The northern section of Highway 8A

Signs at the turn-off from westbound 140 to SRs 8A and 34A

Well, I finally did it! I traveled the northern section of Nevada S.R. 8A, which runs from the NV-CA stateline east of Cedarville, CA, to Nevada S.R. 140, the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway. I posted earlier about the west end of northern 8A here, here, and here. The northeast end of northern 8A was covered briefly in this post, which is part of a series about Highway 140. The traverse described in this post was part of a larger loop trip from northern Nevada to northern California, the westbound portion of which is shown in this map (also embedded at the bottom).

Take the left fork to stay on 8A, or the right fork for 34A.

Looking southeast across Echo Creek at Gooch Table.

Volcanic tableland in the foreground. The Pine Forest Range is on the right; the Pueblo Mountains near Denio are on the left.

The sky was overcast for much of the trip, so the photos I got were not as good as they might have been on a bright summer day. Wildflowers were out—not a superbloom but quite persistent and with numerous species—and I saw three pronghorn in the west-central part of the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge.

One pronghorn barely visible. The south end of Gooch Table is to the left; the hills beyond the pronghorn are northern slopes off Fish Creek Mountain.

As the northern slopes of Fish Creek Mountain came into view, the area started looking familiar, and I wondered if I'd bushwhacked through the mountain mahogany on Fish Creek Mountain during a long-ago deer-hunting adventure. Also, I was now coming into the area where the Stolpas got in trouble in the winter of  '92-93. Beyond the pronghorn in the photo above, more or less just beyond the area between that dark volcanic flow and the mountain-mahogany-covered hills, the land slopes east into the upper drainage of Hell Creek, where Jim and Jennifer took refuge in a small cave approximately two miles east of Blowout Mountain. Hell Creek drains into Virgin Creek, eventually into the area of the Virgin Valley opal mines, where they might have found people, had they been able to continue their long trek through the snow. Instead, Jim walked 40 miles or so to Vya, where he luckily found someone at or near the road maintenance station.

Two pronghorn.

The road, 8A, is wide and graveled, quite smooth over most of its length, though it was decidedly dusty. At the north end, the gravel included oversize rocks that make for a rough ride in places. I had the AC on high and recirculate throughout the dirt portion of my trip (from NV 140  to CA 299) to keep the cabin pressurized; otherwise I was breathing in a lot of dust. Every time I'd stop, the dust would move over me from the rear, and I'd have to wait to take photos. The dust, in the mostly still air, was drafting along with the Jeep in lieu of any wind blowing it to one side or the other. By the way, it's always good to check your air filter after a trip through such volumes of dust, or even during if the silt is particularly nasty.

Mesa at the south end of Fish Creek Table.

And then, having passed from northwestern Humboldt County to northern Washoe County, and having also passed out of the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, I finally turned onto a side road for lunch. Lunch was accompanied by a short wildflower walkabout.

Moving on from lunch, I came to the fast, western section of road approaching Vya. Finally, the sun came out.

Looking west toward Vya: The playas of Middle & West Lakes are in the center, with Massacre Lake behind the hill on the right. The dark knob on the left is Painted Point.

The 8A portion of the larger trip, from its junction at the north end with Nevada S.R. 140 to the NV-CA stateline where the road becomes CA 299, took about two and a half hours, including several brief photo stops and a 20-minute lunch stop. Google has one traveling that route (63 miles) at an average speed of 18 mph, whereas my average speed including more than 20 minutes of down time, was 25 mph. Before leaving, I had calculated that Google was giving me a rate of 17 mph just for the 140 to Vya section, but apparently they think the entire 8A section is a drag. In winter, of course, one might not be able to traverse the road at all, what with all that volcanic-derived silt turning to sticky, slippery mud, or the plateau country becoming buried or drifted during any serious snowstorm.

Wildflowers near the junction of 8A and 34 south of Vya.

As mentioned earlier, I've been up in the Sheldon country before, most notably many years ago for black powder deer hunting. We were probably somewhere over in the Fish Creek Mountain – Blowout Mountain area, or perhaps a bit to the south down near Mahogany Mountain.

More about 8A at LFD:

Highway 8A

Highways 8, 8A, and 8B

all posts tagged 8A

Note: a few photos shown on the map didn't make it to this post.

New Song Category: Gold or Mining Song | Seminole Wind

John Anderson: Seminole Wind (lyrics)

Album: Seminole Wind, 1992

I'm claiming a new song category: Gold Songs. And kind of like the Road Song category—songs that have to mention roads, streets, etcetera—gold songs are those that mention gold, gold mining, and possibly just mining in general. As a new category, at least on the blog, the definition has not yet been set in stone, so to speak. Another example of a "gold song" would be Heart of Gold by Neil Young.

This particular gold song, Seminole Wind, specifically mentions "days of old" and men digging for gold and silver, after which they "leave the empty holes," i.e. mine shafts, glory holes, or open pits. The song particularly emphasizes a couple negative aspects of gold and mining, though it really focuses on a hope that the Seminole Wind, and possibly the ghost of Osceola, will come and blow currently existing things to shit. (At least that's my interpretation.)

