Beatty: Old Buildings, A Fold, and Onward toward Titus Canyon

Before a mediocre breakfast with slow service at the casino at the north end of Beatty, I walked around in the early morning light taking various photos of some of the old (and old-styled) buildings.

The Sourdough Saloon and Happy Burro sit across the street from the parking lot of the Exchange Club Motel.

By the way, you can get a dinner at either place photographed above, and over the course of our two nights in town, MOH and I ate at both of them. Both establishments are relatively congenial. During dinner at the Sourdough Saloon the first night, we found out from other superbloom afficionados that "the best place" was down near Badwater. Additionally, the Sourdough has interesting graffiti on the ceiling: Geology, geography, and geoscience students from around the world (at least as far away as Norway) have left their mark while stopping in for burgers (or pulled pork) and beer.

Ceiling in the dining area of the Sourdough Saloon.

Unfortunately, I can't say that I recommend eating at the Sourdough (although I've since read that you can get a good pizza at the bar, something we didn't try). There seems to be no method for getting your order in other than finally realizing that you are supposed to go up to the kitchen window and harass the cook; the food takes nearly forever; and the sole person present does all the cooking, table waiting, and table cleaning—and she isn't shy about letting you know how put-upon she feels about that! Besides, my memory says that the beer was fairly standard. (I'd rate a bar average or standard if either Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Blue Moon Belgian White were the best beer available—or if zero IPAs were offered—although the presence of either beer, bottled or on tap, would mean that the selection was better than what is typical of old-style Nevada bars, where Coors or Bud are standard and MGD, Killian's Red, or Heineken might be the best beers available). We relaxed with our ales and enjoyed ourselves as much as possible but didn't go back the next night (or rather we did, but we stayed only a minute or two—long enough to figure out it would be the same slow and dramatized scene as the night before).

The Exchange Club casino and restaurant, closed since 2004.

The Exchange Club holds a few old memories of mine, mostly of lousy food back on Thanksgiving Day, 1975, when the third Geology of Nevada field trip stopped there for dinner, and we all spied the "C" rating on the wall, saw the ghastly looking mayo they were serving, and hesitantly ate the pathetic sliced turkey. Canned cranberry sauce was the best part of dinner. Why were we there on Thanksgiving? That was just part of being a grad student. After dinner, we retired to the Beatty dump to camp. (Jokes about radiation? Yes, although we were not at that dump.)

Old sign for the Exchange Club near the center of town.

I took two pictures of the innacurate sign (I repeat: there is no casino).

On this particular morning, the third day of our rambling journey undertaken primarily to see the superbloom in Death Valley, I puzzled over a fold up in the hills just southeast of town.

Recumbent fold?

At first I was wondering what a fold like that would be doing in the Miocene volcanic formations that surround the city. I later realized this possible recumbent fold was in older rocks—Paleozoic or even Precambrian. Looking at Google Earth and the geologic map of the area (Monsen et al, 1990), there's definitely some folding on that hill, but I'm not sure of its geometry. The rocks are mapped as the Late Proterozoic (formerly Precambrian Z) lower member of the Wood Canyon Formation: quartzite, siltstone, dolomite, and limestone.

After breakfast and a fuel stop, we left Beatty's main intersection by going straight instead of turning left.

U.S. Highway 95 turns left toward Las Vegas; MOH and I went straight.

Our trip into Titus Canyon begins here!

Location map

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
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Wave Clouds beyond the Sierra
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Hike to Pleistocene Shorelines

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Walker Lake, Road Stories, A Bit about Copper, and Some Folds near Luning

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Jeep Trail, Folds and Cartoons of Folds, Even More Folds, and Boundary Peak

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Highway 95, Redlich, Columbus Salt Marsh, and Another View of Boundary Peak

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Coaldale, Black Rock, Lone Mountain, and the Boss Mine

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Black Rock to Lida Junction to Beatty

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Jeep Trail, Folds and Cartoons of Folds, Even More Folds, and Boundary Peak

An unnamed portion of the Gabbs Valley Range.

