We began our northern Nevada road trip about a month ago at this blog post about Sulphur, Nevada, a real ghost town located more or less a third of the way along our route. To continue with the trip, we’ll take a step back for a re-start in Winnemucca (The Griddle, above is a good place to stop for breakfast or lunch), though we could just as easily start somewhere to the east, say Elko, although the trip then would become longer. Our goal will be to make it, eventually, to the NV-CA state line west of the Smoke Creek Desert, and from there to U.S. Route 395 north of Susanville. We'll get to 395 by way of a fairly obscure dirt road that will take us from the Smoke Creek Desert in Nevada to a nearly non-place called Viewland, CA. See my Google Maps plot of this route, along with photo locations and other points of interest along the way. I'll add points to the map as our trip progresses.
The Jungo Road (Nevada S.R. 49 and 48) will be our gateway to the Black Rock Desert and points west, and to get on the Jungo Road we'll take U.S. Route 95 north out of the center of Winnemucca a very short distance, where we'll turn left onto the Jungo Road almost immediately after crossing the Humboldt River. Right at the Winnemucca convention center, essentially our starting point, you’ll note a sign stating that the road north (U.S. 95) is part of the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway.
If you're inclined to travel northward instead of westward, have a look at my 2010 Oregon Trip Series, a series dedicated to road tripping over a portion of the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway and other roads as well.
Lo and behond, the Jungo Road starts out paved as it leaves Winnemucca. That’s Blue Mountain nearly straight down the road.
At this point, just about 6 miles into our journey, we get a good view of Little Tabletop Mountain, which is a basalt-capped mesa south of the road. MOH and I used to call these hills “The Pancakes.” From the south side, they look a little like a tilted stack of pancakes.
"The Pancakes" from the south, as seen in Google Earth.
It’s difficult to get a photo of these hills when driving 80 mph on I-80, unless you happen to be sitting in the left passenger backseat, so I resorted to a G.E. view.
Before long, the paved portion of the Jungo Road ends; it becomes a magnesium-chloride treated road...a magged road. I figured the magged road condition would extend all the way out to the Hycroft gold mine, but I forgot that they are not operating with a large crew like they were a few years ago when the mine was active. Hycroft is still running their heap-leach operation while testing the feasibility of operating a sulfide leach pad, but the large crews are a thing of the past, at least for now (see Hycroft’s January 10th press release [pdf] for more about sulfide leach testing).
Here we are at the same locality as the previous photo, about 9 miles west of Winnemucca, looking back towards Winnemucca and the Sonoma Range.
The magged part of the Jungo Road currently ends at the turnoff to the Blue Mountain geothermal field, aka Blue Mountain Faulkner 1, which is just on the west side of Blue Mountain. Magging prevents dust, so the road is dusty to the west. One good thing about dust: you have a better chance of seeing that someone is heading toward you. A bad thing about dust: breathing it, of course. Magged roads have one particular disadvantage: they are very slippery when wet, almost like driving on greased snot!
Although the sign at the turnoff to the geothermal field says "NGP Blue Mountain 1 LLC," the power plant is now owned by AltaRock (or not - UPDATE 15June2019). The field was discovered during gold exploration conducted in the 1980s or 90s.
I often stop on a small-looking playa near Jungo—it seems to be a good spot for a pit stop, being about 1 coffee from Winnemucca, and when it’s hot, which it was on June 15th when these photos were taken, it’s definitely time for more hydration. It turns out that this playa is the southern part of the larger Desert Valley playa, which extends 46 miles north-northeast from about 6 miles south of Jungo, all the way to the Quinn River about half way between Winnemucca and Denio. Desert Valley is the 10-mile-wide basin between the Jackson Mountains on the west and the Slumbering Hills (a mountain range) on the east. The Sleeper gold mine was named for it's location in the Slumbering Hills (and also because it was a "sleeper?").
Here we are coming into Jungo, which is a railroad siding located at or near the junction of the Jungo Road with the Bottle Creek Road, which heads up toward the Bottle Creek mining district and the main part of Desert Valley. The well-bedded rocks in the hills ahead of us—a northward continuation of the Antelope Range or a southern part of the Jackson Mountains—are part of the Jungo Terrane, a thick pile of turbiditic shales with sandstone and limestone interbeds that were deposited in Late Triassic to Early or Middle Jurassic time (Luddington et al, 1996 and Crafford, 2007).
