Road Song: Tucson, Arizona

Dan Fogelberg: Tucson, Arizona (lyrics)
Album: Windows and Walls, 1984

It's been awhile, I know. This is a pretty dark road song, possibly fitting our current times (cw).

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.).↩

More From the Road: Tilted Every Which Way?

I stopped while driving through the Virgin River Gorge in northwest Arizona to take this picture of some of the dipping sed rocks that are common through the greater Colorado Plateau area. (This area, lying barely within the Basin-and-Range province, is just outside the Colorado Plateau proper, but the rocks here are correlative to those throughout the plateau region, and they have been subjected to some of the same tectonic forces.)

It looks like the sedimentary layers are dipping every which way!

This second photo zooms in just a bit, focusing on the far hill, which shows a slight bend in some of the layers.

I've drawn in a few of the beds, as before, and point out a dip slope formed on the top of the reddish layer.

This Google Earth image of the area shows the photo location in purple.

I decided to see whether the beds were really dipping every which way. I used beds I could identify in Google Earth, picked out two points along the beds that were at the same elevations, and drew strike and dip symbols from these two points (method described here). The dip slope labeled above is the small lens-shaped hill beneath the central strike-dip symbol. It became apparent from looking at Google Earth that the primary reason the dips in the photos look cattywampus is because the rocks in the foreground are dipping toward the photographer (to the WNW), and most of the other beds are dipping in a more northerly direction (NW, N, or NE).

The same Google Earth image with some hypothetical strike-dip symbols.

So, how did I do on the strikes and dips? And is there anything else going on in the area? Well, okay (ish) and yes.

Map I-2165 (Bohannon et al, 1991) courtesy USGS, overlain on Google Earth.

The Cedar Wash high-angle reverse fault cuts right through the area, separating the strata dipping toward the west (the foreground strata in our photos) from strata dipping in a northerly direction. You can see, by clicking on the several images and going back and forth between them, that I did well on the strikes on the west and east, and not so well (in general) on the strikes in the center. Either that, or the strikes of beds in the center varies more than shown on the map (I'm pretty sure I did pretty well on the labeled dip slope, but I will never climb that hill to check it out!)

Read a little about the Cedar Wash fault and the general geology of the region here.

Accretionary Wedge #50: The Fire at Field Camp

I had been thinking about doing a repost for this wedge—Accretionary Wedge #50: Field Camp/Trip Moments, being hosted by Evelyn Mervine over at Georneys—but realizing that the wedge is supposed to be about *one* fun moment, song, etc, put me into a tiny bit of a quandary  For me, field camp was a long, long time ago. By and large, many of the specifics of my memories of field camp have faded, and some (many?) of the specifics really shouldn't be reported online because they involve other people (plus or minus myself) doing things that shouldn't be reported without the permission of those involved, or shouldn't, perhaps, be reported at all. Not that we were the rowdiest bunch of field camp attendees of all time, or anything; I'm sure we weren't. As for fun field *trip* moments...well, there have been many, and a lot of those fall into the same category of things NSFO (not safe for online). I'll leave you to your imaginations. Or maybe I should just post sometime about shooting and rock throwing contests I've won out in the field...

Back to field camp. One fun or memorable moment or time [there, I've done it: used "fun" as an adjective three times now!] was at our last mapping project in the Swisshelm Mountains of Arizona, helping to fight a range or brush fire that had broken out across part of the map area. It was an exciting thing for a new field geologist to experience; at the same time, there was a certain tension involved: would we succeed? would our map area be ruined? (there were good and bad points to this latter possibility); would we get burned or injured in anyway? For the latter consideration, I think we were mostly in the invincible category at the time and probably didn't think very much about the danger to ourselves or about our overall safety, which was not treated as a huge deal back then the way it is now.