And so, when you happen to be gathering in places where the wind can blow ferociously—for example in Florida, in tornado country and the Midwest in general, in the Mojave Desert, and even in Nevada—watch out.

Northumberland via old Highway 8A

Before I get very far into this blog post, I have to say that the Blogger interface, with its recent "upgrade," now sucks due to sudden changes in the way the HTML works. First off, the code for each photo is different than it used to be, such that I have to go back to older posts to duplicate spacing at the top, bottom, and left margins. I mean, I guess if I was 100% prolific with HTML, I wouldn't have to do that, but every time they’ve done one of their upgrades, I’ve had to modify the way I enlarge the photos to the right size, and have to recreate or copy the HTML that controls the way my photos display—and quite frankly I do give a damn!

Back to our trip. As I mentioned earlier, it was hot, so I didn't stop very often on my trip down old Highway 8A (now S.R. 305) from Battle Mountain to Highway 50 near Austin, en route to the Northumberland caldera. I did, however, make a point to stop at an old stone house along the Reese River—possibly the original Walters Ranch, though the USGS map shows the ranch down in the green valley closer to the river.

The old place is holding together fairly well, though it looked a little more rundown than the last time I stopped.

A closer view of the entry area, with quite a bit of carved graffiti.

An old rusty stove sits in the ruins of the old stone house, below the caved-in roof and amidst the partly discombobulated walls (stove = dark patch in lower right of photo).

The roof has slumped more than the last time I stopped, which might have been as long ago as 2012. The meadow beyond—the valley of the Reese River between the Ravenswood mountain range on the west and low hills that lie more or less between the Shoshone and Toiyabe Ranges on the east—is often quite green; here it's looking a tad dried out.

At 12:29 pm, toward the end of my little stop, it was 96°F.

A little farther south I drove past the location where FMOH and I canoed meanders of the Reese River back in 2006. This time, the meanders were choked with dark green sedge and the river was too narrow for a canoe. 

My next stop was Austin, for gas. I prefer to be fully fueled when traveling the back roads of Nevada. After fueling up, it was up and over Austin Summit on Highway 50, then up to Bob Scott Summit, where I stopped briefly for a pit stop and to consider Bob Scott as a campsite. But no, I wanted to keep going. Scattered clouds hovered overhead, and a light sprinkle hit the windshield. At 1:20 pm the temp was 84°F.

Beyond Bob Scott, it was downhill to the turn off on old 8A (now S.R. 376) into Big Smoky Valley. I thought about the old camp on Bowman Creek as a possible camping location, but blew that off. I was shortly at the turnoff to Northumberland Canyon.

In this photo, taken just past the turnoff from pavement, Northumberland Canyon is almost 12 miles across Big Smoky Valley as the crow flies. The mountain range that we're looking at, on the east side of the valley, is the Toquima Range; the singular mountain to the right is Mount Jefferson, third most prominent peak in Nevada. I've been to about 11,400 ft near the North Summit. The South Summit reaches 11,941 ft.

I arrived at the western mouth to West Northumberland Canyon at about 2:30 pm and pulled off on a side road where I had a relatively elevated view of Big Smoky Valley and the Toiyabe Range beyond. A low area in the mountain range (just left of center in the photo above) marks the drainage basin of Kingston Creek. The tiny town of Kingston sits on Kingston Creek, right at the range front. Bunker Hill, the rounded peak right of the low spot, reaches 11,473 feet in elevation.

* * * * *

2:45pm: It's now 92°F. I just walked a short ways up the dirt road behind the Jeep, thinking I'd check the road to the range front, but I gave that up for the heat. Instead, I'm sitting next to the Jeep in a lawn chair, enjoying the view. A few clouds overhead look threatening—possible T-storms. I won't cross the flash-flood prone Northumberland Canyon dry wash until...well, hopefully the clouds will dissipate. The crossing right now would be perfectly fine, but if the canyon floods, I'd be stranded on the other side. A long time ago, there was a road across Big Smoky Valley going back to 8A north of Kingston, providing a possible escape route if stranded; I have no idea if that road exists anymore.

There was a huge wipe out of a flash flood in West and East Northumberland Canyons back in 1979. Heavy barite ore from the small mine on the west side of Northumberland Pass was washed down canyon, as was a USFS truck. Fortunately no one was inside the truck.

Back in 1978, in the reddish hills across the dry wash of West Northumberland Canyon (behind the Jeep in the photo above, or somewhere in the low part of the reddish hills in the photo below) I left a standard Estwing rock hammer leaned against an outcrop of tuff as scale for a photo. I've looked for the hammer a couple times, both before and after the mega flash flood of 1979. I suppose it's part of the drainage, downstream somewhere. But who knows? Maybe it's still there, leaning against the outcrop.