From the vantage point of the end of the last post, a little southwest of Luning, Nevada, I turned around and pointed my camera northeast across Soda Spring Valley ... and paused to think back to the late 1980s, when we in the Western District of Former Mining Company had finally taken over exploration of the Walker Lane, which until then had been a mostly unexplored part of the Nevada District. We drove all the roads in the area—up canyons, over ridges, and across saddles—and one thing I remember in particular was coming over the top of a low ridgeline from the east, on a jeep trail that dived and went into a series of moderately sharp switchbacks as it approached some old mine workings.

The road in question is below the arrow.

Ah yes, the memories. We found a gold-bearing skarn—it's not quite in view in the photo above—and after some sampling and sketch mapping, we debated targeting some drill holes, but decided it was too small for our target size.

Back to the road itself. Coming over the top from the east (something I'm not likely to do in any near future that I am aware of), the road immediately drops and dives around a curve, making it hard to judge the condition of the road ahead. We maneuvered to some particular point and stopped. What the H! We would have to do a bunch of walking to actually explore the area anyway, so maybe it would be better to stop here at this turn-around spot than to go farther and find that the road requires backing up on steep slopes around sharp turns.

I don't really remember how we handled the sampling logistics. Sometimes it's easiest to drop a couple people off near the top and then meet them at the bottom later in the day, after they've sampled the upper slopes and you've sampled the prospects in the lower hills. Or maybe after a bit of walking around, we found the road acceptable and drove on down.

The road as seen in Google Earth. It's downhill to the lower left (SW).

The Google Earth view of the road is somewhat impressive *in* Google Earth; here's the Google Maps link in case you want to find it on Google Earth.

The view from the upper part of the jeep trail was grand. I've tried below to simulate the view by sloppily stitching together two Google Earth images:

Walker Lake is off in the upper right (W), Luning is just left of center on the other side of the beige plain (SW); Mina is out of the picture to the left (S). 

After grabbing the first shot or two, I pointed my camera more to the east—a little north of east, to be precise—at a folded part of the Gabbs Valley Range, another area we explored back in the late 1980s.

The notable landmark of this part of the Gabbs Valley Range is a dark pimple of a peak to the right of center: Volcano Peak.

Volcano Peak is not a volcano; rather, it is underlain by tilted beds of the Upper Triassic Luning Formation, which consists mostly of limestone, dolomite, and shale.

Zooming in, we get a better view of Volcano Peak and can identify a few old porphyry copper drill roads that probably date back to the 1960s or 70s.

In a similar Google Earth view, we can begin to see a fold nose, centered and just above the dark line (a Google Earth artifact).

I've cropped this image so I could zoom in farther. The upper drill roads are more apparent. Volcano Peak is now on the far right.

It can be fun to take a shot at the geology by drawing lines on photos like these, or on air photos. Drawing without checking the geology first can be chancy, if one is concerned about being right, as can drawing without checking the geology in the field afterward.

Before checking the geology, I came up with the following cartoon, wherein I assumed many features to be stratigraphic beds, and assigned a few other features to faulting.

Here's my first cartoon, with presumed bedding in cyan and a few tentative high-angle faults in dark purplish blue.

I wondered if the central dashed line across the first cartoon was a low-angle fault of some kind.

After concocting the first cartoon, I checked out the geology as mapped by Ekren and Byers in 1985. It turns out that I missed a large blob of quartz monzonite (mapped as JKqm).

The quartz monzonite is outlined in red.

The central line, which was dashed in cyan in the first cartoon, has now been drawn in dark blue, a mapped fault. It's a high-angle fault, however, and it's just our angle of viewing that makes it look horizontal. (Here we can see why apparent dip matters so much: from this angle, the dip looks to be nearly zero; in reality, it is closer to 90 degrees, although that's a guess, as there is no measurement of it on the geologic map.) The quartz monzonite is cut by this high-angle fault, which is down-to-the east, dipping eastward away from us. I left in the cyan bedding emphasizing the fold, and I left in my still tentative high-angle faults in dark purplish blue (toward the right).