I was mostly involved in shoveling dirt onto hot spots around the edges, and in helping to move water containers to the lines. It was hot and smokey, the visibility was low, and my memory is tinged with orange. Memorable aspects of the day: we joined together in a common cause, we were fed dinner by ranchers also involved in the fire fighting, and the fire was stopped. I'm not sure whether we really cared that much about the range fire, at least not as much as the local ranchers or other fire fighters did, and we made jokes about hoping that the fire would at least burn down the cholla forest located on one of the east-west spurs of the north-south mountain—hoping at long last to be able to map that part of the spur, or to at least be able to walk through the area without massive attacks from stray cholla balls.

No such luck, though. The fire burned through the forest, blackening the cholla and dropping cholla balls all over the area, if anything making the forest more impassable than before.

Afterward, our mapping continued, under what turned out to be more difficult, not less difficult, circumstances: The limestone units and contacts in the upper hills had been reddened and obscured by fire retardant dropped from bombers.

P.S. There is some confusion between jumping cholla and teddy bear cholla, with the former being more likely to grab onto you and being restricted to the deep southwest (California and Arizona deserts), and the latter being somewhat likely to grab onto you and being found as far north as the Gilbert mining district northwest of Tonopah, NV.

This may be a jumping cholla rather than a teddy bear cholla, judging from the pictures shown at the previous USDA links. Keep this video in mind if you ever hear of anyone "flaming" chollas. It might be a case of revenge.

UPDATE 5Oct12: Possibly we stayed here, at Faraway Ranch. The location looks good, the view of the area on Google Maps looks okay, although I can't tell if the buildings are right, and the pond might be gone.

A Bit about Rosemont Copper

I received, via email, this promotional video about the proposed Rosemont Copper mine in Pima County, Arizona, and decided to post it. In some ways, it's a typical coroporate PR video, with an overly bright, cheery voice in the background — worth watching, neverthless. We used to view a lot of things like this at Former Mining Company: movies telling us how great the company was, how great our mines were, how great our hiring practices were, etc. Is there some reason these PR vids can't be made by real people? The real people in the video are, for the most part, much better spokespeople for the mine, IMO, than the PR voice that talks mostly about the nice day, pleasant festivities, and good food.

The fact booklet, made by the same PR company, is worth reading: it goes into some of the uses of copper, why we need it now, and why we will continue to need it in the future. If you are reading this blog post, you are using copper.

Rosemont Copper is a project of Augusta Resource Corporation. To learn more about Rosemont, see these posts at Arizona Geology, and read this pro and con list at Green Valley News & Sun.

I make my living through mining and through exploration to find ore for mining, and I don't find open pits as unsightly or unpleasant as some apparently do. In fact, I find them fascinating — small or large, active or inactive, old or new — and they are great places to see geology exposed in a three-dimensional setting.

Seeking Exposure

USGS Photo: Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. Sunset on Cedar Ridge on South Kaibab Trail. July 12, 1957, by E.D. McKee.

Field camp had been planned to be a rather usual affair, to be located somewhere in the overgrown, fault-erratic littered, carbonates of the greater Blue Ridge Mountains of the Appalachians. It was an upcoming event that I really hadn't give much though to, other than to think things like, "Well, maybe we'll map even more faults down valley drainages for lack of good exposure." It wasn't that I wasn't looking forward to field camp, which would theoretically make me a geologist, at least more of one than those who hadn't yet attended, but I was thinking it would simply be more of the same thing: a few more trilobites and ever more limestones. I'd tell you that they were all Ordovician limestones, but you probably wouldn't believe that, and I'd only be exaggerating. I had, however, long since discovered that guessing Ordovician as an age on an invertebrate Palaeontology test gave better than even odds of guessing right, and Silurian and Devonian weren't far behind for good guesses in case you thought you'd overused Ordovician. (Always know how to play the odds.)

Also, serving a sentence term in an overgrown, kudzu-infested, hot and humid field camp wouldn't be getting me any closer to my ultimate goal, that of returning to the west coast as soon as possible. I was, after all, already six years past the unrealistic deadline I had set for myself when I was going on eleven years old.

Fortunately, due to unforeseen and overall unpleasant circumstances, I ended up taking two semesters off at the end of my junior year, and I ended up working downtown at the Smithsonian Institute (pushing papers, not rocks or fossils). It was my dad who suggested that I go to field camp somewhere in the west, a thoughtful suggestion made as a not-quite-desperate attempt to pull me out of the gray, cloudy and smoggy doldrums I had fallen into.

