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.

Highway8A Introduction I

April 16, 2001—Reno, NV
About to leave for Spencer Hot Springs.
Mostly sunny, cool, breezy.

I am a geologist, and these are going to be notes that I write in little journal books I carry around. ...a whole lot of them are going to lack any structure at all, but if you know a geologist, you know that that is the way he expresses things. Notes: there is no continuity in a geologist’s life, not in an active, busy one, anyway.”
—Rick Bass, Oil Notes

When I started this book — which I've variably titled Mojave Exploration or Highway 8A depending on which section I was writing — I wrote longhand on yellow sheets of lined paper, typed stream of consciousness on an old Mac powerbook, jotted shorter notes in spiral-bound journals, kept scribbled references from myriad phone calls on torn bits of paper, and penciled carefully in one or two of the little yellow field books that geologists are known to carry around out in the field. And so I sat, one blustery spring day, getting ready for a trip to the hot springs, while at the same time trying to get started on starting, trying to write some kind of introduction or prelude to a book consisting of scattered pieces. It was my idea at the time that I'd write every now and then, as though mapping in some field area, writing notes that might go with the stories that were already partly written, but which are even now incomplete. And so I began that day with a field book, a book designed to be carried securely in the side pocket of a Filson vest while out in the field — "the field" being that great beyond where we geologists go to do our fieldwork. And so I began....

---

This field book, the one I am writing right in now, is being written from the perspective of my future; it is being written by my future self, my self as an old woman — an old geologist — an old geologist with a long memory. My long memory has mixed the past, present, and future into one package the way some geologic rock formations have been pushed, shoved, and squeezed — even sliced and diced — into stratigraphic or tectonic packages where every resulting contact between individual rock formations involves some kind of geologic activity: deposition, mountain building, erosion, folding, and faulting. Because of my geologic memory — my intricate, enduring memory — most of the things I’m writing about happened long ago when I was young and clambered over the rocks and hills freely and easily: like a mountain lion or coyote, like a desert fox. Now I’m a silver fox with the long memory of an elephant, the memory of an ancient mammoth.

Most geologists have long memories. We have to. It’s not just so we can retain enough brain cells to survive the beer, gin and tonic, and tequila sunrise nights that so often go with being a geologist, though it does help to have enough brain cells to begin with so enough will remain later. The long memories most geologists have are primarily concerned with knowing how to delve into what has been called Deep Time.

Most people think the past is gone — that it is not present, that it is not now. This now, however, becomes past before I can even say “now,” and so maybe there is no present. Whatever. What I know to be true, is that the past is not gone, at least not all of it. It’s preserved in the rocks and in the landforms of the earth. And the past will be written in future rocks and landforms that haven’t yet been born. That’s the thing about the past — or maybe that’s the thing about the “now,” or about time — it’s all present, right now, in the present. If you’ve got a long memory like I do, all of time is here now: all the time that was past, all the time that is now, all the time that will be future, and all the time that has been imagined or envisioned as future but has not yet, and maybe never will, come to pass (see Dark Side of the Moon).

Geologists routinely work with the long, well-written, though sometimes buried, obscured, offset, or even truncated memories of the earth. Geologists work with all of geologic time: past, present, and future. For example, because of my particular geologic knowledge and experience, I could write a book called Ore Deposits of the Near and Far Future, the way some geologists write about earthquakes or volcanic eruptions yet to come. Instead, I’m writing these field notes about that long ago past. I’m writing them because I dreamed of doing so one summer day in the early 1980’s while I was driving south on Nevada Highway 8A — south from The Frontier, a place that no longer exists, toward a cabin in Kingston Canyon, where I no longer live — driving on the longest north-south straight stretch of paved Nevada road, on a highway that no longer bears its original number. On that long-ago day I dreamed of this book, and so it has come to be: that long ago past is present now, just as this now was present then.

---

And that's the way I began back then, in the spring of 2001, in a fit of fancy.

