High Water Across the West: The Truckee River

Returning once again to my spring mini-series about all the rivers and lakes that are at higher levels than I've seen in quite awhile (most recent post), I decided this time to show a few pics of the Truckee River, which I drive by quite frequently. Actually, I drive by four times a month unless I happen to bypass Reno by taking another route: 1) across the Black Rock Desert, 2) via Wadsworth to Pyramid Lake and northward (this route is currently impassable because spring floods washed out the road), or 3) over the mountains from the Pyramid Lake highway to Highway 395 (when having to turn around because the preferred road was washed out north of Sutcliffe).

The first photo was taken at a scenic overlook near Patrick along I-80, looking to the southeast. The river is high between us and the dark brown mass of intrusive dacite that forms a synform known as Giant's Throne (you can read a little about this feature here or purchase the field guide here).

Here (above), from the same location, I zoomed in on the river just south of I-80. The trees were just getting their spring leaves and were bright yellowish green.

After a bit, I pulled off at the westernmost Fernley exit and drove south into Wadsworth, a small town along old highway 40 (which is not signed 40 anywhere in Nevada, afaik). These photos, above and below, were taken at a bridge over the Truckee in the eastern part of Wadsworth.

I zoomed in on the water roiling downstream from a cottonwood tree sitting farther out in the water than usual.

I couldn't resist a photo of this old church. Once upon a time, while in high school or early college, I painted a watercolor of a similar church located back east in northern Virginia. I'm still fascinated by the style — not sure why.

Unlike some other rivers in the west, the Truckee was nowhere near impacting the old highway 40 bridge from below.

The railroad bridge spans the Truckee less than 50 meters away from the highway bridge.

For some reason, this view looking downstream reminded me of swamps in southeast. Maybe it's just the way the trees were sitting out in the river.

While down on the river between the two bridges, I grabbed one more shot of trees out in the river. And after standing there for a few minutes, I remembered I had to get back on the freeway. 😢

All photos were taken on 14May2017. The river is still high.

High Water Across the West: The Humboldt River at Winnemucca and Humboldt Station

When I started putting these photos together—while thinking about our last post about the Humboldt River in Carlin Canyon—I somehow (and quite erroneously) figured I could throw a whole bunch of high-water Humboldt River photos together in one blog post. The thing is, I have way too many, from several different localities and a few different days, and I hope to collect a few more before the water ebbs. So for today, we'll stick with these two spots, which I visited while driving I-80 from Elko to Reno on April 19th. The first shot looks westward toward Blue Mountain from the westbound exit onto West Winnemucca Blvd (exit 176).

The flooding in Winnemucca was really quite extensive when I drove through on April 11th (no photos) and then again on the 19th: several backyards and a few basements or first floors of houses near the defunct "Barrick Arms Apartments" were under water. The water had receded incompletely when I saw it last (May 28th).

These first pics show the Humboldt River's floodplain looking more like a marshy lake than it's usual dry self. Water level was slightly lower on April 19th than when I first saw it on the 11th.

Here's a phone-camera panorama, with Blue Mountain way off on the left and Winnemucca Mountain taking up the right half of the photo.

This Google Maps Street View image, a flashback to 2011, shows a more typical appearance of the same panorama, albeit from October rather than spring.

And just because, I've included a picture centered on Winnemucca Mountain. It's a prominent feature and a landmark for miles and miles. If you look closely, you'll see the two-toned "W" painted on its southeastern slope.

On that same day (the 19th), I pulled off I-80 at Humboldt House (exit 138, marked "Humboldt") and drove old Highway 40 back toward Imlay.

I crudely spliced together two or three photos looking northwest across what I thought was Rye Patch Reservoir.

It turns out that the entirety of the water seen in these photos is contained within the Upper and Lower Pitt-Taylor Reservoirs.

Here we see Majuba Hill behind blue water in the Lower Pitt-Taylor Reservoir. The light beige horizontal line between the water and Majuba are bluffs underlain by Lake Lahontan's Sehoo Formation. A narrow part of Rye Patch Reservoir proper runs between us and those bluffs, but we can't really see it, even though the water is running high.

Here we can see both the Lower and Upper Pitt-Taylor Reservoirs. The Lower is closest to us; the Upper is beyond the horizontal pale beige line separating the two bodies of water. The wide upper part of Rye Patch Reservoir lies not far beyond the Upper Pitt-Taylor, hidden from us by some irregular low hills. Off in the distance, we're looking at pointed, snow-covered King Lear Peak, part of the Jackson Mountains. The 8923-foot-high peak (2720 m) is about 45 miles away.

High Water Across the West: The Humboldt River in Carlin Canyon — With the Carlin Canyon Unconformity!

Well, there we have it: the Carlin Canyon unconformity with the Humboldt River running nearly bankfull on April 11th of this year.