USGS Photo: Coconino Sandstone at O'Neill Butte,
viewed from Kaibab Trail, July 1957, by E.D. McKee

And so, the application process — of which I remember very little — began, and I applied to several field camps, finally deciding on a camp that would begin by hiking part way into and then out of the Grand Canyon, and would end up at a mapping project in the Swisshelms.

USGS Photo: Sunset Crater, by E.D. McKee. A real volcano!

Yes! Bright, brilliant geology everywhere, just the way I had always — after growing up near the Sierra Nevada — thought it should be. And rocks besides limestones! And volcanic rocks that weren't old and decrepit greenstones of nearly unimaginable age!

My geologic imagination was reignited at field camp in Arizona, and my goal to return west hardened. I came to Nevada a mere two years after my western, bright sunshiney, wide open field camp experience.

The story still makes me smile. ☺

The first rendition of this story for an unpublished Accretionary Wedge, Accretionary Wedge #11: Field Camp, includes a few stories.

This post is an entry to Accretionary Wedge #27, hosted this month by Lockwood at his favorite coffee shop (and blog of that name) Outside the Interzone. Go there to read about more significant geological experiences.

Where it All Began

OR

"How Did a Nice Girl Like You Become a Geologist, Anyhow?"

As continued from How did I become a Geologist?

I was often asked this question, especially in my early years as a geologist — the question was usually asked by strangers, mostly men, who I had just run into out in the field: prospectors and would-be prospectors, landowners, ranchers, and even other geologists. Really, you'd think people could be a little more inventive than to reuse that worn phrase so many times. The question seemed to imply some kind of wrongness in my choice of careers, and some other kind of wrongness that I'd managed to meet them out in the field — a "field" where I presumably didn't belong.

I've run into that question from Yuma to Gabbs, from Hog Ranch to Okanogan, and from Juneau to Fairbanks, and I wondered at the question every time it was asked. (The song Tucson to Tucumcari seems to be a most applicable song: my exploration travels have taken me, on legitimate business, to the places in the song: Tucson, Tucumcari, Tehachapi, and Tonopah.) I usually stuck to my routine answer, "My dad was a geologist," an answer that made sense and explained everything, at least it did for all those who asked the question. It didn't really explain things to me, nor did it tell the curious or suspicious questioners much about me.

The Making of a Geologist:
I'd like to say that it all started on Highway 8A, in Nevada, but it didn't. Nor, I suppose, will it end there, although it could. It all really started before I was born.

I was conceived and born while my dad was in grad school continuing his studies as a geologist at UO. Upon my birth, we moved almost immediately to central California, where I grew up with the foothills of the Sierra Nevada as my backyard playground, and with the northern Sierra Nevada towering above me. In those days, you could see the Sierra from Sacramento, you could see Half Dome from the Central Valley (you still can, just not routinely), and you could see Mt. Shasta from a bridge on Highway 40, now I-80, the road to San Francisco (at least, that's the way I remember it).

---

I began life downstream from the headwaters of the McKenzie River of the southern Cascades, where I was like a little geologic formation myself, filling in the lowlands of a wide valley. The deposition and formation of my early life continued after my parents moved to another vast lowland: the Great Valley of California. Sediments formerly and actively depositing from seas or rivers, and rivers meandering and flowing between levee walls to the delta and into the bay, were all a part of this early life of mine — a life buttressed by the strength and continuity of the granite of the Sierra Nevada batholith, which formed the backbone of my early life.

While I was growing up in this serene and stable-looking area, my dad was at work as a geologist (the area, which is not far from where faults of the San Andreas fault system run through the San Francisco Bay Area, is far from geologically serene or stable, as many of you know). We routinely traveled from there into the McKenzie River and Willamette Valleys, up and over the crest of the Cascade Mountains, and up and down the Oregon coast; we meandered around the Sierra Nevada foothills, into the Sierra Nevada, to Yosemite and Lake Tahoe; and we made these traverses during all the seasons of the year.