Related Posts:
Why Highway 8A
Single Digit Highways
A Bit about License Plates
Highway 8A: The Cutoff from Cedarville to the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway

Related Asides:
A Geologist's Field Book
Deep Time
Dark Side of the Moon
Wedge #15: Ore Deposits of the Future

Dark Side of the Moon

Eclipse

All that you touch and all that you see
all that you taste, all you feel
and all that you love and all that you hate
all you distrust, all you save
and all that you give and all that you deal
and all that you buy, beg, borrow or steal
and all you create and all you destroy
and all that you do and all that you say
and all that you eat and everyone you meet
and all that you slight and everyone you fight
and all that is now and all that is gone
and all that's to come
and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon

Roger Waters quoting Jerry Driscoll [Gerry O'Driscoll according to this source], from an interview [Wayback Machine] at The Most Complete Pink Floyd Page: [Wayback Machine]:

"The final words ['but the sun is eclipsed by the moon'] are Jerry Driscoll's. His original words were, 'There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact it's all dark... and the thing that makes it look alight is the sun.'"

Pink Floyd
Dark Side of the Moon
Composer: Waters
Year, 1973



Cover Art from a now defunct (geocities) Pink Floyd site.

Related Posts:
Why Highway 8A?
Single Digit Highways
A Bit about License Plates

Coming Soon!
Highway8A Introduction I

Links updated 2Mar2018.

11:11 1/11/11 — a time-related quote

Down on the planet...
Kirk: Kirk to Enterprise.

Spock: Spock here.

Kirk: Captain Spock, damage report.

Spock: Admiral, if we go "by the book," like Lieutenant Saavik, hours could seem like days.

Kirk: I read you captain. Let's have it.

Spock: The situation is grave, Admiral. We won't have main power for six "days." Auxiliary power has temporarily failed. Restoration may be possible, in two "days." By the book, Admiral.

Kirk: Meaning you can't even beam us back?

Spock: Not at present.

Kirk: Captain Spock, if you don't hear from us within one hour, your orders are to restore what power you can, take the Enterprise to the nearest star base, and alert Starfleet Command as soon as you're out of jamming range.

Commander Nyota Uhura: Sir, we won't leave you behind!

Kirk: Uhura, if you don't hear from us, there won't be anybody behind. Kirk out.
—Quote at imdb.com

Later, back on the Enterprise...
Kirk: Regulation 46-A: "If transmissions are being monitored during battle..."

Saavik: "...no un-coded messages on an open channel." (to Mr. Spock) You lied.

Mr. Spock: I exaggerated.

Kirk: Hours instead of days. Now, we have minutes instead of hours.
—Quote at TrekCore

—From Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, one of my favorite movies

Deep Time

Deep time, geologic time, and the geologic time scale are intertwined concepts relating to the age of the earth, the long epochs, periods, eras, and eons of earth time, a time that is so long compared to our ordinary, everyday time, or even to historic time, that it took some number of years for it to be recognized. We in the west were formally introduced to geologic time by James Hutton, the father of geology. In Theory of Earth, published in 1788, he said:

For having, in the natural history of this earth, seen a succession of worlds, we may conclude that there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded, that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions. But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.

The Persian polymath, Avicenna, had come to a similar conclusion more than 700 years before Hutton:

Either they [mountains] are the effects of upheavals of the crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, some hard... It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size. [quoted by Toulmin and Goodfield, 1965]

John McPhee took us a little deeper in 1981, when he introduced the phrase "deep time" as a proxy for geologic time in his book Basin and Range. Prior to that, geologic time was the realm of geologists; since then, deep time has become a part of our everyday vocabulary. John McPhee, in essence, gave geologic time to non-geologists.

As a geologist, I've studied geologic time at least since high school, when I took Earth Science as an elective, extra science. I knew of geologic time prior to that, going back possibly into my early or middle childhood, when I became fascinated with rocks, minerals, volcanoes, trilobites, and dinosaurs, and when I probably learned some of the names of the geologic time periods and eras, such as Cretaceous. (Wikipedia shows the ages, epochs, periods, eras, eons, and supereons of the earth better than the geologic time scale linked to earlier; also see the ICS Geologic Time Scale). Did I understand the vast amount of time involved between trilobites and dinosaurs? I don't know.

I do know that thinking in terms of geologic time has become somewhat commonplace for me, and it seems to be primarily a matter of numbers and scale, and something that I visualize. My life fits inside a linear view, which runs from left to right in front of me: my birth being to the left, today being right in front of me, and my imagined latest years, even somewhat beyond likelihood, being to the right. When I think of history going back to the time change from B.C. to A.D., 1 A.D. is on the left, and everything else is relatively squished as it approaches today, which is still right in front of me. So, what about the 2 million years or so of Pleistocene glacial and interglacial intervals? Now, I've placed the beginning of the Pleistocene over to the left, our general time or the last century is right in front of me. At this point, I can't help but look farther left, beyond the beginning of the Pleistocene, where I can easily see the entire Tertiary back to 65 million years ago.

