 2, formerly commissioned as U.S. Highway 50 from about 1926 through 1966.

Railroad Pass, Lander County (USGS TNM 2.0 link)
Railroad Pass, Esmeralda County (USGS TNM 2.0 link)
Railroad Pass, White Pine County +/-Eureka County (USGS TNM 2.0 link)
Railroad Pass, Clark County (USGS TNM 2.0 link)
Railroad Pass, Washoe County (USGS TNM 2.0 link)

I did some work in the area way back in the 70s, mostly while stream sediment sampling for the NURE program, and have driven by on the old highway several times when taking the scenic route to or from Austin. Somehow, I never spotted this old vehicle during the many times of driving by; perhaps I was concentrating on missing the potholes that used to be so prevalent along Route 2 (722) back when the signs seemed to indicate that the state was trying to let the road go back to dirt.

My attempt at artistry.

In the photo above, and the one below, I focused concentrated on getting the background in focus. The southeasterly direction of the shot has us looking down Elkhorn Road, across Elkhorn Pass and essentially down Elkhorn Canyon — located on the east side of this low divide in the Shoshone Mountains — at the snow-covered Toiyabe Range Peak in the elevated Toiyabe Range of central Nevada. The USGS GNIS lists Elkhorn Pass at 6883 ft (2098 m) and Toiyabe Range Peak at 10925 ft (3330 m).

A more level shot, with part of the foreground almost in focus.

And now we have in foreground in focus!

A Hidden Waterfall

Eastgate Wash upstream from Eastgate, looking southeast toward its headwaters in the Desatoya Mountains .

Eastgate Wash is a major drainage incised into more than one alluvial fan complex on the western flank of the Desatoya Mountains of central Nevada. As you can see above, it also cuts into the darkly iron-stained middle Tertiary volcanic rocks of the Eastgate Hills. It's shown on most maps as an ephemeral stream, but I've often it running near Eastgate, and westward out to Middlegate, the eastern notch in the Clan Alpine Mountains. (It doesn't necessarily run year-round all the way to Middlegate Station).

Aerial photo of Eastgate Wash going throught the Eastgate Hills, a small western arm of the Desatoya Mountains, from MSRMaps.

Recently, while driving over scenic Highway 722, formerly S.R. 2, formerly Highway 50, we stopped at a pullout because I thought we might be able to see the Mazama Ash in the banks of the creek. I couldn't remember exactly where that ash locatlity is, and the channel was filled with willows and other dense vegetation, not terribly inviting for a quick reconoiter, so we decided against trying to find the ash.

Instead, as I stood there, I could hear the stream roaring, so I walked down to check it out.

View looking upstream.

View looking downstream, with the volcanic rocks of the Eastgate Hills in the background.

Zooming in on that last view, you can just begin to see the water pouring over a little cliff in the upper right.
I scrambled back uphill, then back down, moving downstream until I came to this little viewing area, with the stream running rapidly in the foreground, and yes, a waterfall in the background, almost hidden by the brush. That little waterfall was causing all that roaring!

A zoom shot of the little waterfall.

And the water flows by at my feet.

I stood there, breathing in the green, flowing turbulence, then scrambled back up to the roadside. We got in the car and drove on, over the pass.

Single Digit Highways

Nevada S.R. 722 sign near its western junction with Highway 50.

As I mentioned in Why Highway 8A?, single digit highways in Nevada became a thing of the past during the 1976 Nevada highway renumbering program:

"when all ... single digit state highway numbers were replaced by harder to remember three digit numbers. Hence, my stretch of Highway 8A is now S.R. 376. The Austin to Battle Mountains segment of Highway 8A is now S.R. 305."

Those of us who were around in those days often still use the old highway numbers of single digits when giving directions. We tend to remember those numbers and do not always know the new three-digit numbers that came along just about the same time the state had another bright idea: get rid of license plates designating county of origin.

As it turns out, even Nevada State Route 2 — "old" Highway 50, the alternate route to Austin that takes off from “new” Highway 50 just east of Middlegate gap and then squeezes through Eastgate and switchbacks over the Desatoya Mountains — is now designated by an unmemorable three-digit number, 722. It takes almost as long to remember Route 2’s new three-digit number as it takes to get to Austin on Route 2.

Junction of 722 and 50 looking eastward, with Eastgate barely discernible and the Desatoya Mountains in the background.