Looking downstream, back toward the tunnels, we're actually still looking at the unconformity, but it's cropping out poorly on the slope below the tilted limestone beds of the Pennsylvanian-Permian Strathearn Formation.

I went ahead and cropped the best photo I took so we could zoom in on the unconformity in it's classic exposure, and then drew a line right along the contact.

The Strathearn lies unconformably over the near-vertical (to locally overturned) Mississippian-Pennsylvanian Diamond Peak Formation, which is sometimes mapped as the equivalent Tonka Formation in this area.

Zoom in on this feature with a GigaPan by Ron Schott. And if you click the Google Earth link below his GigaPan, you can view the feature *and* the GigaPan in Google Earth!

A Watering Hole Bites the Dust: Water Hole #1

Water Hole #1 in Golconda, Nevada — a bar made famous in the late 1970s by an industrious pig, Waterhole Ike — closed sometime within the last two to three years, before I had a chance to stop by and check out their beer collection.

Water Hole #1 and attached grocery store in March, 2015.

The bar and store during better times: June, 2012.

Zooming in on the bar.

Note the boarded-up windows.

A view of part of the motel next door.

The rest of the motel.

Part of the motel in June, 2012.

Read more about Golconda and Waterhole Ike:
A Visit to Often Overlooked Golconda - Backyard Traveller, Rich Moreno
Waterhole Ike - Howard Hickson's Histories
The illustrious past of Golconda - RGJ.com
Mike's Water Hole - FB page

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And, by the way, the stories about Waterhole Ike remind me of a story told by a former colleague of mine, who — back in the old days — once saw a pig walk into a bar up in northern Idaho (or maybe it was Montana? or Colorado??). The bartender or a friend of the pig grabbed a beer (can or bottle, I'm not sure which; brand, I'm not sure of that, either), opened it, and held it for the pig, who immediately guzzled it. The colleague, rather dumbfounded by the incident, asked about this phenomenon and was told that the pig saunters in to the bar about the same time every day and has a beer. (Story verified by another former colleague.)

Dust Hole

I was out driving around the other day, basically following I-80 from Lovelock to Reno, and I decided to take what I thought would be a short side trip, getting off at Toulon to check out a bit of remaining old Highway 40 just east of the Humboldt Dike.

After checking out the old alignment, I thought about turning around and going back to Toulon to get on the freeway, then decided to go on toward the old site of Trinity, where U.S. 95 south to Fallon meets I-80. Go forward, not back! To do this, I drove southwest on an easy portion of what turned out to be a long, tedious, and very rocky section of powerline road.

Near the top of the first rise, the road narrowed and turned rocky and then went into the first of a series of sideways excursions across several large and small washes coming south out of the south Trinity Range. Near the bottom of the first of these washes, I pushed my way through a small silt hole (I was already in 4WD in order to go slower over the sharp volcanic rocks). Rather than stopping and backing through the thing or trying to turn around at this somewhat late point (and thinking that Trinity would be just over the next rise), I kept going, only to suddenly find myself heading into an immense, roiled dust hole cut into old Lake Lahontan lake sediments (or Tertiary intra-volcanic sediments). I leaned on the gas pedal, thinking that if I came to a stop in the middle of the hole, I would be stuck and would have to send a SPOT help message or walk out to I-80 (or both). Waves of dust washed over the jeep covering it entirely, and for the last part of the hole, I couldn't see a thing. I didn't have time to turn on my window wipers, which probably wouldn't have helped anyway, and I kept going like a person with their eyes shut, trying to remember the next part of the road from the brief glance I had gotten.

I made it through, and instead of stopping to take any pictures of it, I continued on, just wanting to get the hell out of there. After a steep bit or two through rocks I actually scraped over a little (this is hard to do with the excellent clearance the jeep has), I arrived at the top of the next rise.

On an obscure powerline road, looking southwestward toward Trinity.

From the top of the rise, I could see that I had at least one more major wash to cross and more than a mile to go. At this point, I was just short of half way there (although I didn't really know that at the time), and I knew that I wouldn't be turning around to go back to Toulon, because I wasn't going to drive through that second dust hole twice in one day. (Or ever again!)

Here, I'm looking northeast across the wash I had just crossed.

Both dust holes are visible in the photo enlargement below, just right of the powerline in roiled, light-colored sediments in the center of the broad wash area:

From looking at this in Google Earth, I'm pretty sure that only the beginning of the second dust hole (the one closest to us) is fully visible in the photo.

I was running enough adrenaline right then, that I didn't try harder to get a better picture — I was focused more on getting out of there as quickly as possible and getting back to the highway!  I hurriedly cleaned the dust off the windows of the jeep, and drove on toward Trinity.

The view of the second hole that I would have had if I'd walked back over the hill a short distance.