If I think of all of geologic time — the time frame during which the Earth existed, the last 4.6 billion years — things get even more squished on the end towards our current time, and I've often at this point managed to seat myself firmly in the early Paleozoic, Cambrian maybe, about 600 million years ago. The Precambrian is off to the left, and everything else off to the right. Sometimes I look at this sliding geologic time scale from the end of the Paleozoic, toward the Mesozoic, knowing (even though the Paleozoic rocks and fossils didn't know) that dinosaurs and the massive intrusions of the Sierra Nevada will be coming along as geologic time progresses.

And so, viewing all of geologic time, or particular parts of geologic time, requires me to slide my view to the right and left — or to slide time itself — while expanding or contracting the detail of the time frame, depending on what I want to look at. And when I'm reading about a particular time — whether historic, pre-historic, or geologic — the view often shifts until that the particular time is right in front of me, with time after that, including present time, over to the right.

Another thing I find myself doing when trying to view geologic time — and possibly this happens because I've read so many science fiction books set in countless future timelines — is to include future histories and future geologic time frames in my view, way off to the right. I do this when thinking about the future of the Earth, Solar System, and Universe, and also when thinking about things happening on Voyager in the 24th century (Star Trek timeline), or on the planet Path (Ender’s Universe). Often, this future time looks dark, with a lot of scattered stars and star systems. Or, once again, if I'm reading or watching books or movies set in these future timelines, that present is right in front of me, and our current present — their past — is to the left.

Some time ago, I read In Search of Deep Time by Henry Gee. Early in the book, he gets into a description of deep time, based in part on what John McPhee said in Basin and Range:

McPhee meant the term to refer to the immense intervals, measured in millions of years, disccussed as if they were days or weeks in the conversation of geologists: yet in reality, the intervals of geological time are too long to be readily comprehensible to minds used to thinking in terms of days, weeks and years--decades, at most.

He goes on, after showing a standard geological time chart:

But apart from telling you that Deep Time is long, conventional accounts never consider the implications of the scale of Deep Time on the way we think about evolution [I extrapolate, here, to include other geological occurrences and events]. If, as McPhee says, Deep Time implies intervals more or less incomprehensible to humans, we are entitled to ask whether it is valid to tell stories about evolution according to the conventions of narrative or drama. If it is not, then every story we tell in which causes are linked with effects, and ancestors are linked with descendants, becomes questionable: we can no longer use Deep Time as a backdrop for the stories we tell ourselves about evolution, and how and why we came to be who we are.

Once we realize that Deep Time can never support narratives of evolution, we are forced to accept that virtually everything we thought we knew about evolution is wrong. It is wrong because we want to think of the history of life as a story; but that is precisely what we cannot do. This tension--between Deep Time and the everyday scale of time--is the theme of this book. – Gee, In Search of Deep Time, Introduction

I didn't really find or feel much of that tension when reading his book, and was really looking forward to reading something deeper about deep time. The book, instead, is primarily about certain mechanical aspects of evolution (cladistics), which are really beyond me as a hard rocker, but which were nevertheless fascinating. I can't really comment as to their usefulness, but can refer you to this New York Times review of the book. As a geologist, I disagree that geologic time intervals are too immense to be comprehended. Perhaps it's a conceit for me to think so. Perhaps it's as McPhee says:

Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways. ... In geologists' own lives, the least effect of time is that they think in two languages, function on two different scales. – McPhee, Basin and Range

Now, as an aside, I'd like to take deep time in literature farther back than John McPhee, to the "deeps of time" of J.R.R. Tokien.