The distances to Austin on Highway 50 and Route 2 are similar, but the sharp switchbacks over the Desatoyas and the back-then invariable condition of complete disrepair made the drive take a little longer. (During the 1970s and 1980s, the state was always just on the verge of letting Route 2 — excuse me, Highway 722 — go back to dirt by allowing the asphalt to erode. Conditions are now generally improved, but don't count on crossing in winter.) That longer time to Austin, however, was well worth it then, and is still worth it today: it’s the scenic route, after all. Please take it at least once.

Those single-digit, Route 2 days were back before the Fernley-to-Ely portion of Highway 50 was dubbed “The Loneliest Road” by some passing-through reporter working for Life Magazine. The epithet came out in Life’s July 1986 issue.

NOTE: Life Magazine claimed the 287-mile stretch of Highway 50 from "Ely to Fernley" as The Loneliest Road, although Highway 50 doesn't go through Fernley; only Alt 50 goes through Fernley. Highway 50 takes off east of Fallon about half way to Fernley, and heads straight for Silver Springs, Dayton, and Carson City.

The label of "loneliest" was at first rejected, even jeered at, by those who lived and worked along the second-most heavily traveled east-west road in Nevada. (There are exactly three east-west roads that span the entire width of Nevada: I-80, Highway 50, and Route 6. Parts of two or three others combine to make it eastward from Tonopah to the stateline near Panaca, and I'm not counting that partial, multi-road crossing, nor am I counting I-15, a mostly north-south route that makes a short northeasterly cut through Nevada's southern tip.) Later, after its initial rejection, "Loneliest Road" was picked up and turned into a tourist attraction, thereby creating more traffic and making the road even less lonely.

I never understood the “loneliest” appellation. It wasn't lonely to drive across Nevada on Highway 50, or on Route 2 aka old Highway 50: it was open, free, beautiful, and at times exhilarating. In the summer, when all the geologists and prospectors were out in the field, the small mountain town of Austin was crowded. Motel rooms were booked in advance, although an unsuspecting traveler might be able to find an empty room on a weekend, when some of the working crowd had left town. And I swear, every single time I drove through Austin on this “loneliest” road, I ran into at least one person I knew, someone not from Austin — and this phenomenon continued well into the 1990s.

In these days of increasing complexity, there are only two single-digit routes left in Nevada. One is a disconnected section of Highway 8A that is still left in the northern part of Washoe County in northwest Nevada. Although the most recent state highway map no longer shows that route number, Nevada 8A signs were uploaded to Flickr in 2007.

The only road that has maintained its single-digit integrity — its integer — is Route 6. That’s because Route 6 is a U.S. Highway, not a Nevada Highway.

NOTE: There are still some Nevada highways that have their original double-digit designations. I won’t be going into the double digit routes much, because they aren’t as distinctive to me, and didn’t play as large a role in my personal geologic history.

Route 6 is a strangely incomparable, unparalleled highway that starts (ends?) in Bishop, California, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada — the side that most rightly belongs, in terms of geological and political temperament, inside the boundaries of Nevada, as clearly as Las Vegas most rightly belongs inside the confines of southern California. From Bishop, Route 6 heads east into Tonopah, Nevada, northeast into Ely, Nevada, east into that variably muddy and dusty town of Green River, Utah, and farther east into Grand Junction, Colorado. From there, it crosses the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, where it officially leaves the geologic and physiographic province of the West and enters the geologic and physiographic province of the Midwest and the city of Denver, Colorado, simultaneously. From Denver, Route 6 goes through Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska, Des Moines, Iowa, Gary, Indiana, Cleveland, Ohio, Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Providence, Rhode Island. It then juts out to Provincetown, Massachusetts, ending (beginning?) at the very northernmost tip of Cape Cod. Along its meandering journey, this obscure highway mingles with some of the great ones: U.S. Highway 50 and Interstates 70, 76, 80, 84, 90, and 195. The Sierra Nevada, which arose as a geologic block a few million years ago, long before Route 6 was conceived or constructed, seems to have prevented its attainment of sea-to-sea stature.

NOTE: Route 6 started (or ended) in Long Beach, CA, for 27 years, and indeed was a coast-to-coast highway during that time (1937 to 1964) before the section from Bishop to Long Beach was formally decomissioned as part of California's 1964 renumbering program. Thanks to Lyle for pointing this out.

But these stories are not about Route 6 or Highway 8A. They are not really about highways at all. Instead, the stories — which may someday be complied into a book — center around people and some of the places, geology, and projects along a few of the highways and backroads I have traveled; the stories are about where those highways lead.