The Carlin Unconformity, with old Highway 40 and the Humboldt River meandering past.

Roadcuts were magnets to my father, so we stopped and looked at them any time we went out for a drive. We collected rocks everywhere we went, and we went to lots of places. By the time I was five, I had seen the famous unconformity in Carlin Canyon, NV, and I had collected slate from eastern Nevada, granite from the Sierra, andesite from the foothills, asbestos from northern California, and agate from Oregon.

It probably also helped that I have rock collectors on my mother's side of the family, and that I grew up inspecting (and adding to) their collections of agate, geodes, barite roses, and other seashore and desert goodies. All these connections, collections, and early explorations combined might be enough to make a geologist out of anyone, but my brother, less than three years younger than I, who remembers much of this time period, did not become a geologist.

What truly did it, I think — what made me into a geologist, that is — was that I was born with a North Arrow in my head: you know, the kind of north arrow you find on any good map, one that continually and consistently points north. I guess that's a little like asserting that I was born with little magnetite or iron oxide pieces in my brain, so I can navigate the way geese or other birds supposedly do. Anyway, as far back as I can remember (possibly back to 1 or 1.5 years old), all my memories come with accurate north arrows engraved on them: that window faced east, that bed faced north, that street ran east-west, and you turned south into that driveway.

It's possible that later knowledge and directional orientation (when did it start?) has superposed North Arrows on my old memories, but maybe not: the arrows hold true for houses I was in when I was ≤1 years old, ≤1 to 4.5 years old, 4.5 to 5 years old, 5 to 6 years old, and so on. I have only revisited one or two of the early houses as an adult, and two of the early houses I have not revisited at all. For the latter two houses, my North Arrow memories check out with the house-detail memory of my mother ("Well, after you came in the front door, the master bedroom was immediately to the left...") along with the directional memory of my dad (who doesn't remember where the rooms of the houses were but does know that the front door faced east).

My dad was also born with a built-in North Arrow, as far as I can figure out, and consequently has been turned-around only once in his life. (I've been lost or turned-around three times that I can remember: once in fog, once in a dense forest, and once in fog in nearly impenetrable brush.) My natural directionality and 3-dimensional thinking (the latter is a requirement to be a geologist and the former is highly recommended) were both reinforced every time we, as a family, traveled anywhere or stopped at any roadcut. Probably the words north, south, east, and west were in my vocabulary by the time I was three, along with the words rock hammer and roadcut, so it remains a little difficult to pull out the built-in part from the added-to-later part — but the built-in part was there, of that I am sure.

That, anyway, is one way to make a geologist, although I'm sure there are other ways. One thing that geologists are sure of is the existence and viability of other ways — this idea is technically referred to as "multiple working hypotheses," and it's sometimes overstated as, "if ten geologists mapped the same area, you'd end up with at least ten different maps."

This story may be continued in another form later...

---

Seatrain I'm Willin' on the Seatrain album (1970)

A classic road song.

Accretionary Wedge #11: Field Camp

This post is a submission to the July Accretionary Wedge, being hosted by Ron Schott at his Geology Home Companion Blog.

Field camp for me was a long time ago and far, far away (well, it was far away at the time, a lot closer now). The year was 1973. I was in a slump due to various personal events, and was taking two quarters off from what was supposed to be my junior year in undergrad school. It being my junior year, I was scheduled to take field camp that summer, somewhere amongst the roadcuts, stream beds, and kudzu of southern Virginia. Having never much liked the east coast (well, sometimes, but I was getting impatient to get back into the west by this late date in my young life), I really wasn't looking forward to the experience.

My dad had a great idea: go to field camp somewhere in the west. So that's what I ended up doing, with field camp becoming my first step to moving back to the west that I loved. He flew out with me, after giving me his Brunton, and we spent a couple days going here and there around Tucson, including the Desert Museum and the Kitt Peak Observatory. We found what to this day remains my favorite Mexican restaurant, La Fuente, although I haven't eaten there now in more than 15 years.