Not recognizing in the moment the exact location of Jungo, I took a photo of the junction with the dirt road that comes up with Imlay. If you happen to start this trek in Imlay, you'll cross the Humboldt River just above Rye Patch Reservoir, and you'll pass by Haystack Butte, a geographic marker that can be seen from the Applegate Trail.
I don’t do it often, but on this trip I went ahead and took a couple photos of two of the old mining cabins at Mandalay Spring. I’m not sure why these shacks are present (besides the spring) or what era they date from. I’ve been inside at least one of them—for some reason the entire enterprise struck me as depressing (maybe it was the peeling wallpaper or strings of disintegrating clothes; maybe it was just me).
This cabin is located a little closer to the spring and at about the same elevation; whereas the first cabin sits up above overlooking the spring.
I took this photo at one of the first spots to pull over and get a good look at the Black Rock Desert, which on this day was partly obscured by summer haze. Black Rock Point, for which the desert was named, is a small, dark hill just to the left of the road as it points off toward the vast playa; a closer view of the point can be seen here. The little hill in the foreground is part of a Pleistocene Lake Lahontan shoreline. There was another obvious shoreline just 200 m east of this smaller one.
Selected References:
Crafford, A.E.J., 2007, Geologic Map of Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey Data Series 249, 1 CD-ROM, 46 p., 1 plate.
Ludington, Steve, McKee, E.H., Cox, D.P., Moring, B.C., and Leonard, K.R., 1996, Pre-Tertiary geology of Nevada, Chapter 4 in Singer, D.A., ed., An analysis of Nevada's metal-bearing mineral resources: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology Open-File Report 96-2, p. 4.1-4.17, 1 sheet, scale 1:1,000,000.
Our story—the 1981 story of Allie and I doing recon down in the Mojave—began in Reno in the spring of the year and ended unexpectedly and abruptly in Needles before the end of June. I no longer remember exactly how long we spent in the east-central Mojave, but we looked at six different target areas—depending on how you count them—and we probably spent at two to five days in each area.
"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. ...
- from 'Manual of Muad'Dib' by the Princess Irulan"
A Caravan Camper on a white truck
in front of a mine dump in eastern Nevada.
Allie and I left Reno in a dull gray, four-wheel drive Chevy pickup truck topped with a matching Caravan Camper, a type of heavy-duty metal camper shell with carpet kit, similar to the one I have now. We were equipped with an ice chest full of food, drinks, and ice; a 5-gallon water cooler or two; sundry camping gear; assorted tools; one spare tire (only one!); and all kinds of exploration equipment and supplies. We had sample bags and sample books, Estwing rock hammers and rock chisels, triplet hand lenses and little magnets on rawhide straps, and little plastic squeeze bottles filled with a 10% dilute solution of hydrochloric acid (HCl). The acid bottles were usually held tight in leather cases that could be slid onto belts. We also had a carefully stowed glass bottle of non-dilute HCl, so we could make additional dilute acid as needed. (HCl was easy to get back then, and the bottle came meticulously packed in vermiculite within a sturdy cardboard box.)
We had files of topographic maps, geologic maps, published reports, books, and copies of company reports in plastic file boxes that would help to keep everything organized while also protecting it from water and the pervasive Mojave dust. We had Brunton compasses in leather holders, ready to attach to our belts. And we had various mapping paraphernalia: mechanical pencils with black, blue, and red leads; colored pencils; pens and markers; and six-inch C-Thru® protractor-rulers of various scales: 10-50, 20-40, 10-20, and 30-60. We had field notebooks to hold notes and sketches, and we had aluminum clipboards that would protect our maps, air photos, and reports. We carried everything we needed for any particular day’s traverse in Filson® survey field vests[1], on belts, or in backpacks. A geologist, fully attired and field ready, is easily distinguished from desert rats, ranchers, and routine hikers.
