One Year Ago Today: Some Talus Up Close, a Lake in the Humboldt Sink, and Bonus Fall Colors

It was a fall day, and while driving out to my field site near Winnemucca I stopped for a hike. I got up high enough to see the water in the Humboldt Sink quite clearly (although way off in the distance), and I clambered over piles of talus. The tallish cheatgrass and possibly an ephedra bush are showing their fall colors, though the cheatgrass takes on this straw yellow color by mid June, and keeps showing it until it regenerates itself from seed sometime in the spring.

And here I am, on top of part of the talus, with a great deal of foreshortening going on so the hill seems nearly flat, and the nicely filled but not overflowing Humboldt Sink is in the background. My Jeep can be seen as a vague dot between talus and lake about half way between the center and right of the photo and not far above the vertical center. Water in the desert is always a precious thing, and it's always something worth stopping for.

Somewhat unrelated: I stopped along the Truckee River before making it to that rocky perch above the Humboldt Sink and took a few photos of bright yellow leaves.

Wandering Amongst the Granite Knobs in the Northern Sierra

Granitic knobs in the northern (way northern) Sierra.

It's been a busy summer, such that I really haven't had time to get much blogging done—and I had so many good posts planned! But it's been really difficult for me to do much of anything while working essentially twelve to fourteen hour days (depending), and on days off I've been working around the house, gardening, and attending to other things besides writing.

Nevertheless, MOH and I have found time to get out and about a couple times; these photos were all taken on a particular jaunt of ours back in early July. While traversing from west to east across the Great Basin Divide, we unexpectedly drove by some lovely exposures of granite—well, probably it's technically granodiorite.

It was just barely past spring at our elevation of 5500 feet.

Pinemat (Ceanothus prostratus) takes over a stump.

From our parking area beneath tall pines next to a spring, we wandered up to the the closest knobs.

The view southward from our "Granite Hill."

From this perspective, it's easy to get a feeling for the magnitude of several wildfires that have burned through this area in fairly recent years. At least two, maybe three, fires were evidenced by different tree heights.

Upward we climb.

I think exposures of granite and other granitic rock are fascinating, and it's hard not to stop and stay all day, even when the day is a scorcher.

A wildflower has taken hold along a fracture or joint.

This bouldery countenance reminds me of the tufa formation "Old Woman with Basket," also known as Stone Mother, on the east shore of Pyramid Lake.

Looking off to the north, as the last photo does, it's easy to see at least two plantings of Ponderosa Pine, which followed two or more forest fires. As the trees grow, forest managers come along and thin the trees.

This tree was five to nine years old when cut, depending on how one should count the rings.

Here are a few of the great mafic inclusions we saw while wandering around.

Some vertical joints within the granite.

A cobble got stuck in one of the vertical joints.

A swarm of inclusions!

Update from the Lake: It's Been a Green Spring

It all started with the squirrel, who was out in the side yard chomping on some seed we'd thrown out, or maybe it was a peanut. Somehow it inspired me to grab my camera and wander through the yard.

I walked around toward the front, and grabbed this shot of our wild patch of clover, growing along the fence protecting the Carolina allspice.

The clover isn't anything we actually planted, but it's kind of pretty.

An iris.

When I got around to the backyard, I made sure to get a photo of the ripest lemon on our small, two-year-old (to us) lemon tree. The tree arrived with green lemons, and it's only this year that it's really started growing.

Iris budding out near "the island."

I'm not really sure which of our fruit trees this is, but I'm thinking it's the plum. If not, it's the cherry, the peach, the almond, or the apple.

We planted peas randomly throughout last year's garden area, mostly to fix some nitrogen, but we'll also harvest seeds for eating and reseeding.

Last but not least, the raspberries were starting to go to town.

All pictures were taken in early June.

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.↩

From the Road: A Joshua Tree Lunch Stop with Volcanic Rocks

It wasn't long after I stopped to make coffee on the Turtle Mountains road, that it was time for lunch.

(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).

From the Road: Ocotillo, Coffee,Palo Verde, and The Turtle Mountains

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).

Titus Canyon: We Make Our Way Toward Klare Spring

We're making our way down Titus Canyon toward Klare Spring, an obligatory petroglyph stop about two miles below Leadfield. On this rather short leg of our journey, we'll be seeing a hodgepodge of photos from two trips taken in two separate years, all shot within a short distance of each other not far upstream from the spring. The canyon distance of the views that our photos will show, upstream to downstream, will be about two miles (3.2 km).

Our first photo set looks back to the east. You do remember that last time, before we stopped for our little hike scramble, we had looked to the south and had seen what I think is the main strand of the Titus Canyon fault zone. We can see this same fault exposure from our current stopping point just north of a shadowy cliff. The mile-distant fault is placing Bonanza King Formation dolomite (Єb) of the upper plate over Carrara Formation (Єc) limestone and a bit of Zabriskie Quartzite of the lower plate (we can't see the Zabriskie from this angle). I’ve sketched the main strand of the Titus Canyon fault zone (TCFZ) in hachured dark blue.