During field camp, we traversed the entire state of Arizona, from the north at Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, to the east somewhere near Window Rock and possibly Kayenta, to some tiny place in central Arizona somewhere south of Winslow - ah, that was Young, Arizona - with a brief stop at San Manuel or Baghdad, a recoup day in Tucson, then down to southeastern Arizona, where we spent some time around Tombstone and Bisbee, and then spent most of our latter days mapping in the Chiricahua Mountains.

Lots of memories from field camp, but no photos. The first days we spent around the Grand Canyon, including an excruciating hike (for sea-level acclimated people like me) down to the Redwall Limestone - and back up. That was the tough part. Then, we did some stratigraphy and mapping at Wupatki, and a bit of mapping near Sunset Crater, and rode the lift to the top of San Francisco Mountain.

At field camp, I drank more Coors beer than I ever have since, finding out later that it was only favored by people from the east coast who couldn't buy it at the time, and was looked down on by most of the locals; I got stuck in the sand for the first time, and although I wasn't driving the Carryall, it wouldn't have helped at all if I had been; I learned how to pee exceptionally fast so no one would come over a cliff or around an outcrop and see me (we had 40 students, 10 of them women, and 10 professors, although not all the professors were there all at the same time, thankfully); I watched as poor Toya got a name for sitting on a cholla one hot afternoon somewhere in northern Arizona; I saw my first and last cock fight in that tiny place known as Young; and I helped fight a fire on our final mapping project in the Chiricahua Mountains - the cholla burned, but didn't disappear, and many outcrops were red from then on and difficult to distinguish from one another. We got fed by local ranchers that evening, and on the last day of mapping, G. Davis brought in a few cases of beer by helicopter. Later, we had an award night, with most awards being silly to hilarious (including the cholla incident), and all T.A.'s got thrown into the the local pond.

And I learned to sing: the Redwall's connected to the Supai, the Supai's connected to the Hermit, the Hermit's connected to the Coconino, the Coconino's connected to the Toroweap, the Toroweap's connected to the Kaibab, the Kaibab's connected to the Moenkopi, the Moenkopi's connected to the Shinarump, the Shinarump's connected to the Chinle, the Chinle's connected to the Moenave, the Moenave's connected to the Kayenta, the Kayenta's connected to the Navajo... it was at about this juncture that we gave up, having not spent too much time in anything above the Navajo Sandstone.

UPDATE: This Wedge was not published.

Mining and Exploration News

Just a few summaries and links to mining and exploration stories out recently. Excuse some dorky titles. How can you tell which titles are dorky? Easy, the dorky ones are mine.


From Ron Schott's Geology Picks:
Not so Good Oil and Gas Exploration in Washington state

From Geology.com:
Surprise, surprise, there's a new gold rush in CA!
Internet Addiction - do YOU suffer from it? (Oops - not mining related unless you are reading this blog post over and over again!)

Also from Geology.com:
Geologists are needed in Australia

But in other reports (and comments), jobs aren't really available unless you KNOW SOMEONE.

Canada can't attract women into mining jobs according to this article - also from Geology News - although on my spring field trip, all the women geologists were Canadian, except for me.

Mining and petroleum-related jobs are still going strong - from Arizona Geology.
Space radar can be used to improve mine safety in underground mines, from EurekAlert!

I could find no reference in the above news release to open-pit mines - I guess we're on our own! Also, the news release mentioned driving the referenced new equipment through mineshafts. Mine shafts are vertical, and no underground trucks or truck drivers drive up and down through these things (shafts). The driving is done in mine tunnels or adits, and in declines or inclines. Declines are mine tunnels or adits that descend gradually as you walk into a mine (or drive - a geologist should be so lucky!); inclines are tunnels that go uphill at a very slight angle as you enter the mine, usually for drainage purposes. Also, the article speaks of the "roofs" of underground mines, a somewhat vague term that could refer to the rocks immediately overhead while underground, or possibly to surface rocks above the entire mine - I'm not really sure which, because if you are in an underground mine, the surface over your head is called the "back." And that's because when the old-timers made their tunnels, they were typically not very high, and the miners had to bend over to enter and walk through them, thus having their backs almost in contact with the "ceiling" of the mine adit.
Last but not least, lots of things have been happening in Arizona - as usual - see these articles and more at Arizona Geology:

• Vale do Rio Doce reported to be looking at Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold (as a takeover target)
• Freeport is the most likely takeover target
• Drilling is underway at Tombstone
• Why Are So Many Companies investing in Arizona Mines?
• White Cliffs diatomite and zeolites
• Arizona potash looking attractive
• Vale denies takeover plans

Arizona Geology shows a neat, colorful table comparing commodity prices over the past decade, described somewhat more fully at Pitpundit Blog.