We also had a pile of camping and cooking gear scattered in the back of the truck: pots and pans; plates, bowls, and utensils; a gas Coleman stove and fuel for said stove; sleeping bags and sleeping pads; a tent, which we didn't use while down in the Mojave; a tarp or two; and other miscellany. We may have rustled up some of the gear from a stash in the company warehouse—though had we not been timely in choosing gear (and we were late that year), we would have been out of luck. A certain person's name was used to describe what happened if you didn't grab your gear in time, or if you got stuck with second-rate supplies. Had his last name been Gibbs, it would have been called "getting Gibbsed."
U.S. 95, looking south, just a few miles north of Beatty.
Before leaving Reno, we spent a little time pondering two particular questions: 1) should we take a thermometer and 2) should we abstain from beer and other alcohol? We debated back and forth about the thermometer and finally decided to leave it behind. Maybe we'd feel cooler if we didn’t see the expected 3-digit Fahrenheit temperatures!
If the creosote has bloomed, the field season is over.
Speaking of temperatures, when we got to our first locality, the temps we encountered didn't seem too bad, though it took a little time to adjust after coming from the higher and cooler elevations of Reno. We adapted. We devoured lots of fresh fruit. For lunch we’d have half avocados, their centers filled with Italian salad dressing, and we’d roll whatever else came out of the icebox in flour or corn tortillas.[2] We also prepared our own variant of south-of-the-border food, using lots of hot peppers, gobs of hot sauce, and unlimited spicy guacamole. We figured there would be something medicinal in mixing the spicy fire of the food with the scorching heat of the desert. And in fact, these were the only foodstuffs we could bring ourselves to eat in the heat. And throughout the day, from sunup to sundown, we drank gallons of water, juices, and sodas—and zero beers.
[1] It looks like the standard survey vest isn't being made anymore—at least I don't see it on the C.C. Filson website. Perhaps that's because so many geos are now wearing safety vests much of the time. I hope my current beige style-12 and orange style-8 vests will last indefinitely: I still use them on field trips, while hiking, and on most sampling and mapping excursions. My beige vest is partly held together by duct tape; a gaping hole in the lower right area developed after carrying a leaky acid bottle inside the inner pocket. (I really don't like having things hanging from my belt, though I did used to wear my Brunton that way. Now I stick it in one of the side pockets.)↩
[2] This was called a "Bill Rehrig" lunch, although we didn't use that term until many years later.↩
I'm doing the year-end meme wherein I compile the first sentence of the first post of every month. Meme rules are as follows, as per DrugMonkey:
Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.
I also add the first photo from the same first post. Previous takes on this Twelve Month meme at LFD were posted for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2015.
After checking out the southern route to Mineral Ridge while on my 1976 thesis quest, I headed north out of Silver Peak on then Highway 47 (now S.R. 265), carefully measuring the miles to the left-hand turnoff.
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.
May:
I'm not sure how I got started on checking different words and concepts on Google Books Ngram Viewer yesterday, although my "History" tab suggests to me that it might have been related to some reading I was doing on science fiction.
I collected this hand sample from the Original Bullfrog mine, Nye County, Nevada, sometime back in the mid to late 1980s when doing recon in the area, then cut and polished it—probably with a company saw and grinding wheel.
We're now about two thirds of the way up the hill toward Red Pass on the Titus Canyon road, a one-way road that runs approximately east to west from Nevada into California, starting not far south of the ghost town of Rhyolite.
There I was, preparing a few photos for posting in the ongoing Death Valley Trip – Titus Canyon series, doing my usual thing of marking up photos in MS Paint (I'm too cheap to buy any real photo programs), when I figured that I must have something around the house that might work better than either dragging the cursor across the screen with my trackpad or dragging my finger across the computer's touch screen.
Now we'll leave the parking area near the Leadfield sign and, as I promised last time, we’ll walk out to what I’ve been referring to as the “far west cabin," although maybe that should really be "far northwest cabin."
When I drove to the area on the south side of the Whipple Mountains where I ended up camping amidst downpours and nearby lightning, I thought I'd grab a few photos of the Colorado River Aqueduct, which passes through just north of CA Highway 62 on its way to the greater L.A. area, but an RVer was camped just beyond the aqueduct overpass, so I blew it off until I left.