Some miscellaneous notes:

1. Ely is pronounced Eee-lee, not Eee-lie like the inventor Eli Whitney. And Nevada is pronounced with the first “a” sounding like the “a” in cat—it is not pronounced as it is in Spanish, where the first “a” would sound like the “a’s” in “la-di-da.” The common mispronunciations of these words, along with a few other Nevada place names like Verdi, Genoa, and Moana, give away newcomers and outsiders from places like California, Colorado, and the East Coast. The correct pronunciation of these other place names will have to be taken up with a Nevadan, preferably a native Nevadan or someone who has been around awhile.
2. Some people prefer to think that the West begins with the westward crossing of the Mississippi River. I firmly believe that one has not entered the province of the West until one has gone westward from Denver, Colorado, and crossed into the Rocky Mountains, the eastward edge of which is marked by the hogbacks along the Front Range just west of Denver.
   

Return to Why Highway 8A? (if that's where you came from).

Geology off the Road: a bit of Tuff, Fossil Leaves, and EarthScope

It was a gray, early December day, but we continued our exploration on backroads near Middlegate Station. From the the exposures of flow-banded and brecciated rhyolite near Highway 50 — this was before The Shoe Tree had been cut down and could be used as an excellent landmark — we headed north on the main dirt road into the valley between the two southern branches of the Clan Alpine Mountains, the valley of Bench Creek. We took a sharp right at the first opportunity, within about a half mile of the pavement (the turn can be seen in the next-to-last picture of the previous post in this series).
The side road took us up the main wash, where we were tasked with looking for "little white flakes" of the middle Miocene Middlegate Formation, a formation composed of coarse- to fine-grained, often tuffaceous, sometimes zeolitized lacustrine sediments with interbeds of tuff, all lying unconformably on the older volcanic rocks of the Clan Alpine and Desatoya Mountains. A short distance up the wash road, we came to this exposure of white rocks... and though the weathering pattern looked blocky rather than flaky to me, we stopped to check it out.

Darn, we'd pulled over for a poorly welded lithic-rich ash-flow tuff, no doubt older than the rocks we were looking for. We moved on quickly, continuing up the wash.
Following the main wash road as we had been instructed by a hand-drawn map given to us at Middlegate Station, we finally came to a saddle overlooking this sedimentary section. These are the same tuffaceous sediments that can be seen north of Highway 50 when driving between Cold Springs and Middlegate gap, where the Shoe Tree used to live. The sediments were deposited in a small Miocene basin known as Middlegate Basin. Leaf fossils and petrified wood are reported in these rocks, and the zeolite erionite has been mined, at least in a small way, near the junction of S.R. 722 (old Highway 50, former Route 2) and Highway 50.
We trekked over to the white patches we could see from the saddle, and wandered around the overly muddy area looking for leaf fossils, breaking open numerous small slabs of white tuffaceous shale. We were unsuccessful for some time, and that's because we were in the wrong place. Close, but not quite.

Part of the Eastgate 1:24,000 topo map via MSRMaps courtesy USGS; X marks the saddle, not the fossil locations; sections are a mile on each side.

The saddle roads form a crude X in the center of this Google Earth image.

In order to find the fossils, you should not stop at the saddle (we had turned left and had parked on the narrow muddy ridge northwest of the saddle) but should instead keep driving down a fairly steep over-the-saddle road to the ENE; then, near the bottom of the hill, you should turn and drive southeast down another wash to a main wash heading SSE to south. In fact, while wandering around before driving over to the one fossil site we found, we could see a small hill with small diggings. That hill, located near the bottom of the GE image, is where we found the fossils.
It looked like the area had been pretty well picked over — we banged around quite a bit and only took these meager specimens. I suspect there are better localities, possibly shown here. I haven't the vaguest idea which of the many possible Middlegate flora leaf types (or stems, seeds) are represented by our bits and pieces. See these three lists (from Table 1 in Axlerod, 1985).

This plant growing near the saddle caught our eye as an unusual bush, then after our eyes became attuned to it, we saw it everywhere.

After fossil hunting, we tried to exit southward out of the wash. It was ultimately too muddy, and I don't think it's easy to find an Eastgate Wash crossing without a good map or current air photo. So we drove back to the saddle, up the steep road, and back down to the main wash road.
After trying for some unknown reason to drive south toward The Shoe Tree, and then stopping just barely in time before entering an impassable field of mud, we drove back to the main wash road and saw a fence on a little hill. We drove up to it and found this EarthScope installation.
This particular EarthScope observatory, is one of several plate boundary observatories strung across central Nevada near Highway 50.
This is Station P068's GPS receiver, with Fairview Peak in the background.
As we leave the wash, near our first tuff stop, Fairview Peak looms in the distance.