When I got to Trinity, I took out the air filter out of the jeep and shook the dust out of it.

View Toulon to Trinity in a larger map

After getting onto I-80, I accelerated to traveling speed (warp 7.5+ or 75-80 mph; warp speed terminology on roads and highways explained here), leaving a trail of dust behind me for several miles, perhaps as far as about halfway to Nightingale Hot Springs.

Phew! Maybe I'll go back someday to get a better photo of the hole. Maybe.

(See embedded Google Maps view above for location of all geographic points of interest mentioned in this post.)

Escape from the July 20 Haboob in Western Nevada

At 3:37 pm, July 20th, my phone made a strange and loud noise in my pocket, and I took it out to find the first of two emergency alerts that I would receive from the National Weather Service.

The first NWS alert, for the Lovelock area, is on the bottom.

Besides the emergency alert sound, similar to that of the emergency broadcast system on radio and TV, the "Severe" and "Avoid travel" were phrases that caught the attention of the two geologists working that day, geologists who were hoping to leave in about an hour, but not particularly sooner.

UPDATE 29Jul2014: Also note that the Severe Alerts above mentioned "Dust Storm," not using the word "Haboob," which according to Wikipedia is derived from the Arabic word habūb, meaning "blasting/drafting." (I've seen other, similar derivations and translations of Arabic words and don't know which are most accurate.) Nevertheless, as you will see below, what we were about to witness was a huge dust storm with a miles-long wall of dust, often called a haboob in many parts of the world, including Arizona.

Our first glance outside wasn't too encouraging with regard to travel.

First view of the haboob on the east side of the valley: a wall of dust coming up from the south.

After looking around outside, we rushed to put things in order, piled into a truck, and left town. We didn't really want to hang around until 8 pm or whenever visibility would return.

To begin with, I thought the dust was a fairly localized phenomenon coming from the Humboldt Sink, which is about 10 to 15 miles southwest of Lovelock, or perhaps it was coming from the combined Humboldt and Carson Sinks. The Carson Sink is the very large sink for the Carson River, located 15 to 35 miles south of Lovelock, beyond the West Humboldt Range. I'd never seen the Humboldt Sink kick up quite this much dust on its own, so I had to entertain a larger possibility.

Shot of the haboob approaching Lovelock from the south. In this shot it has started to ride up over the south end of the Trinity Range beyond I-80, thereby already having overridden I-80 out near Toulon.

Three stitched-together photos of the same wall of dust, taken at 3:52 pm as we were scrambling to leave. The dust was already encroaching onto trees usually in view to the south.

As we got onto the on ramp for I-80, the dust looked like it would shortly pass over the Golden Gate truck stop (shown as Port of Subs and only approximately located by Google on this map)

A first look back at the dust after getting on I-80.

Many of the next shots (and the one above) were taken looking into the side mirror on the passenger side of the truck (the one that says "Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear"). I've reversed these mirror shots to show more accurately the shape of the hills and mountains behind us as we drove north and northeast toward Winnemucca.

The haboob is now about to overrun the Lovelock L in the southern Humboldt Range (Google Maps location of the L).

Somewhere between the Oreana and Rye Patch exits, I could see that the wall of dust had gone past Coal Canyon (Google Maps location) and was steadily moving northward.

Just past Rye Patch, it looked like the dust storm had fully moved into Rochester Canyon (Google Maps location) and possibly, though not clearly, into Limerick Canyon (marked as "Lovelock-Unionville Road" by Google on the previous map).

Shot of the haboob from just northeast of Humboldt House. The trees are at Humboldt House; the small reddish hill on the left is one of the heap leach piles at Florida Canyon.

When we rounded the corner at Humboldt House (Google Maps location) and the Florida Canyon Mine, the sight of the huge wall of dust engulfing the Trinity Range behind us reminded me of a giant pyroclastic cloud (not that I've ever seen one IRL). The dust was billowing and looked like it was eating everything it its path.

The haboob approaches a small rain shower in the Trinity Range.

Dust in Buena Vista Valley. The TA truckstop near the Mill City exit is visible in the distance to the right (west) of I-80.

As we went past the Unionville exit (behind us in the photo above), dust was rising from Buena Vista Valley beyond the low, brownish hills near the Star Point Trading Post and RV park, and I thought that all we were seeing was non-haboob from Buena Vista Valley and possibly from the Carson Sink.

At this point in this photo-log, you might notice that some photos are oversharpened, due to motion, relative darkness, and an obviously improper ASA (ISO) setting by the photographer. I probably should have switched to an ASA of 800 or higher, and was probably using a normally adequate setting of 400.

Another view of dust in Buena Vista Valley and the east side of the Humboldt Range. The trees are at the constantly closed Cosgrave rest stop
(Google Maps location).

