Geologists: The Cowboys of Science

A colleague of my former (deceased) husband once said, "Archaeologists are the Cowboys of Science." (I don't know if he actually said it in Capital Letters like that, but that's how it came across to me.) DH disagreed and said, "No, Geologists are the Cowboys of Science. Archaeologists don't even come close."

The first character that actually comes to my mind, for some reason, is Bret Maverick's brother Bart. He's not a geologist, but he goes off gallivanting around the countryside on his horse, somehow managing, often, to get into trouble. He reminds me of some geologists I know, who go off the same way in their 4WD pickups.

Also read:

Sherlock Holmes, Forensic Geologist

The Romance of Geology in Russia: A Tribute to Alexander Ainemer
Here's to You: Geological Heroes
Dust Hole (previous post)

Left Behind: Pink Point

It's rare that I haven't brought too much back from the field, rather than too little, so I had to think hard about the question for this month's Accretionary Wedge:

What do you regret leaving behind at a geological locality?

and I'm not sure that what and where I left this one thing qualifies as terribly geological.

One day, while in the middle of our 1978 helicopter camp in Hot Creek Canyon (camp #3, not yet blogged), I was let off by the helicopter in the early morning on the top of a drainage — a fairly typical thing for days when the helicopter was in camp. That particular morning, there was no good place near the top of the drainage to be let out, and so the pilot put one skid on a rock outcrop jutting 10 or 20 feet up in the air, a rocky mass all surrounded by dense juniper and piñon. He told me to hop out on the downhill side. (We hadn't really gotten any hover-exit training the way Indiana Meg did; our pilot seemingly expected us to know everything he learned over his many years in Vietnam and Alaska.)

I looked, and sure enough it was somehow possible; after I threw my pack into the brush below me, I managed to get myself onto the skid. Maybe it was only 5 feet down, but it was the hairiest "landing" save one other that I can recall.

The rest of the day was somewhat standard save for three things.

(1) I found a large pink projectile point in the middle of the drainage I was walking down, a drainage that had obviously seen some flooding in the last 1 to 5 years. The point was possibly made of Ivanhoe "chert" (more precisely opalite or silicified tuff) from the Tosawihi Quarries of northern Nevada, a large series of rock quarries made by ancient to nearly present-day native Americans in the Ivanhoe mercury-gold district north of Battle Mountain. I had been trained by my archaeological contacts to leave things like this in place, but I debated a long time before complying and moving downstream. GPS didn't exist back then, so I carefully spotted the location on my 7.5' topo map, planning to report the location later to the NAS or BLM. The problem with this approach is that the point was an anomaly: it was probably washed downstream in the most recent flash flood and would probably end up being buried by the next. I should have picked it up, marked the location on the map, and turned it in to a museum or some other appropriate outfit.

That's the thing I regret leaving in the field.

(2) A second fairly unusual thing happened that day when I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake. It was by no means the first rattler I'd seen that summer, but it was the closest I had come to one without being warned. I was walking rather quickly downhill through some trees, having bypassed part of the drainage because of dense vegetation. I stepped, and in mid-step I saw the rattlesnake just as it saw me. I sidled rapidly to the right while it slithered rapidly to the left. It had absolutely no interest in making a stand, which is what I've found to be the case in most of my rattlesnake encounters. Needless to say my adrenalin shot up.

(3) Later that day, after having walked and sampled the entire drainage down to the range front, I picked out a likely helicopter landing spot on the upper part of the alluvial fan. The sun was hot. The willows, or some other large, clumpy masses of sticks with minimal leaves, were not casting any shadows worth using, and trees were lacking. I took my flannel shirt (worn in early morning when the temperatures were sometimes chilly) out of my backpack, placed it half over a sagebrush and half over my head and face, and lay down under the shade I had just created.

I think that the only reason I recall the last bit is because of the three earlier unusual events and because it was possibly the first time I created shade in the desert that way. The trunk of a juniper tree would have been most welcome.

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For the record, I also regret leaving behind one or two boxes of jasperoid from my thesis area in the yard or shed of a house I moved away from in 1979 or 1980. As far as I know, samples of that jasperoid no longer exist, certainly there are no more outcrops of it.