The reddish brown tuff of Hoodoo Canyon, 31.4 Ma, overlies whitish volcanic and volcaniclastic rocks that include Ts6, an air-fall tuff related to the tuff of Hoodoo Canyon, and Ts5, 4, and 3—and possibly Ts2 and 1—which are all intracaldera sediments deposited after the partial collapse of the ~32 Ma Northumberland caldera and before deposition of Ts6.

2:53 pm: I've frequented this valley, these parts, since before 1978. In fact, the first time I camped in the area was up on Pete's Summit in 1976, after seeing the Ordovician graptolites in the Vinini Formation while on a grad school field trip. It's my country, I feel, and if I had a house up here on this pediment, I'd sit outside and stare at the basin, the way I did back in 1979-81 when the company put me up in a small cabin above Kingston. There's usually no no one around for miles, for at least ten to fifteen miles. The view is awesome.

It's 4:27 pm now, and I've crossed the wash and moved to the site we used to call the Hot Spot, so named for it's anomalous gamma radiation and U3O8 minerals. From the camp I've chosen, I can look northwest toward Kingston Canyon, east into Hoodoo Canyon, and south toward Northumberland Canyon. The wind is coming in from the northwest, and it's 91° F in my little camp. It's five hours to sunset according to the hand method, though at five hours away, the method is grossly inaccurate.

4:51 pm: I'm cracking an All Day IPA. Until the sun is lower, I won't set up camp more than I have already, which is only to remove the ice boxes, the water cooler, and folding chair. I'm somewhat low on ice, and the beer isn't the coldest beer in the world, but it's refreshing. And now the sun has come out from behind those formerly threatening clouds, so I've moved into the shade of the Jeep. A tree would be nice!

* * * * *

As the sun got lower, I drank my cool beers and had a minimalist dinner of chips and dip. The sun finally went behind the clouds hovering over the Toiyabe Range. I watched the sunset colors change, took many photos, marveled at the yellow-orange crepuscular rays, took more photos, and basked in the quietude of the area.

Virga and a cliff of Northumberland Tuff glow reddish orange.

I had another beer or two and took more photos. At some point, the sun went down, but with the Toiyabes in the way and no connection for my cell phone, I could only estimate the time of actual sunset, guessing it to be about 8:05 pm. According to SunCalc, the sun set at 8:10 pm at my campsite. The hand method referenced earlier gave a time of about 9:25 pm—off by almost an hour and a half! (It's more accurate within one to three hours of sunset, especially when there aren't any mountain ranges looming above the true horizon.)

By 8:43 pm, I had my headlamp on, using the red light setting. It was way warm for sleeping, but I didn't check the temperature by turning on the Jeep. Overall, it felt strange to be camped there in the middle of nowhere during the middle of a summer heat wave. And for some reason, I felt creeped out by a long ago memory of a lone mountain lion in the Toquimas, so I didn't want to sleep outside the Jeep, making for a night that was hotter than necessary. Eventually, I slept, albeit restlessly.

Well, it's been so long...

It's been a long time—almost a year—since my last real post, the actual last post being a road song with brief blurb. And even though it's been a year, I haven't really started what would be the last in a series of posts reporting on a trip from Winnemucca to northeastern California, with geology and other points of interest along the route. It's been hard getting to that last post and to a few side posts along the route that would be possible if I would just maintain a bit of focus. And the stumbling block is basically that I'm not traveling that way anymore, at least not routinely: I don't live at that end of the road. Yeah, "the lake" is a thing of the past (which is really sad, especially given the exceptional heat that the summer of 2020 has brought to the northern Nevada area where I currently live).

Anyway, that's a roundabout way of getting around to saying...it's been a long time since I visited the Northumberland caldera in central Nevada. The current isolation of living by myself, social distancing to the extent of hardly seeing anyone who doesn't happen to be in line behind me at the supermarket, and WFH—which I've been able to do so far for exactly two months since leaving "the field" of northeastern Nevada—was starting to drive me nuts, as it does periodically, and I wanted to get away.

Unfortunately, it's been very hot here in northern Nevada (and elsewhere in Nevada, and in many other parts of the west), so though I contemplated going on a brief camping trip, it seemed too hot for that (did I mention the heat?), and the upper campground at Wheeler Peak is closed for renovations (I consider the lower camps to be both too hot and too crowded). So, with the highest, coolest camp in Nevada out of the question, I opted for a central Nevada area that I've been familiar with since 1978: the Northumberland caldera.

Yeah I thought, maybe I'll camp in the highlands, up in the piñon-juniper, but I was unsure of any specific places up there so was sure I'd opt for the more familiar lowlands. Eventually, after much dithering accompanied by equally much grousing about the heat and why it's not a great time to go camping, all the while and nevertheless preparing, then reverting to no it's too hot, then more prepping, then etcetera, off I went.

The trip was a reprise of many, and because of the heat (the highs were around 100°F) I made few stops on my way out to an old drill site atop a location in the northern part of the caldera that we at NEC (Northern Exploration Company) called "The Hot Spot."