(Actually, before I found a place for lunch, I mistakenly pulled off on the paved road to McLaughlin, thinking that I could get a better picture of the Castle Mountains, a place I had worked long before, only to find that the road had no legitimate turnarounds until nearly reaching the Colorado River. This unforeseen escapade surely added an extra hour to my driving time!)
North of Searchlight, I found a suitable dirt road and drove away from the four-lane highway on blessed dirt. (Highway 95 wasn't four-laned in this part of the world the last time I drove on it; road widening began sometime after publication of the 2002-03 Nevada road map and was complete by the publication date of the 2005-06 road map.)
Before making lunch (and then more coffee), I wandered around and took a few pictures, including this one of an alive but bent over and half-burned Joshua tree. (I don't know if the tree was hit by lightning or lit on fire by an obnoxious passerby. The other Joshua trees nearby showed no signs of fire, so I don't suspect an old wildfire.)
What's that in the distance beyond the Joshua tree?
It's a hill of light-colored rocks covered by darker rocks (part of the Highland Range, Clark County, NV) .
My idea of the geology while out there was simple, and turned out to be fairly incorrect. I did get the type of rock right: Yes, it's (primarily) volcanic. I was thinking of a fairly thick ash-flow tuff sheet, with a thick poorly welded zone (in buff or pale orange), a very thin to intermittent vitrophyre (the thin black bed on the far hill), all overlain by a strongly welded zone (the sloping dark brownish hill-capping formation). Wrong. And wrong.
I found the detailed geology in this M.S. thesis (Colombini, 2009); the basics of her geology was largely from a map by Faulds et al (2002), but with more detail than I want to report. The larger picture consists of hill-capping basaltic andesite (this section might commonly be identified as basalt in the field) overlying a thin, dark, glassy rhyolite to rhyodacite flow (I guess I was partly correct on this!), overlying pale orange non-welded tuffs of mixed sedimentary and volcanic origin (and partly correct on this). Some flow-banded rhyolitic flows are mostly hidden at the base of the orange hills, barely sticking up high enough to be seen in the photo.
These rocks are all mid-Miocene in age, and they have all been tilted to the west (away from us) by widespread extreme extension related to detachment faulting within the Colorado River extensional corridor. The structure of the area is complicated by being within or near the Black Mountains accommodation zone (Faulds et al, 2002; abstract only, the rest is behind a paywall).
After my overnight stop in the Whipples, I drove north, figuring I'd get a couple more photos of the Turtle Mountains. No, wait—from many previous trips, I knew the dirt road going out to the Turtles would be a good place to pull over for a pit stop.
I'd forgotten how tall the ocotillo can grow!
Ocotillo with Jeep for scale and the northern Turtle Mountains in the background. The hazy mountains on the right are the Old Woman Mountains.
I have a couple stories about the Turtle Mountains, one of which features an old prospector who successfully witched the copper pennies my field assistant and I hid beneath some smoothed-over sand. I'm still a little dumfounded by his luck—or did he have an exceptionally precise witching tool?
Making coffee in the back of the Jeep, a somewhat messy prospect due to the lack of a proper gold (or silver) cone-shaped filter.
I parked near a shaggy-looking Palo Verde tree.
The ocotillo is diagnostic of the Sonoran Desert (biotically speaking), as might be the Palo Verde tree (AKA paloverde).
Savahia Peak in the Whipple Mountains, with cholla.
And here's a cartoon of the geology.
The upper plate volcanic rocks are dipping moderately to steeply to the west (cyan bedding). The Whipple Mountains detachment fault (hachured dark blue) is fairly flat-lying in this area, separating reddish, hematitic upper plate rocks from greenish, lower plate chloritic and mylonitic gneisses. I've drawn in a few approximately located listric normal faults in bright blue to illustrate the general structural configuration. The upper plate has moved to the east relative to the lower plate, as indicated by both the dip of beds in the upper plate, and (especially) by the movement on upper plate listric normal faults.
We're officially on the Titus Canyon leg of our larger Death Valley trip—a round trip odyssey that will take us to and near a number of places. This section of our journey began with the last post, which was centered around Beatty. I’ll be complementing my February photographs with photos from a similar journey MOH and I took back in the late spring of 2009. So, let's get on with it! We'll begin by leaving Beatty.