Quotes from Tolkien on the deeps of time:
Out of the shadows the hobbits peeped, gazing back down the slope: little furtive figures that in the dim light looked like elf-children in the deeps of time peering out of the Wild Wood in wonder at their first Dawn. – The Two Towers, Book III, Chapter 3 [quoted here]

In this elvish sheath dwells the Blade that was Broken and has been made again. Telchar first wrought it in the deeps of time. – The Two Towers, Book III, Chapter 6 [referenced here]

And She that walked in the darkness had heard the Elves cry that cry far back in the deeps of time, and she had not heeded it, and it did not daunt her now. – The Two Towers, Book IV, Chapter 9

As it drew near the great furnaces where, in the deeps of time, it had been shaped and forged, the Ring's power grew, and it became more fell, untamable save by some mighty will. – The Return of the King, Book VI, Chapter 1 [quoted here]

A Few References:
Al-Rawi, M.M., and Al-Hassani, Salim, 2002, The Contribution of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) to the development of Earth Sciences: Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, Publication 4039, 12 p.

Avicenna (Ibn Sina), c 1014-1027, The Book of Healing: editions of the Arabic text were published in Cairo, 1952-83, originally under the supervision of I. Madkour (list of works).

Gee, Henry, 1999, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life: The Free Press, New York, N.Y., 267 p.

Hutton, J., 1788, Theory of the Earth: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. I, Part II, pp.209-304, plates I and II. Hutton's work is available online in several places (Univ Wisconsin, 1788 version with link to 1785 abstract, Project Gutenberg, 1795 version) and also for sale at Amazon.com.

McPhee, John, 1981, Basin and Range: Farrar; Straus & Giroux, New York.

Toulmin, Stephen, and Goodfield, June, 1965, The Discovery of Time. New York: Harper & Row. [Reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977, 1982.]

More Reading:
Mapping Deep Time (deep time, geologic time, and Hutton)
The "Army of Caterpillars" Tracked Down (Hutton and Dutton)

NOTE: You can now, starting today, follow @GeologicTime on Twitter to find out, "What would 4.6 billion years of Earth history look like [when] represented by one year's worth of tweets?" I suspect that @GeologicTime will be quite busy during the latter months of the year! Read a little more about that project here.

Related Post: Links: Deep Time and Time

Why Do I Like Geology

I’ve been asked to say what I like and don't like about my work or my life as a geologist.

--SIDE NOTE: I don’t often call myself a scientist, but I call myself a geologist, which I've heard is supposedly some kind of scientist, though I wonder some days, or maybe I just wonder about some people. Whew!--

These are questions that I’m rarely, if ever, asked in real life. What I’m usually asked is, what do you do as a geologist, because most people—as far as I can tell—don’t have the vaguest idea what a geologist does. When I’m asked that, I say vague things like, I map the geology out there, you know, the rocks (because I’m a rock person). Sometimes I’m asked—by people who have an idea of what a geologist might do, and who know that I work for mining companies—how is it that you find gold or whatever-it-is you’re looking for out there. Well, then I mention mapping to find out what is out there, drilling to delineate and define the ore, and looking for various hints and clues that depend on the commodity and ore-deposit type that I might think is worth looking for (or for which someone has paid me to look, if I haven’t had the chance to decide that for myself). I explain that some things look good because of past associations: certain colors in the rocks, certain types of brecciation, certain minerals, certain structural conditions, and possibly things like quartz veins if one happens to be trying to find a vein-type deposit—but maybe even if one isn’t, because quartz veining can indicate that something is going on in the area, some mineralization processes may have been at work.

And I explain that, really, to understand these things, to discover something undiscovered or to further delineate something already discovered but not yet large enough or good enough for anyone to want to come in and mine, that I or someone will have to sample the rocks, because assays and geochemical analyses need to be performed; these are necessary so I can tell what is really in the rocks and not just end up going on past associations. Past associations can lead you in a right or wrong direction, and that direction may just depend on blind luck. So samples are necessary, geochemistry is required.

And then I explain that I’m often working on a drilling project, whether it’s an early stage drilling project nearly immediately following the mapping and sampling phase or whether it’s an intermediate or end stage drilling program, where a mineral deposit of some kind has already been discovered or even partly drilled out. And that, once again, many samples with assays and geochemistry are required. Because, although a really good geologist can estimate copper grade in some kinds of deposits, gold grade is quite elusive, even in vein deposits where some of the gold might be quite visible.