The Hot Spot (photo above) is a fairly small mound-like outcrop of welded ash-flow tuff (tuff of Hoodoo Canyon) mineralized with carnotite replacing feldspar sites. At least I think it's carnotite. Maybe it's autunite. That mineralogic tidbit is somewhat blurred by time. I didn't break a single rock out there this time, so didn't check the uranium mineralogy. I did, however, collect a couple nice hand samples of Ts2 and Ts3, formations within the intracaldera sedimentary package.

Anyway, I ended up at the Hot Spot, spent an overly heated night camping in the back of the Jeep, and then I returned via a slightly different route the next day, a partial reprise of trips made in the region as recently as 2012, a time which seems almost as long ago as those first days in 1978.

Road Song: On the Road Again

Canned Heat: On The Road Again (lyrics)
Album: Boogie with Canned Heat, 1968

I haven't updated my road song list for quite sometime, in fact my post list by "road songs" indicates that I added the last new one in August, 2015, more than two years ago!! One The Road Again, not to be confused with the song with the same title by Willie Nelson, is an oldie from the Woodstock days, one I had pretty much forgotten about until MOH reminded me of it last week. In my mind this is old time hippie music to go along with Tupelo Honey (Van Morrison), Sugar Magnolia (Grateful Dead), and Creole Belle (Jesse Colin Young).

Sorry I can't guarantee that music videos I post will remain online. Enjoy while you can! 😊

Tales of the Mojave: A Dry Placer

And now, let us continue with my Tales of the Mojave series. In our last post, we had barely left town—town being Reno, NV, hundreds of miles to the north, and we being Allie and I, two young and fairly junior geologists: I was beginning my fourth full year as an exploration geologist; Allie was beginning her first. Besides the several recon targets I had generated while we were still in Reno, we also had a placer submittal to examine and evaluate.

A Dime a Dozen

Placer claims are a dime a dozen in the Mojave, and they are typically worthless—at least in my limited experience. (Actual placer miners might disagree with my assessment, but I'm using the mindset of large, hard-rock mining and exploration companies.) Unlike lode mining claims, placer claims can be increased in size if an association (group of more than one person) locates the claim: The usual 20 acres per lode claim or individual placer claim can be as large as 160 acres in an association placer when located by 8 or more claimants.[1] Association placers can, in other words, cover an entire quarter section, making it possible to cover a lot of ground with relatively few claims, something that was done widely across the lowlands of the Mojave Desert of California in the 1980s (and elsewhere, like Arizona, and elsewhen, perhaps even right now). Many of the placer submittals we received during the 80s were located not only for gold, but also for platinum, an element that is quite rare in the placer settings of the southwestern deserts.

“A degree of skepticism should also be reserved for ores said to contain uncommon metals or minerals. Because of their rarity, these substances may command a very high price and are therefore extremely attractive to the investor. The platinum-group metals including platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium, are the darlings of the swindler. Considering their high unit-value, even minute amounts of these metals appear to be a reasonably good bet to the innocent investor.”

–from Mining Scams, AZGS

In any case, I’m not sure why we were called upon to appraise these particular placer claims, nor do I remember their exact location or size.[2] I did already know a few things about placer deposits—a little—having looked at a number of placer submittals in the California foothills earlier that year. The Mojave placer, however, was different from those in the Mother Lode region of California, being “a dry placer” or “desert placer,” which means they were not located on or very close to any actively running water. Flash floods in usually dry washes, and sheet runoff across the fans during storms had formed the sand and gravel deposits that might (or might not) contain placer gold, but the nearest naturally running water was several miles to the southeast in the Colorado River. (Water in the nearby Colorado River Aqueduct was nearer by half, but was inaccessible to any would-be placer operators, including us.[3])

The Desert Sun

The desert sun glared through the windshield of the truck as if to threaten us with heat stroke or worse, and heat waves rose inexorably from broad alluvial fans and bajadas, countless meandering dry washes, and endless desert pavement. As we turned onto dirt somewhere between Vidal Junction, CA, and Parker, AZ, I wondered what we were getting ourselves into. It wasn’t just the question of evaluating a dry placer property located miles from running water, but also the larger question: What were we doing in the Mojave in June? We drove down the fan, over rocks and by countless jumping cholla, not knowing for sure where we'd end up, not having to meet with the prospector, as one does so often when checking out a submittal. It didn't take long, really, before we found the spot, nearly lost in low, decapitated hills and erratic dry washes south of the Whipple Mountains, buried under  a millennium’s worth of accumulated sand and dust. Dust covers entire mountain ranges in the western Mojave Desert, and it collects on pool tables in towns up and down the Colorado River in the eastern Mojave. Parker, Arizona, is one of those towns. Hopefully we'll stop in Parker some other time.

We had brought extra water with us in 5-gallon containers, including 1 or 2 basic upright cooler types and several clear, collapsible plastic types. The extra water was, at this point, for evaluation of the claims, not for our own hydration, but the extra containers would serve us well as our expedition unfolded. So far we hadn't noticed anything untoward in the flavor of the water, primarily because we had filled our containers north of the NV-CA line, probably in Reno. Desert water can taste absolutely awful.