A centered view of the Humboldt Range looking south-southwest down I-80.
The tiny-looking, triangular knob in the broad central part of the range is Thunder Mountain. Star Peak is the high point to the left; the high point to the right is probably Van Zant Peak.

I could now see dust on both sides of the Humboldt Range, and I began to suspect that there was only one dust storm.

Dust now appears to be coming over the top of the Humboldt Range in the gaps between Thunder Mountain and Star and Van Zant Peaks.

All three peaks top 9000 feet, with Star Peak coming in at 9840 ft or 2999 m. The valley floors on either side of the range are at about 4150 to 4500 feet, and Imlay sits at 4200 feet (< 1300 m) just north of the north end of the range (Imlay at MSRMaps).

Looking back at our final view of the Humboldt Range as we approach the Rose Creek exit just east of Winnemucca.

The haboob (above) has now moved fully into the valley of the Humboldt River at Imlay, and it looks like it's about to start riding up the south flank of the Eugene Mountains on the far right (Google Maps location of Imlay, with the Eugene Mountains to the north). Dust is coming around both sides of the Humboldt Range to potentially merge into one wall at the north end of the range. At about this time, I received the second of my wireless alerts (first image at the beginning of the post).

As we approach Winnemucca, dust is rising in Grass Valley ahead of a thunderstorm coming in from the south.

Dust devil in Grass Valley.

Dust in Grass Valley on the right, and what appears to be dust beyond the low, north end of the Sonoma Range, somewhere out near Golconda.

A shot more clearly showing that some of the dust is rising east of the Sonoma Range rather than being confined to Grass Valley.
This last photo was taken at 4:52 pm.

Until we rounded the corner going into Winnemucca near the Rose Creek exit, we had experienced no wind (or very minor wind, especially compared to the usual norms), and there had been absolutely none when we left work just ahead of the wall of dust. Now, the wind was strong from the south or southeast, and we were glad to have arrived in town just barely ahead of the main part of the dust storm. I settled into the apt, and, looking out the front and back windows every now and then, I noticed persistent though mostly patchy dust and a short-term disappearance of Winnemucca Mountain to the north — nothing like the wall of dust we had seen earlier! It rained later, and the next day we found out that winds had been strong upon the arrival of the haboob in Lovelock, strong enough to knock down tree branches. Streets were wet and puddled at work the next morning, and life went back to normal, albeit with less haze and fire-related smoke, which had been prevalent before the storms.

I had immediately, upon arrival at the apt, looked up the satellite photo for the area to see if the passage of the haboob could be seen. I thought maybe it could:

Visible satellite image for 23:30 Z, or 4:30 pm PDT.

What I noticed while running the loop that ended with this image, was that apparent wind and dust movement was to the north all along a zone across northwestern Nevada (above, from about Reno to north of Battle Mountain). Also, outward from Nevada and the Basin and Range in a very large circular "front," the many patches of combined storms, clouds, and dust appeared to be moving broadly or generally away from the center of Utah or an ill-defined area in northern Arizona. I don't know whether this was all part of the same storm system, but below I've drawn in bright cyan what I think was the approximate line of the haboob with trailing and collapsing (?) thunderstorms behind it, and I've put in a few arrows showing apparent drift of wind, dust, and clouds in bright magenta:

Cartoon of possible location of haboob across northwestern Nevada in cyan; wind directions as apparently indicated by moving dust and storms are shown by magenta arrows. These are my interpretations only and have not been verified by a meteorologist.

Dust hit Lovelock shortly after 3:55 pm; dust was moving across I-80 in Winnemucca by 4:50 pm; dust was about to move into Gerlach in a big way as of 5:57 pm. I didn't find a lot about the haboob online, although it was mentioned by a few local news broadcasts that I can't access, and was mentioned in this RGJ news story. There were a few pictures, a blog post, and two videos of people on I-80 driving farther into the storm than I would have thought wise. The first video in particular shows the movement of the dust storm fairly well; the second shows somewhat more prudent driving.

The original weather alert by the NWS for Churchill County "INCLUDING PYRAMID LAKE-INCLUDING THE CITIES OF. FERNLEY. FALLON. LOVELOCK. SILVER SPRINGS" and remaining in effect until 8 pm is archived here; the original NWS alert for Humboldt County "INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS. WINNEMUCCA. MCDERMITT. PARADISE VALLEY. GOLCONDA SUMMIT" and remaining in effect until 11 pm is archived here.

How to drive in a haboob or large dust storm (STOP DRIVING!!: DO NOT ENTER THE STORM!! DO NOT USE FLASHERS!! Pull farther off the road than shown in the above videos — ALL the way over past the paved or flat to sloping shoulder! READ THE PAGE AT THE LINK!!).

More about Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA).
Wikipedia on haboobs.
The Northern Nevada Haboob (of May 22, 2014).

P.S. This is my 1004th post!