These two cartoons show the problem with assuming too much from photos (or air photos). Features that look like bedding might, when field checked, actually be faults, dikes, or other structures like joints. In this when case, we checked the cartoon against a geologic map of relatively small scale, 1:48,000 or 1 inch = 4000 feet.

Somewhere in these canyons, way back in the late 1980s, we came across an old, partly broken-down core shed. The shed was mostly intact then, but the core had started to become scattered, either from vandalism or from the escalating disintegration of the core boxes (or both).

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By this time on our trip to Death Valley, it seemed that we should be farther along, but we hadn't even gotten to Tonopah! So we moved on, but almost immediately we decided to stop not far down the road: it was getting to be lunchtime. Just before Mina, we pulled off the highway onto a major dirt road that goes eastward between the Gabbs Valley Range and the Pilot Mountains.

Looking southeast toward the Pilot Mountains from a broad alluvial plain above the town of Mina. Pilot Peak is hidden from view behind the unnamed, lightly snow-dusted, >8500-foot-high peak.

A lot of folding, thrusting, and possibly some low-angle normal faulting has occurred in the Pilot Mountains. In fact, the area is (or should be) one of the type localities for the Luning-Fencemaker fold-and-thrust belt.

While eating a cheese-bologna sandwich, I took a few photos of some of the folds. Some recumbent folds are actually better viewed from another road, but I forgot about that until looking around in Google Earth.

Folds! This is probably mostly Luning Formation limestone and shale, with some Tertiary volcanic rock in the lower left.

More folds!!

The potential here for great fold photos only increases with time spent in the area, and driving up into the hills would do the same.

I turned away from the folds to take this shot of Boundary Peak.

I grabbed this photo of Boundary Peak, hoping that MOH and I would get even closer later in the trip (and we did!). The photo shows both Boundary Peak (the highest peak in Nevada) and the higher Montgomery Peak, which is right behind it and slightly to the right in this photo—look carefully!

We'll continue our journey after lunch. We'll be stopping at Redlich and the Boss Mine. We'll see desert pavement and a cholla. We'll see Boundary Peak again. We might spy some breccia and a solar power plant.

Location map

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
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Wave Clouds beyond the Sierra
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Hike to Pleistocene Shorelines
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Walker Lake, Road Stories, A Bit about Copper, and Some Folds near Luning

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Walker Lake, Road Stories, A Bit about Copper, and Some Folds near Luning

MOH and I left the area where we had stopped to hike (shorelines, remember?), and we steered steadily south—south to south by east—between the steep eastern face of the Wassuk Range and Walker Lake's western shore.

It can be hard to drive by Walker Lake without stopping for photographs, though I find myself doing that more often than not. Sometimes the lighting is off, with the sun high in the sky or at the wrong angle, other times the lake and mountains are obscured by a pervasive haze. Consequently I have few good photos of the lake. I got lucky in the spring of 2008.

Between a rock and a guardrail: the steep eastern side of the Wassuk Range, looking north along Highway 95.

I've always found this precipitous range front fascinating when driving past at 40 to 60 mph (o_O)—the granitic rocks along the range front look shattered, presumably munched by the Wassuk Range fault zone—but I've rarely pulled over to examine anything closely because of unusually minimal standing room on the inboard side of the highway.

Looking south toward Hawthorne from a pullout near what is now the north end of Walker Lake.

A strangely stitched agglomeration of six photos. Notice the pronounced shorelines in the foreground and in the distance on the left.

Driving toward Hawthorne, I had hoped to skirt town by breezing through on the hazardous waste bypass road, but our gas gauge read low enough to make me wonder if we would make Tonopah. I suspected there would be no open gas stations between Hawthorne and Tonopah. (It turned out that there weren't any, open or not!)