Related Posts:
A Few Rules of the Desert
The Caliente Series & Caliente Camp Series

Things You Find in the Field: Leadfield

While out wandering around in the field - whether for fun, for work, or for both - it is common to come across all kinds of miscellaneous old relics, sometimes including partial to entire ghost towns. Here, I'll just show a few pictures from Leadfield, California, which is in Titus Canyon, on the downhill side of Red Pass, in Death Valley National Monument.
I won't go into the history of the Leadfield mining district in Titus Canyon, CA, except to say that the sign does not give the entire history, and that real copper and lead discoveries were made there in the early 1900's. See links below.
A photo overview of part of the Leadfield town, with colorful grey to pale orange mine dump. I didn't knock around on this dump, so I don't know what was being brought out of the ground, but the grey matches the color of the local limestone.

A window through a door.

Rust and paint.

The view from one of the cabin windows.

In between.

Hinge.

An attempt to keep people out of one of the historic mine adits.

Sun on a rusty wall.

Window and wall.

Death Valley Ghost Towns: National Park Service
Leadfield, California: Ghost Town Explorers
Leadfield, California: Wikipedia
Leadfield Ghost Town: Mojave.net

Old Junk in Ophir Canyon

Okay, so yesterday's post was really a lead in and good excuse to get to one of exploration's finest perquisites, that of being able to wander around old mining districts and check out everything left behind by previous operations, sometimes going back to the late 1800's.

The miscellaneous piles of junk and still-standing or semi-standing parts of mills and old buildings that I found at the mouth of Ophir Canyon is supposedly part of the old Warfield-Ophir group of claims (any current claims may have different names by now), according to Kleinhampl and Ziony, 1984. The area was worked for tungsten (and molybdenum?) in the past, with the most recent mining efforts possibly being from the mid-1970's, but reports and locations are unclear.

The main part of the Ophir or Twin River silver-tungsten-gold mining district, at the old townsite of Ophir, AKA Toiyabe City, is farther up the canyon and is also well worth visiting.

This appears to be a fly wheel flat pulley, possibly from a crusher. If anyone can identify this equipment more completely, please let me know. I just like the shapes and colors, and didn't spend a lot of time - this time - looking for manufacturers' names and dates.
Yellow-painted meal framework and grating, with pipes and wires.
And old dump truck or haul truck, filled with rock. Is it scheelite ore?
A nicely colorful metal roof on an otherwise falling down shack. Photos of this cabin from about 2002, when it was still standing, along with photos of the entire equipment setup, can be seen here, near the bottom of their webpage.
Falling down cabin, with the metal roof being much sturdier than the rest of the building. A low part of the Toquima Range can be seen in the background: Moore's Creek to Dry Canyon to Road Canyon (or Charnock Pass) - a scenic, volcanic-rock ridden way into Monitor Valley.
Here's a view of the northern and central Northumberland caldera, which erupted the Northumberland Tuff about 32 million years ago. Also seen in the view is the area in which I stayed out all night once, just south (right) of Wildcat Peak, the pointed peak on the horizon, and the tuff of Hoodoo Canyon, a bit to the north (left) of that peak.
Another view of the central part of the Northumberland caldera, through more metal frameworks.
I've retreated now to my parking area, near the creek seen in yesterday's post, giving yet another view of the central and northern part of the Northumberland caldera, across the vast expanse of Big Smoky Valley.
And here, on a ledge where possibly some old buildings once stood, one can see across the valley to the southeast, getting a good view of Mt. Jefferson, which at 11,941 feet is essentially the third highest mountain in Nevada. Mt. Jefferson consists primarily of a huge pile of Tertiary volcanic rocks, mostly moderately to strongly welded ash-flow tuffs, including the tuff of Mt. Jefferson, which erupted from Mt. Jefferson caldera about 26.7 million years ago. Much more detail about the calderas in and around Mt. Jefferson is discussed here.

Mt. Jefferson is a great place to hike up, if you can stand the elevations, and even if you can't. The top, which is not accessible by vehicles, is almost surreal somehow - or maybe I was oxygen starved. It's mostly flat, with little hills of tuff. The Alta Toquima archaeological site sits up there at about 11,000 feet, above tree line.
Driving away from Ophir Canyon, I had a great view of the Round Mountain gold mine to the southwest. Round Mountain has been in operation since the early 1980's 1977.

References:
Kleinhample and Ziony, 1984, Mineral resources of northern Nye County, Nevada, NBMG Bulletin 99B.

McKee, E.H., 1974, Northumberland caldera and Northumberland tuff, in Guidebook to the geology of four Tertiary volcanic centers in central Nevada: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology Report 19, p. 35-41.

Thomas, D.H., 1982. The 1981 Alta Toquima Village Project: a preliminary report. Desert Res. Inst. Soc. Sci. Cent. Tech. Rep. 27.