There are two ways to get to the Titus Canyon road from Beatty. I usually forget that fact because it's generally been years between journeys into the canyon. Consequently, I seem to end up on this route one time, and that route the next time, alternating routes without really thinking about it. Then I wonder why the road, the signs, and the overall lay of the land don't look the same as the last time I passed through the area.
Beatty's main intersection: a 4-way stop.
We went one way in 2009, turning left at Beatty’s main intersection, which kept us on U.S. 95 as we drove east and then south through and out of town. We passed the dirt turnoff to Fluorspar Canyon (might there be some fluorite up there?) and passed into the Amargosa Narrows. Not far beyond the Narrows, we turned right onto the unsigned paved road to the Beatty Airport, which goes by an obscure ghost town, Gold Center. Airport Road turns to dirt beyond the airport.
The Amargosa Narrows: Precambrian Z rocks crop out on the right, left, and straight ahead.
We went the other way this past February, going straight on Nevada S.R. 374, the Daylight Pass road, at the same intersection. This paved road winds through a bit of the Bullfrog Hills, going by Velvet Peak and Paradise Mountain. It then meets up with Airport Road near the Bullfrog pit of the currently inactive Bullfrog open pit gold mine.
The Bullfrog pit, as seen from the dirt portion of Airport Road, looking across a sea of blooming creosote (from the early May trip, 2009).
The Bullfrog gold mine—AKA the Barrick Bullfrog gold mine—was in operation from 1988 or '89 through 1998, when it produced about 2.4 million ounces of gold from two main open pits, the Bullfrog pit and the Montgomery-Shoshone pit, and from at least one related underground project, the North Extension. Discovery of these ore deposits began in 1982 with St. Joe Minerals Corporation (overall history is described in some detail here, here, and here). The exploration property then passed through several companies in quick succession through a series of acquisitions or buyouts, going from St. Joe to Bond Gold Corporation, then to Lac Minerals Ltd (or LAC Minerals Ltd, depending on the year—this company went back and forth with its name several times in a few years), and then to Barrick Gold Corporation.
The deposit is hosted in Tertiary volcanic rocks, mostly ash-flow tuffs that are cited by Castor et al (1989) as being correlative with the Miocene Timber Mountain Tuff, which has age dates ranging from about 10 to about 15 Ma (Geolex). In fact, the host formation was mapped by Maldonado et al (1990) as the Rainier Mesa Member of the Timber Mountain Tuff.
I had a tour of the Bullfrog pit back in the late 1980s or in 1990, while I was working for Former Mining Company. Bond Gold was probably the operator when I was there, and the mine was just called the Bullfrog mine. We learned then that much of the overall low-grade ore is concentrated in veins, breccias, and stockworks, and we thought at the time the deposit would be fairly difficult to make money at. It later surprised me that a large company like Barrick got involved in the mining. (I have no idea how the economics really played out; so much can depend on the up front expenditures a company has made and the price of gold during production.)
The deposit formed near the end of an extreme extensional event that took place in the area between 11.4 and 7.6 Ma (Castor and Weiss, 1992; Weiss et al, 1995; Castor et al, 1999). Although ore is partly hosted in and controlled by structures in the upper plate of the Bullfrog Hills detachment fault, it's not generally considered to be a detachment-related type of ore deposit (although knowledge of detachment faulting and related structural models would be indespensible for making discoveries in the Bullfrog mining district).
A little farther down the Daylight Pass Road, about six miles from the center of Beatty, the Titus Canyon dirt road heads WSW toward the Grapevine Mountains.
Turnoff to the Titus Canyon road.
The Titus Canyon road is a dirt road of variable character, narrow and washboardy in many parts, and entirely one way east to west. It isn't possible to turn around once you get going, and from asphalt to about "Tan Mountain," [name from Panoramio photo no longer available] there are few pullouts. It's possible that one could exit the road in two or more places within this first section, but it's not clear to me that any of these possible exits are really roads.
High clearance 4x4 vehicles are recommended!