So, what is my most favorite thing? The problem I have with this question is ultimately my problem with having favorites. I used to be asked to say what my favorite color was. I had to make that up. Because, really, I didn’t have one. I like, and have always liked, a hell of a lot of colors. Some not so much, most quite well. For a while I really liked lavender, and then I decided to have blue as a favorite color, perhaps as a reaction against the ubiquitiously female pink. At some point I decided that I didn’t like green—that was after living on the east coast where all the overgrown vegetation was obscuring my view of the geology. Now, there really aren’t any colors I dislike completely, although there are several that I favor, including magenta, various shades of purple, and some shades of green—among many others.

So again, what is the thing I like best about my work or my life as a geologist? I think primarily I like or even love rocks. I like working with them, I like being around them (they don’t talk too much, for one thing), and I like trying to figure out what they’ve been doing all the many eras, eons, and epochs that they’ve been in existence—depending on their geologic age. I also love the concept of geologic time, now popularly called deep time, and I’ve loved it for a long time (for me, that is—geologically speaking I’ve loved the concept of deep time for barely an instant). The rocks don’t even really have to be consolidated or rock-like, yet, for me to like or love them. Unconsolidated materials—soil, alluvium, gravels, sand—these are all rocks in the making, although many of the unconsolidated deposits won’t be preserved for future geologists to look at, but some of them will. And when I’m working with these unconsolidated materials, deposits, and formations of Anthropocene, Recent, or Pleistocene age—which I have mapped in some detail, and even drilled when needed—I often think about whether these particular deposits will get preserved and someday become rock, as though becoming rock is the primary purpose of being a deposit of any kind. (Yeah, maybe that’s weird, but that’s where deep time meets future time in my mind.)

So, now we’ve established what I like best—and because I like rocks best, and because I'm an exploration geologist looking for minerals, a few things become required, whether I like them or not. These requirements generally include that I travel for work, because one usually runs out of backyard rocks fairly quickly, and because the mineral deposits I'm finding, mapping, sampling, drilling, and delineating aren't usually found in my backyard (somone's backyard, maybe; if they had been found in my backyard, I'd alreay be rich and would just be blogging and traveling for a living).

Traveling, therefore, is a requirement. There are jobs that don’t require quite as much traveling; these are usually at or near mines. Some of these jobs require long commute times, and they usually require long working hours. By long commute, I mean as much as 2 hours in one direction. For compensation, the pay is often good, and sometimes the time off is good. Also, because travel away from home base is often required (except sometimes when working at mines), staying in motels becomes almost second nature. It used to be something I didn’t like, something that for some unknown reason even made me anxious. Now it’s nice to get away, at least for a while, and one reason that's so is that the rooms are almost always clean and not cleaned by me, and they have a greater feeling of space than the little house I currently live in.

And what do I dislike about the life? (Yes, we call it that: the life, like we were in the mafia or something.) That can depend on a particular job, but one thing that can be bothersome is office-type politics. Traveling away from the office, if one happens to have an office, gets one out from under the keen eyes of sometimes overbearing or over-managing bosses, gets one away from gossip and other related office antics, and can allow one the freedom to do one’s job properly. In the wide open spaces, one can feel free—even in these days of constant “on” required by cell phones and such, especially because cell service is not available in many prime exploration areas—unless one happens to be close to mines, freeways, major cities. Of course, by Nevada standards many of the “major” cities I’m referring to are quite small. Which is another good thing, for the most part.

What I have found over the years is that almost all good things have their downside in some circumstances, that good things become bad things, maybe just with repetition, maybe just because of the oppositional nature of things—and likewise for bad things. The things I don’t like under some circumstances can become things I like under other circumstances, and the things I like can become things I don't like, at least for some time being.

As far as using the things I like to motivate myself through things not liked: yes, I think I do that to some extent, but in some situations I’m more likely to motivate myself with things that arean’t strictly work related, by finding something that keeps my mind entertained or keeps me inspired. These things might be as simple as taking photographs when there is time, or finding something at work that I can do that is both helpful and personally rewarding, even though it might not be required or expected. And then other times I just plow through, knowing that mineral exploration is quite variable by nature, and that I’ll be doing something else soon, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a few months—but soon in the long scheme of things, and instantaneously by the standards of geologic time.

scientiae-carnival

Pennsylvania Canyon: Into the Canyon

After a long hiatus in this continuing story about Caliente, Meadow Valley Wash, and related places [Caliente series], I'm finally getting back to the fork in the road at the base of the Ella Mountain Lookout. Which way will I be going? I'll turn left, into Pennsylvania Canyon on the road with the warning sign that says "Road Damaged Ahead."
When I dropped over the saddle into the Pennsylvania Canyon drainage on the damaged road to Elgin, I finally did feel like I dropped into another world, a world of lower elevation, of rockier, steeper, sandier, and more washed-out roads, but also a world that was partly in another time zone, another dimension. I dropped farther and farther into the past as I went lower and lower into Pennsylvania Canyon.