Some References:
Axlerod, D.I., 1956, Mio-Pliocene floras from west-central Nevada: University of California Press, 54 pp.

Axlerod, D.I., 1957, Late Tertiary floras and the Sierra Nevada uplift: Geological Society of America Bulletin, vol. 68, p. 19-46 [abstract].

Axlerod, D.I., 1985, Miocene floras from the Middlegate Basin, west-central Nevada: University of California Press, 279 pp.

Barrows, K.J., 1980, Zeolitization of Miocene volcaniclastic rocks, southern Desatoya Mountains, Nevada: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 91, no. 4, p. 199-210 [abstract].

Burke, D.B., and McKee, E.H., 1979, Mid-Cenozoic volcano-tectonic troughs in central Nevada: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 90; no. 2, p. 181-184 [abstract].

Eakin, T.E., 1962, Ground-water appraisal of Gabbs Valley, Mineral and Nye Counties, Nevada: Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, in Ground-water Resources - Reconnaissance Series Report 9, 54 pp.

Papke, K.G., 1972, Erionite and other associated zeolites in Nevada: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, Bulletin 79, 36 pp [link to purchase].

What Is a Road Song?

For those of you who may not know, I have a series (or at least a tag and a page) about road songs. The road songs are often posted as videos, sometimes with lyrics or links to lyrics, usually without much fanfare. Occasionally, I attach a story, or weave the road song into a story or blog post in some way. You might wonder, though, looking through my list, what exactly qualifies a song as a road song?

Road songs began back in the mid-1980s, when a colleague of mine in the Denver office of Former Mining Company made a tape or two containing a bunch of road songs. That year — it would have had to have been 1988 — I was traveling to other districts, going from project to project, visiting other geologists' properties and projects in a kind of geologist-exchange program. It was educational for me, and the idea was to foster communication and exchange of ideas between districts, and also to foster camaraderie. The districts I'm speaking of here aren't mining districts, which are fairly small geographically, but rather districts making up the company. FORMINCO(Former Mining Company), like many other mining companies including the earlier and now totally defunct Northern Exploration Company (NEC), was organized into districts that were tightly to loosely based on geographic territories. At FORMINCO, we had four districts defined by state lines. The offices of two districts were in Reno, offices of the other two were in Denver.

So one day, I'm in the passenger seat of some other geo's truck, being driven from place to place through thick trees and over rutted and roily dirt roads somewhere in central Idaho, in search of particularly fascinating outcrops — any outcrops would do, given the number of trees and lack of visibility — and JS, the geo-type whose projects I was visiting, pulled two of his newly made road tapes out of the glove box. The tapes, filled with road songs, were meant to be played while on the road, any road. Brainstorming while we listened, all the while watching for outcrops, we came up with a million more road songs, and a rather loose definition.

A road song must contain a word pertaining to roads — road, highway, freeway, byway, street, interstate — or it can instead contain words pertaining to cars, trucks, semis, and railroads or railway cars. Travel songs without mentioning the roads or railroads or the vehicles don't count, and airplane or boat songs are generally out. Exceptions to these rules may exist, but I can't think of any.

The broad definition leaves a lot of room for inclusion, which is why a song like Pancho and Lefty — mostly not about roads or travel, but mentioning "the road" in the opening lines — can be considered a road song, and a classic one at that, because it initially refers to the life of living on the road.

After being inspired by the two JS tapes, I went home and immediately began making 90-minute tapes of my own. I think I made three. I no longer have these tapes, but I sent copies to JS way back when, and he eventually put them on a media more permanent than casette tapes. Then, sometime last year, while talking about old stories at some geological meeting, he mentioned that he still had the songs as originally taped, and he cut me a CD and sent it in the mail. The CD has two of my original three tapes, two or three of his, one or two of someone else's, and several audio cuts from movies that relate to roads, travel, gold, discovery, or the west in general.

And that's the way road songs began: way back when, on a back road in central Idaho, on a mining property I barely remember and would never be able to find again.

Photo: Old Highway 50 (formerly S.R. 2, now S.R. 722) in Smith Creek Valley, looking due east toward the Shoshone Range, with Bunker Hill of the Toiyabe Range in the background (MSRMaps location).