The first station we stopped at in Hawthorne was immediately frustrating for some reason, so I went to another station. The second station seemed to be still residing in the dark ages, without usable card readers, so I went inside. "Do you want to fill up? Leave your card here," the attendant said with her hand out. I looked at her like I'd never heard of such an archaic procedure, and she relented, "Go ahead, take it with you, just be sure to pay after." I filled up and went back in to pay. She apologized for the inconvenience, but I wasn't convinced that their card readers were actually broken. I thought it was at least 50-50 that the station was just trying to get customers inside to buy a drink or a snack or two. But maybe the out-of-order signs were legit...

For some reason I found the whole having-to-stop-in-Hawthorne situation just almost too much to handle, even though the city used to make you drive into town no matter what. Now there is a bypass. Then there was a great little Shell station at the downtown corner where you turned left after stopping at the town's single red light. It was a perfect opportunity to get excellent gas.

We pulled back onto the 4-lane part of Highway 95 near the west edge of Hawthorne and turned right onto the bypass.

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Two things come to mind when I go through Hawthorne. First, I'll remember a dream I had once where I took the Hawthorne bypass and drove around town, north to south, and the bypass itself seemed to be the whole point of the dream. Second, after turning east onto Highway 95 at the south end of the bypass, my mind will go into a driving reverie and take me back to a time in the late 80s. I was telling someone that if I had enough money, I would quit my work in minerals exploration and just go out and map. Here or there. I'd seen a lot of places I thought were interesting, and I loved mapping. So, I'd just go out and map. And I'd start a map publishing company.

My unnamed sidekick said that mapping should have a point. Like I shouldn't just go out and map; maybe instead I should try to figure out something in particular about the geology of the area. I disagreed. The USGS mapped tons of quads and the whole point was getting the entire area (the West? the U.S.?) mapped. My mapping would be more detailed than quad mapping, and I would just go out and do it. Maybe I'd start right there—up ahead in the volcanic rocks near the pass outside of Luning. Maybe I'd start at any of several places I'd already done some detailed mapping, part of the point being to make the mapping available to the general population of geologists working in the area, not just to one exploration company.

Volcanic rocks in the Benton Spring area of the Gabbs Valley Range, about 7 miles north of Luning.

I drive east, my mind goes into this same reverie, and I remember that time—and how, when it came down to it and I had some money and some free time, I didn't do that.

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MOH and I drove into Luning, and rather than stop at the Luning Rest Area, we took a dirt road going toward the hills of Black Dyke Mountain, accidentally choosing a road that would have eventually delivered us to the Blue Ribbon Mine. It was in this area that I learned how to test for the presence of copper in black Mn-oxides by using cold, dilute HCl to plate copper onto a rock hammer. This method tests for copper wad or neotocite (a hydrated Mn-silicate sometimes containing enough Cu to be considered an ore mineral), or a few other black copper minerals such as chalcocite and tenorite.

Not too far ahead, in the low hills of Black Dyke Mountain, we spotted some folds in unknown rock formations:

Folded, contorted rocks in the hills less than 2 miles SW of Luning.

Zooming in on the folds.

And that's it for this part of the road trip! We'll continue on towards Tonopah and Beatty next time.

Location map

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
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Wave Clouds beyond the Sierra
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Hike to Pleistocene Shorelines

Cliffs of the Ruby Mountains: Some Pretty Pictures

And while we're waiting an even longer time for me to get around to posting about the nappe in Lamoille Canyon, here are a few of my favorite pretty pics taken from our campsite at Camp Lamoille in late September. I can say that a bit of the nappe can be seen in a few of these photos, if you know where to look!

Cliffs (with sunset, first night) and the U-shaped valley of South Fork Lamoille Canyon about where it merges with the main part of the canyon.

Oooh! Cliffs and colors!

Oh, besides the nice colors on the cliff walls (sunset, still the first night in camp), this photo shows part of the Lamoille Canyon nappe.

Sunset colors and burning orange aspens.

Alpine glow on the cliffs behind the roof of the wood-heated lodge.

Back to a view of the U-shaped valley.

Our camp and lit-up lodge, with granitic gneiss in the core of the nappe barely visible in the dark cliffs behind the tent.