Recent Mining News: Copper and Jobs

(And by "Recent" I don't mean "Holocene.")

• ASARCO sells properties: including copper mines.
• BHP Billiton may take over Rio Tinto.
• Rosemont mine in Arizona: lots of news in the news.
• Bingham Canyon mine in Utah: discovery of more copper.

• Get a job in Arizona: Carlota copper mine and other mines.
  
• Are new geologists' salaries as high as they say?

Mining and Minerals: Some Links

Download your own "Mineral Baby" at The Mineral Information Institute.

MII also has information, posters, links, lesson plans, and packets for teachers (of at least the elementary grades, maybe adaptable for higher grades). Most of the support material (posters and other things) cost money; the information and "packets" are free. Some of these things are probably more useful than others - a teacher would have to evaluate them.

Here is some interesting geological info on uranium breccia pipes in Arizona, found via Arizona Geology.

And here is a nice post about copper and copper "mining" over at NOVA Geoblog.

Mining - A Bit of News

Things are looking fairly good in the mining industry - for companies, for new geologists, and for older, experienced geologists who aren't ready to retire yet (like me). Not only are the prices of metals up, but so are the prices of oil and coal. Consequently, geologists in the mining industry are finally making as much money in constant dollars as we were in the 1980's (no data on that last assertion, just some experience). There was a period of time after the price of gold went down in 1997 (and after the Bre-X scandal of 1997), that salaries stayed the same (in current dollars) and maybe even dropped a little. The AGI report compares geoscientist's 2005 salaries with 2004 salaries, and you can see a summary here. As was mentioned in Arizona Geology, the AGI data is really pretty old - out here in the mining fields of Nevada, salaries have increased considerably since 2004, and any geologist - good, bad, or ugly (or indifferent?) - is hard to find. In fact, maybe the name of the game should be exploring for geologists.

And it's also a good time to buy a gold mine in Arizona, I hear.

Update: A good summary of starting salaries for college graduates at Reporting on a Revolution, along with some information geology salaries in India and speculation about the future.

Detachment News: Arizona

Due to the name of this blog (not to mention the interest of the blogger), I need to report some recent detachment news from Arizona Geology, as quoted in part below:

Dave Maher says we can find new porphyry copper systems in southeast Arizona by exploring for the roots of Laramide igneous systems (island arcs) and working our way up the geologic section. Dave presented the results of his recent PhD dissertation (UA, Dec 2007) at the Arizona Geological Society monthly dinner meeting last night.

And from his meeting abstract:

In east-central Arizona, overlapping sets of Tertiary normal faults [have] dismembered, variably extended, and exposed up to 15 km of the upper crust, including portions of several Late Cretaceous to Paleocene (Laramide) igneous centers and their associated porphyry copper systems.... The field evidence and the reconstructions demonstrate ... extension of about 100% across the study area, but the amount of extension locally varies from less than 20% to well over 400%....

Now, the fact that many porphyry copper deposits in Arizona (and elsewhere) have been affected by mid-Tertiary extreme extension is not really news. What is news here, is that he has suggested a new way to explore for porphyry copper deposits - exploring by going in the opposite direction than the direction taken in the past. In the past, deposits have been found by looking for and very successfully finding the tops of deposits (hence, the low price of copper for such a long time interval until fairly recently). He suggests that explorationists wanting to find more copper - a good commodity to look for with the price up so high - should look for the roots of systems and work their way back up-section to probably fault-offset, mineralized portions of porphyry systems.