As property reviewers, we would not only have to determine whether gold was present, but we would have to make some deliberation as to the feasibility of mining by a fairly sizable company. I could think of three scenarios for processing (mining) any placer deposit we found:[4] 1) haul water into the area from the Colorado River or from Lake Havasu to wet-separate the heavy gold from the lighter quartz and feldspar sand and gravel, 2) haul the gold-bearing sand and gravel to the water, presumably the Colorado River, for wet-separation offsite (no doubt requiring further land acquisition), or 3) dry wash the sand and gravels without water. Dry washing using the oldtimers' dry winnowing method is notoriously inefficient at gold recovery and can be totally worthless if not done with extreme care and diligence.

How we get gold in California: winnowing gold, near Chinese camp.
Original in Harper's Monthly, v. 20, 1860; source: Library of Congress (no known restrictions).

Of course there are more current methods of dry washing available than winnowing, if you happen to have some gold-bearing sands and gravels on your Mojave placer claims. I'd look into the Bedrock Dreams website (UPDATE 15Jun2019: no longer available) which used to show many possibilities and has a lot of info for the up-and-coming small-time gold miner (hard rock and placer).

The Dry Wash

At the dry wash, we camped in trenches dug by the claim holder. In the “cool” of the evening—when temperatures dropped somewhere between 70º and 85ºF by morning—we panned for gold using the precious water we had hauled in. Because the paved roads of Highways 95 and 62 and the desert-river town of Parker were not so far away, we went ahead and used a lot of our water for panning. We didn't have to save most of the water for drinking, which we would have done had we been camping four hours away—over hot, dusty roads—from anywhere of desert significance: any place with water, food, people, and, preferably, gas, spare parts, and tires (the latter preferences ruled out places like Goffs and Essex)

We were lucky, and our pans showed some color: a few, small flecks of gold almost too tiny to see. With repeated tries, we consistently got 2 to 4 colors in each pan. After we used up our extra water, which happened faster than we had envisioned, we took to dry panning. (It doesn't matter how close you are to town; it's ill-advised to use up all your water. You might need it during some unexpected, unplanned-for vehicle mishap or environmental disaster like a clogged fuel filter, a flat, a washed-out road, or a flash flood. See A Few Rules of the Desert.)

At some point, perhaps out of boredom, we gave up on classic dry panning, which looks a lot like regular panning but with tons of dust. One more time we filled the gold pan with the weakly gold-bearing alluvial sand and threw the material expectantly skyward. The evening breeze blew the lightweight fines toward Arizona—where all Mojave sand and dust aspires to reach—and the heavier material fell back toward the pan. We had reinvented dry winnowing! In theory, we should, after several skyward tosses of material, have been left with a few heavies, some black sand, and a few flecks of gold. We weren't, though; maybe our technique was subpar. Regular wet-wash gold panning requires some skill, but if there’s gold in the pan, even an unskilled person will usually find it—although I've seen newbies mistake golden-colored quartz, gold-flecked biotite, and that common mineral pyrite, AKA fool’s gold, for gold. All of these minerals might fool some of the people some of the time, though with practice or a good course in mineralogy, you should not get duped by any of them. Gold is the only mineral that will shine or look bright golden yellow in the shade. Pyrite pales next to gold, and put in the shade it won’t shine—it becomes just another mineral, barely tinted beyond pale brown, nowhere near the bright golden yellow of real gold. (The exact color of gold depends on its fineness and upon which of several other elements, notably Ag, Cu, Fe, Pt, Cd, might be contained within the gold. These factors will affect how bright yellow or golden the gold looks. And then there's chalcopyrite, not as common as pyrite, but often lying somewhere between pyrite and gold in it's yellow-gold sheen. So it is possible to be fooled. But don't be. A Niton™XL3t GOLDD+ xrf analyzer can be a friend.)

Dry panning and air winnowing hadn't done much besides create a lot of dust and two ravenous geologists. So we put the gold pans away and turned our thoughts toward dinner. The sun was fairly low over the Turtle Mountains to the northwest, and my time estimation method indicated we had about 1.5 hours to sunset. What should we eat? We went ahead and established our Mojave Desert, south-of-the-border-style cuisine of tacos or burritos, with avocado and as much hot salsa and jalapeño as we could stand. This type of food is not too heavy for the heat, and (I’ll swear to this—or ask any desert rat) the spicy burning of the peppers created a cooling effect, something we would really need as our time in the desert progressed. Besides, there’s enough vitamin C in the peppers to fight scurvy, a credible desert plague: Rapid melting of the ice will spoil many vegetables and a few fruits over the course of our stay.

Yeah, we had just arrived in the desert and were still greenhorns, not quite able to call ourselves Mojave Desert rats. Not yet.

A little fooling around with SunCalc produced this reproduction of sunrise and sunset at our campsite (approximate location and date).

As the sun sank behind the Mopah Peaks, I thought about the next day. We'd be moving upslope into the Whipple Mountains proper. We were done with the placer submittal and, back in Reno, would recommend “No Further Work.” Although we didn't really know how large the weakly gold-bearing sands are, we suspected that their likely flash-flood origin from upstream copper-gold diggings in the Whipples would make mapping out the gold bars and channels difficult at best.