Although 4WD is not usually necessary along most sections of the road, high clearance is a must, and 4WD can become necessary at any time (especially during bad weather). I think the road is blocked from the east when bad T-storms or flash flooding are expected, but I'd always want to check the weather to avoid getting stranded during a bad washout, like the kind the Death Valley area experienced in October, 2015.
This is what the October flooding looked like, during and after:
Don't get caught up in one of these!
Somewhere between the Titus Canyon warning sign and the Death Valley sign, you can look off to the north and see some classic Nevada ash-flow tuff formations, in this case tilted moderately along two detachment faults. The visible roads and workings are in the area of the Original Bullfrog mine, a little less than four miles west, as the crow flies, from the Bullfrog open pit.
Tilted volcanic rocks on Bullfrog Mountain (the highest point in the photo), with the Original Bullfrog mine not far left of center.
Wildflowers and creosote are in bloom in this May, 2009 photo. More precise photo and location information can be had by perusing the map near the end of this post.
I got to fooling around, saving this Google Earth image of Bullfrog Mountain from a similar angle as my photo above.
The same Google Earth image with two kmz file overlays.
What fun! Okay, this was so much fun, I went ahead and made the image match my photo more precisely, and then added a few geologic labels.
The photo, again, for comparison with the image below.
Geologic overlay of Google Earth (G.E.) image, labeled.
This is a good part of the Bullfrog Hills in which to see the results of the extreme extension that occurred in the area during the Miocene, although I'm not sure if its possible to actually place a finger on the main (or secondary) detachment surface. For the most part, the detachment faults are shown on the maps as dashed beneath Quaternary cover. In only three areas is either detachment fault mapped in the hills where we might be able to go look at the fault planes, and in only two places are dip measurement shown, and both sites are in the low hills to the east of the photo and images.
As for the rest of the local geology, the mylonitized lower plate Precambrian rocks are easily reconnoitered in the light colored hill on the far left of my photo (lower left of the G.E. geologic image), and the tilted volcanic section is easily walked in the hills above the Original Bullfrog mine. The main volcanic formations, oldest to youngest (west to east, left to right), are as follows: Ts3, mostly sandstone, shale, and conglomerate; Tql, quartz latite lava flows; Tlr, the Lithic Ridge Tuff; Tbt2, bedded tuff; Tcb, the Bullfrog Member of the Crater Flat Tuff; Tbt3, bedded tuff; Tpc, the Tiva Canyon Member of the Paintbrush Tuff; Tbt4, bedded tuff; and Tmr, the Rainier Mesa Member of the Timber Mountain Tuff. The Op on these maps is the Ordovician Pogonip Group, here consisting of limestone only 60m thick. The Zm consists of Late Proterozoic metamorphic rocks that have mid- to late Miocene cooling ages related to the regional extension.
Bullfrog ore.
The lower trenches at the Original Bullfrog mine used to be a great place to stop when driving through the area. (The location dot in the last image shows the site of the original mine, not the lower trenches; the lower trenches are more easily seen in the last photo as the small color anomaly below the location of that dot.) The easily unearthed quartz-amethyst veins contain v.g. and other neat minerals (see this post and next week's post). Much of the mineralized material was mined out in the 1980s (or earlier?), and a bunch of it was placed on a nearby heap leach pad. I doubt that leaching was an efficient way of recovering gold and silver from this ore, and we used to bemoan the placing of all this great specimen material out to leach. Not long after my first introduction to the area, which was probably in about 1986 or a little later, someone—no, I really can't won't say who—came and scraped the leach pad, removing all the rock in order to recover and melt the gold and electrum down for a wedding ring (at least that's the story I've heard). I visited the area most recently on the last day of the last millennium (depending on when we say the millenium started). I camped on one of the drill roads after wandering around the roads, trenches, and prospects. I didn't find much. If you ever happen to stop by the area, remember that you're probably on patented (private) ground, at least up near the original mine site, although I don't remember seeing any signs.
The Death Valley National Park boundary on the Titus Canyon is marked by signs, a fence, and a cattle guard.
Here's where we'll stop our journey today, right at the eastern boundary of Death Valley National Park (as an oldtimer, I keep wanting to call it a National Monument).