As explained previously, that fault appears to wrap around to become what I've drawn in as the same fault strand, high on the cliffs in the upper right. I've postulated a lower strand, drawn in hachured bright blue. The exact position of the proposed fault is questionable, possibly higher on the hill than I've shown it, as is the formation contained within in the resulting "middle plate," which I've shown as Bonanza King. In this first photo, taken in late February of this year, things look pretty brown, because spring has just barely arrived.

The cliffs on the side of the road are captivating in that they look iron stained and possibly brecciated. I think they make a great backdrop to a photo that's very similar to the first one, but which was taken on a green spring day in early May, 2009. The creosote was in bloom, and so were some cacti and other wildflowers.

I'm not sure what rock formation is exposed in this almost-always shadowed cliff. It might be Carrara, as labeled, or it might be Bonanza King.

MOH and I wandered around this area quite a bit, checking out the wildflowers.

Here we are, a little to the north of the last spot, along an old wash channel paralleling the road, still looking to the east. 

The same photo with geologic labeling by moi.
(H/t to Dana Hunter for the "moi.")

What are we seeing here? Well, we're looking at the main strand of the TCFZ on the cliff in the distance to the east, as before, but here I've postulated an offsetting high-angle normal fault, down-to-the-north, and drawn it in with lighter blue. As for the cliffy areas north and south of the wash and road (left and right, respectively), I'm unsure of the exact location of the Titus Canyon fault. On the left, there is definite Єc in the lower cliffs, some unknown in a slope and cliffy area above that (labeled Єc?), and definite Єb near the top of the cliff (unlabeled! who let that slip by?).

Looking back to the first photo set, there’s a huge alluvial fan coming off the higher cliffs south of the road. On our most recent trip through the canyon in early 2016, I became fascinated by the massive alluvial fans within this part of the Grapevine Mountains. It looked like one hell of a lot of erosion to me—and probably all taking place fairly rapidly and fairly recently when the Grapevine Mountains were uplifted radically in the late late Cenozoic—and so I took a number of photos of fans, some that looked active, like this one, and others that looked older.

A steep side canyon area south of the road has filled with coarse alluvial debris, forming an alluvial fan complex.

A closer view of part of the alluvial fan.

A Google Earth image of the fan complex. North is not up! The magenta line on the right is the main strand of the TCFZ (extrapolated); the magenta line on the left is possibly the lower strand in this area.

Then I looked off to the northwest and took this photo after spotting the reddish alluvial fan remnant seemingly stranded high on the active fan slopes:

A reddish color in alluvium is often indicative of an older age. Rocks above the fan are all Bonanza King Formation.

I have a hard time comprehending the amount of uplift required, possibly in pulses, to create the alluvial record that can be seen within and on the edge of the mountains in the Death Valley area.

Google Earth image of our second fan complex; magenta lines are related to my idea(s) of the TCFZ.

A little bit of alluvial air-photo mapping.

The current wash (above) is obvious. What I've labeled as 'terrace 1' can be seen in the last photo as the alluvium in front of the alluvial ledge in the lower part of the photo, the alluvium I was standing on when I took that photo. Beyond that, we have the larger fan complex, including the reddish fan in the photo, which I've labeled. I couldn’t decide where to mark the lower boundaries of that reddish fan. Anyone up for some mapping?

I then turned to the west, zooming in to see what I thought might be some reddish talus, possibly small alluvial fans, high on the slope.

Reddish talus high on the slope below dark gray and reddish outcrops of the Bonanza King Formation.

It turns out that this photo shows two mapped strands of the TCFZ, although the exact location of both is somewhat in question.

Here is my best guess of the geology, taken from Niemi (2012) and Google Earth air-photo interpretation.

The mapped upper strand of the TCFZ has placed younger Bonanza King Formation rocks (Єb) over older Carrara Formation (Єc), with the Єc forming what is here a middle plate, while the mapped lower strand has placed the Carrara over the even older Wood Canyon Formation (ZЄw).

Meanwhile, back on the lower slopes:

Bloomin’ cactus!

The barrels are leaning strongly to the south. They grow faster on the shady side, causing them to lean over, giving them the nickname “compass cactus.”

These leafy green plants were everywhere.

Barrel cactus, yellow wildflowers, and ephedra (the olive green plant behind the barrel clump).

Here’s another view of the same plants, with dolomite of the Bonanza King Formation as a backdrop. The ledge on the left might be the location of the upper strand of the TCFZ, just above Klare Spring.

And that puts us in a good position to move on to Klare Spring.

Location map

Related Posts:
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Tan Mountain
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Up and over White Pass
The Approach to Titus Canyon: To Red Pass
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Just Below Red Pass
A Hike at Red Pass, Titus Canyon Road, Death Valley, CA
Titus Canyon Road: A Little History and a Few Maps
Down into Titus Canyon: We Leave Red Pass Behind (Finally!)
Scribbles
Titus Canyon: The Upper Part of Lost Canyon
Leadfield: Scams with a Side of Geology
Leadfield: Views from Old Mine Buildings
Leadfield: Geology...and a Cactus...on the Way Back to the Parking Area
Almost Titus Canyon: Is This a Fold? And... Apparent Dip with Post-it® Notes
Titus Canyon: The TCFZ, the FCFZ, and a few Other Faults
Titus Canyon: Another Look at the Titus Canyon Fault and A Scramble