To be continued...

Notes:

^[1] (Read about basic claim location rules here.)↩

^[2] In later years, when working for Former Mining Company, I rarely took on placer submittals; in fact I actively avoided them, especially after one particular submittal (a classic scam) led to a fabricated conflict between our lode claims and the association placer claims of the submitters.↩

^[3] The Colorado River Aqueduct is a 242-mi (392 km) water conveyance in southern California. The aqueduct diverts water from the Colorado River at Lake Havasu (at Parker Dam north of Parker, AZ) on the California-Arizona border west across the Mojave Desert to the east side of the Santa Ana Mountains. The aqueduct is operated by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) as one of the primary sources of drinking water in southern California.↩

^[4] A note about my usage of "found" and "deposit." We knew there were claims for placer gold. We didn't know for sure if any gold existed on the property or in the area. If there was gold in the dry washes, the claim owner had discovered it, not us. We, however, wouldn't think of any gold on the claims as an economic deposit until it had been tested, which usually involves drilling or—especially in the case of placers—small-scale test mining. It's not considered accurate to call a mineral occurrence a deposit until it meets economic parameters and passes mining feasibility studies. It is therefore correct for me to assert that the claim owner discovered the gold, but Northern Mining Company's representatives (us!) might discover a gold deposit.↩

Tales of the Mojave: A Bit About Northern Exploration Company

I planned to have this descriptive section as part of the last post—the one about being packed and ready to leave town—but this "little bit" grew and grew, and eventually it had to find its own home. I've written lots of little pieces like this; many of these could be hyperlinked from several main posts. This one might most properly go near the beginning of a Tales of the Mojave book.

N.E.C.

Northern Exploration Company (NEC), a famous former international mining and minerals exploration company, had seven exploration offices when I began working there as part of a small horde of young or “junior” geologists in NEC’s Western District. Some of us were temporary summer hands (and many of us, like me started that way); many of us were on year-to-year contracts (me!); and a very few of us ended up with permanent positions in the company. There were three or four permanent geos leading the horde when I began working there; that permanent cadre had expanded to maybe six by the time I left.

When not out in the field, we worked out of one of several office-warehouse complexes scattered here and there in Reno and Sparks.[1] The complexes seemed to have been slapdashed together and often had a few problems; for example, the typical southwest-desert–inspired flat roofs were prone to leak during storms or snow-melt. Our complex—and a nearby complex leased by another, also famous former mining company—was near the Truckee River and so occasionally flooded. The large windows of the office half of our complex faced south across a largely undeveloped area of the Truckee Meadows; these windows caused overheating, especially in winter when the low sun provided unplanned for solar energy. Nonetheless, we had a good setup that included a smallish warehouse in the back with shelves for field supplies, tables for core logging, and rock saws and grinding wheels for cutting and polishing hand samples.

The Western District of NEC was a decidedly renegade district, though at the time renegade attitudes were fairly common within exploration groups based out of Reno.[2] Geologists aren’t ordinarily known for their adherence to rules, and they are especially not known for following pointless and questionable rules sent down from above—an above that was usually either outside the country or east of the Mississippi, the latter being nearly the same thing as a foreign country to those born and bred in The West.

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We can argue nearly forever about where The West begins or ends. The Mississippi River clearly constitutes one viable boundary for defining what is east and what is west. The hundredth meridian has also been used as the boundary between east and west; for example, in 1843, Thomas Farnham said lands between the 100th meridian and the Rockies were “usually called the Great American Desert” (Stegner, 1954). Later, Thomas Durant held a “100th Meridian Excursion” when Union Pacific crews passed the 100th meridian in 1866, a goal set by Congress. A little later, John Wesley Powell, writing for the USGS in 1879, recognized the 100th meridian as a line roughly defining the eastern boundary of his “Arid Region,” an area that generally receives less than 20 inches of rainfall per year and encompasses most of the west (by any definition). I think one could also use the Great Continental Divide as the boundary between east and west: All drainages east of the divide would drain to the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic. All drainages west of the divide would drain to the Pacific.

Google Earth image with yellow line marking part of the 100th meridian. The meridian cuts several states in two and roughly separates a greener area in the east from a notably browner area in the west.

I usually maintain that the true west, “The West” as I capitalized above, begins at the eastern edge of the Front Range of Colorado. Denver is not inside The West by this definition. (Neither is Boulder, for that matter.)

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As mentioned in our main text above, geologists within the exploration offices of the west (however we define west) were often fractious and rebellious, and they were unlikely to listen to anyone from Chicago, say, some muckety-muck who might be sporting a fancy three-piece suit and polished black shoes. (There are numerous stories revolving around entertaining such VIPs.) Denver’s offices were often a little spiffier than those in Reno, perhaps having been influenced somewhat by the fancier petroleum offices in the area. Also, some Denver offices acted as headquarters for the minerals explorations groups of larger companies, and some *were* the headquarters for smaller companies. Consequently, geologists who had the misfortune to be based in Denver often ended up being a little more stilted, a little less rebellious, a little more formal: they were ever-so-noticeably more well-behaved when it came down to orders from above, and they were a little more likely to look at you askance if you decided that a rock-throwing contest was in order before the sampling program began in earnest. (A few were definite leaders as far as renegade actions go—here I’m particularly thinking of some unnamed few during my later years at Former Mining Company. Most, though—well, many—tried hard to keep up.)