The next day, noonish: the upper part of the cliffs that were in darkness in the previous photo.

The same cliffs on the morning of the third day; orthogneiss in the core of the nappe showing in the lower left of the photo.

A red-tailed hawk soars overhead just before the downpour of the second day.

Dinner bell at the lodge.

Cliffs, clouds and chimney on the second day.

The rocks of the chimney blend in with the not-so-distant cliffs.

A dusting of snow, cliffs, and orange aspens; early morning of the third day.

The sun rises behind a hill. The shallow slope to the right of center is part of the lateral moraine of  South Fork Lamoille Canyon.

Related Posts:
Cliffs of the Ruby Mountains: More Views from the Hanging Valley Pullout
Links: Lamoille Canyon Geology
A Hanging Valley in Lamoille Canyon
Cliffs of the Ruby Mountains: Mt. Gilbert
First Trip into the Ruby Mountains of Nevada

Folds in Volcanic Rocks near Midas, some Wildlife, and an Aside about How to Use Lizardtech ExpressView

After passing Sawtooth dike on the Tuscarora Loop tour (driving ENE on the Midas Road into the Midas Trough), you need to immediatedly look south for the next three miles or so at some spectacular folds in rhyolitic volcanic rocks. The folds are in hills east of the junction of Evans and Clover Creeks (MSRMaps location), with photos beginning at hill 1762, above, and running to the gap southwest of hill 1938. Also see the Midas Area Google Maps view below for specific photo locations.
An enlargement of the first photo — with giant copyright notice because my online watermark site once again went down — in case the first photo was too small.
Geologic map of the Snowstorm Mountains and vicinity, Elko and Humboldt Counties, Nevada (Wallace, 1993), courtesy U.S. Geol. Survey.

The folds are entirely within an upper Miocene unit mapped by Wallace (1993) as Trpy — younger rhyolite porphyry — which consists of rhyolite and rhyodacite flows and domes.

By the way, I finally figured out how to download useable geologic maps from the USGS website. Here's the map. After downloading, or right-clicking and "Save Target As", one then needs to go here, go to downloads-viewers, and download/install the ExpressView Browser Plug-in (MrSID) for Windows. After installation, then just double-click, or right-click and "Open", the downloaded, saved map file, which has a .sid extension. The map then opens automatically in a useable page in your browser (IE or Firefox). This is so much easier than the old way, when one had to use the command line to open the saved maps. So, ignore these instructions listed as "Help in using this map" on the linked-to USGS map page. Although the instructions might be useful for some purposes, they are unnecessary for making a GEOtiff, tiff, jpg, gif, png, or bmp of a map or some portion thereof. The toolbar that comes with the viewer is a bit obscure; one does some things by right-clicking on tiny icons in the upper left and upper right corners. Saving is accomplished by right-clicking almost anywhere, which brings up options for printing, saving, and other useful items.

The main part of the hills, with some nice folds on the right.

A closer view of those folds.

These last two photos are looking at the northeastern contact area, where the Trpy rhyolite has been faulted against several formations, including the older volcanic rocks of Jake Creek Mountain — rhyolite and rhyodacite flows, domes, and ash-flow tuffs that cap the Owyhee Bluffs to the north — and the older rhyolite porphyry unit (Trpo), which on Owyhee Bluffs is fed, in part, by Sawtooth dike.

First photo, above, is from late spring; photo below is from mid-summer. The cheat grass is partly green and purplish brown in the first photo; everything has turned straw-colored in the second.
This general area, from the WSW opening to the Midas Trough to the turnoff to Midas, is a great place to spot antelope:

Antelope in early June.

Antelope in mid-July.

We also spotted a large flock of ravens coming back out of the area in mid-July...
...and several vultures feeding on roadkill.

View Midas Area in a larger map

Selected Reference:
Wallace, A.R., 1993, Geologic map of the Snowstorm Mountains and vicinity, Elko and Humboldt Counties, Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey, Miscellaneous Investigations Series Map I-2394, scale 1:50000.