The Kmart of Exploration

Our Hughes 500-D in 1978.

The Western District of NEC came to be known, at least to a select few, as “The Kmart of Exploration.” This appellation had been assigned to NEC by a summer hire[3] —Dan, the guy with the Frisbee dog, a black and white Aussie of one variety or another—during the uranium summer of 1979. He said he came up with the epithet after being involved in procuring supplies and provisions for the field largely at Kmart. I thought the nickname—seemingly indicating that the company was cheap—was overstated; after all, each uranium camp[4] had a trailer with space for a full kitchen; an office with drafting area, map storage cabinet, and beaucoup supplies; a camp cook; canvas tents with room for two field hands in each tent; a couple of 1978 4WD pickup trucks, brand new during the uranium summer of 1978; and a Hughes 500-D helicopter equipped with radiometric instruments capable of detecting radiation and breaking it down into the three major source elements, potassium (K), thorium (Th), and uranium (U). I thought our camps and equipment were pretty plush, especially when compared to the archaeological camps my husband frequented.

Much to the head honcho's dismay, "Kmart of Exploration" stuck. Perhaps it was partly our field schedule that made the name stick. We worked eleven and three, drive-on-your-own-time. That schedule meant eleven days in the field, three days off, with the driving time between home and field (and vice versa) being on our own time, not on paid-for company time. Perhaps the name stuck because we were encouraged, if not required, to camp out rather than stay in motels.

Camping supposedly saved gas, time, and money because we didn’t have to drive in to town every morning and evening and didn’t have to spend money on motel rooms. We also bought groceries instead of eating in restaurants, resulting in a lowered food expense. So we typically lived outdoors—in the dirt and weather of whatever area we were working in—for two to four nights; then we were into town for one night to get a shower, to sleep in a cool, air-conditioned motel room, to gas up, to stock up on fresh food, and—most importantly in the Mojave—to stock up on water and ice. Then, back into camp mode we went. I thought there were some flaws to the party line about camping, although I never did an actual cost-benefit analysis. For one thing, those of us who didn't have a permanent camp located somewhere near running water in the higher and cooler reaches of eastern Nevada (a certain lucky few that I was rarely part of) spent a certain amount of time setting up camp every evening. After getting our new camp in order, we made dinner and cleaned up. Then, nighty-night. After waking up in the morning, we tore everything down and repacked the back of the truck. With all the unpacking at night and repacking in the morning, we often ended up rearranging boxes of sample bags twice a day. Because we prepped our own camp and food daily, we were essentially working twelve to fourteen-hour days, rather than ten, with little time to rest or recoup in the evening before falling asleep (on cots or on the ground). Ten-hour field days were de rigueur at NEC. That meant we'd quit camp at 7:00 am, say, with breakfast and camp tear-down already complete, then work in the field until 5:00 pm. Then we'd finally get on to camp setup and dinner making after that. When someone else was cooking your meals and when there was running water available for cooling off and even showers, as in the uranium and moly camps, the hours were okay—long, but feasible.

In the Mojave, they were hell.

To be continued...

Notes:

^[1] These complexes were often called "geo-ghettos" back then—although that term would probably not be politically correct now—often because they weren't built all that well in some respects, and also because they seemed to house a lot of geological groups.↩

^[2] We cultivated—or were known for—a semi-outlaw attitude and everyday defiance that was deliberately exacerbated by the temperament of the head honcho in Reno.↩

^[3] We didn’t call our summer employees “temps” until a good number of us moved to Forminco, where "temp" was already in use.↩

^[4] For more about the uranium camps, see this series about the Caliente camp of the first uranium summer (that's what we called them: the first uranium summer, and the second uranium summer).↩

A Reference

Stegner, W.E., 1954, Beyond the hundredth meridian: John Wesley Powell and the second opening of the west: Penquin Books, 496 p., 1992 reprint. Quote from p. 215-216 of 1992 reprint.

Tales of the Mojave: We're Almost Ready to Go

The Road South:

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"

-Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965

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.

To be continued...

Notes:

^[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.↩

Repost: Here's to You, Geological Heroes

My DSL lines and WiFi, provided by Frontier (or not provided, as the case may be), are currently quite lousy with 50%-plus packet loss. For some reason, Google pages and products, including this blog, work at least slowly and sporadically, as does the NWS weather site. So I can find out how many calories I'm eating (or drinking) while checking out the latest atmospheric river that has most likely been one of the culprits in decimating my internet connection. I can also do a little research by asking Google questions and submitting search terms. If the answers show up in the blurb accompanying the resulting list of search results, then I'm good; if not, I'm stuck with a list of websites that won't open. Consequently, I can't quite finish the current post I'm working on: It needs a little more research. So I'm reposting a post from 2010: a submittal to the now defunct Accretionary Wedge blog carnival. Here it is.

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The Accretionary Wedge is coming up soon, so my thoughts are naturally turning to Geological Heroes, the topic of this month's Wedge, hosted at Mountain Beltway by Callan Bentley. Callan says,

I invite all participants (geobloggers and geoblog readers alike) to contribute stories of their heroes. It’s time to pay tribute to the extraordinary individuals who helped make your life, your science, and your planet better than they would otherwise have been.

As far as geologic heroes go, I was first thinking that maybe I don't really have any (or maybe I just don't have many personal ones that I feel I can write about on the blog). I thought, therefore, that I'd list two geologists who are heroes to me, although they aren't personal heroes:

• Tanya Atwater - a leading plate tectonicist, geophysicist, geologist, and oceanographer. She is a hero to me by way of being a leading and famous woman in my field (or a related field), one who "is especially well known for her works on the plate tectonic history of western North America, in general, and of the San Andreas fault system, in particular...."
  
  I've not yet had the good fortune to meet her, but long ago (and not very far away) I named a dog belonging to my previous partner and me after her. Upon hearing of this dubious honor from an acquaintance of ours, Tanya A. reportedly said, "Ruff ruff," while making a motion like scratching her ear with a paw.

• Tom Dibblee - a legendary field-mapping man, who mapped "565 quadrangle maps covering over 40,000 square miles, some fourth of the State of California." I first learned of his mapping while working in the Mojave, where his maps cover nearly every square inch of ground and provide the basics and details for every geological map that has come after him. He is known in that region for not having to use a Brunton to take strikes and dips (except when beds were dipping at shallow angles), because his sense of orientation and angle estimation were excellent, such that he was always within a couple degrees. He started mapping when in high school, and never stopped, completing a mapping career of almost 80 years only when he passed away in 2004.

Beyond these two, I was sitting out on the rig one day, and while thinking that I'd just leave this post at a two-person list I realized that the topic "Heroes" was making me think of Waylon and Willie, and I started singing "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys."

Don't let 'em pick guitars and drive them old trucks...

[technically a road song because it mentions trucks] and then that somehow led me into "All My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" followed by "Waylon, Willie, and Me."

Now, not all the lyrics of these three songs are applicable to whatever particular feeling they engendered in me on that recent field day, nor are all of the lyrics particularly applicable to the topic of geological heroes — except that:

When I start thinking about the real geologist heroes I've known over the years — whether male or female — they are rather much like cowboys, or like outlaws: out in the field all day, bouncing around in pickup trucks old and new, doing their own thing, making it on mottos such as "it's easier to get forgiveness than permission" or "it's all changed now," running their own programs, districts, and companies, shooting cans, rolling boulders, and participating in other shenanigans that shall go unmentioned here, some of which have involved various forms of (legal in Nevada) explosives.

These more personal heroes of mine include my thesis advisor(s), my major professor, the professor I T.A.'d for, several former professors and T.A.'s, many geologists from both Northern Exploration Company and Former Mining Company and elsewhere, the two Larry's, the two Nancy's (you *know* who you are), most of my former field assistants — one has or is now running her own company, one patented her Hg-gas sniffing method and has run her own lab, one is now running her own exploration group at a major mine, and some have gone on to other things but are nevertheless heroes to me for making it in the "man's field" of exploration and mining geology.

My heroes, over the years and decades, have also included several FOP/Quat people: JODavis, Bud Burke, Marith Reheis, and anyone who was present for the flying Vee in the middle of the Black Rock Desert in 1987 or who made it to the 1991 FOP down in Fish Lake Valley, Nevada.

And then there are some true outlaws or aspiring, wanna-be outlaws — hmm... should these names go unmentioned? (You know who you are: R, BS, JS, PG, S+D, et al.)

Really, when it comes right down to it, there are too many geological heroes to list, refer to, or name, including all the consultants and independents attending the hospitality suites and receptions at Northwest every year, going back to the wild S+D bashes in Spokane some thirty-plus years ago.
And so, here's to you (all of you)...

...from a copy of a print from an original slide taken here at a now burned-down hot spring cabin, by JODavis in the fall of 1981, photo credits to JODavis and LLLackey, photo ©2010 Looking for Detachment, all rights reserved, poem written by SH and CR.

The Spencer Hot Springs cabin, with roomy concrete bathtub and piped in hot water, was burned down later that year or the next, reportedly by the same individuals who, in their over-zealous righteousness crossed out in red marker the name "Asshole" (and other cuss words written on the interior of the cabin) — these individuals were apparently disturbed by the existence of such a den of iniquity as a hot spring where people *gasp* sometimes bathed naked. I don't know who these red-marker people were, nor do I really know that they were the arsonists — but that's the way the story goes.

The original from the 1978 album "Waylon and Willie."

April 2010 Accretionary Wedge: Heroes