I descended into some nether world that was neither here nor there, really. The sand wasn't as sandy or as roily from truck traffic as it had been 30+ years before, and the steep upper part of the road was seemingly steeper. The steep part was most assuredly rockier and had seen only minimal maintenance for at least a few years, possibly several.

The hillsides had been burned by fire, probably twice - once in a fairly distant past after my last visit in June, 1978, and again in some more recent time, perhaps during the last decade.

Pennsylvania Canyon hugs the west edge of the Clover Mountains Wilderness Area (did not exist back then) in the upper and lower parts of the canyon.

The trees I didn't recognize at first - the ones in the upper elevations near the lookout and the saddle - were Ponderosa pines. These were growing alongside sagebrush, manzanita, piñon pine, and Gambel oaks. Rabbit brush was growing primarily in the disturbed area on the side of the road.

The road was, indeed, damaged in places. The photo below shows a washed-out section not far below the upper steep area. The dirt and soil are a chocolaty brown color remembered from long ago.

Below the washout shown in the previous photo, the road is primarily in the wash. That washout, and the re-routing of the road into the wash, happened quite a while back judging by tracks and the general state of erosion. The current route occasionally goes onto the mostly eroded old road, which can be seen in the photo above to the right of the wash road. Much of our 1978 travel in this section may have been on the old road; I don't remember any old washouts.

One band of wild horses ran from my truck approach - a caution I haven't seen in our so-called wild bands in more than 20 years, a caution possibly bred of the poor road condition and the apparent lack of much human traffic in the canyon. One pass up or down the road by a 4-wheeler-type ATV created the only recent tracks I could see.

At 12:20, having started into the canyon at 11:15, I came to this washout in the lower canyon - located here, just north of the central 4400 contour, where the section line parallels a side canyon going off to the east - almost three miles south of the sandy turnoff I had been looking for. The turnoff I didn't find - east of hill 5547 and south of a 5200 contour - would have taken me to Elgin on what used to be the main road. There is one fresh ATV track in this washed out part of the canyon.

After duly examining the washout generated by this side canyon, I turned around to head back toward the Ella Mountain Lookout.

At 12:40, I pulled over and had lunch in the middle of the wash, in the shade of a juniper tree.

I came to the steep and rocky part of the road at about 1:35 pm, having once again missed the sandy turnoff from long ago. I didn't get photos of this steep part when going into the canyon: I was too busy looking for potential turnaround points in case the road suddenly dropped off into nothing. After all, it was supposed to be damaged!

- Where was the road damaged? I saw "Road Damaged Ahead" signs on both the northeast entrance near the lookout and the southwest entrance near Elgin. I think the damage was on the section between the canyon and Elgin, beyond the sandy turnoff I didn't find, though maybe the signs referred to the washed out lower canyon. Really, though, the upper section of the road just below the saddle was enough to give me pause when driving into the canyon. I drove cautiously, all the while considering the possibility of having to back up should there be a washout below me. Would there be a turnaround point ahead? A washout? Theoretically one can back out of anything one can get into, but when going downhill, that theory does not always apply. Gravity helps you while going down; it will hinder you if you try to back up. So I was cautious. I went downhill slowly, straining my eyes while trying to see through and around bushes that nearly blocked my view. -

Coming back out - and on the farthest reaches in, almost eight miles from the lookout and about four miles from Elgin - the heat and rocks and endless nature of the canyon defeated me, made me irritable at roads gone bad: roads poorly maintained for lack of required claim assessment work, roads inverted in their nature by being worse in the upper stretches, and better in the lower, than they had been in the past.

And so, feeling defeated, I left - slowly but surely, using 4WD on lengths of road that didn't need more than 2WD in the past, and using 2WD where 4WD had been required. I left, and looking once again back down the canyon from the last saddle overlook, I did see, finally, that maybe I had just left some in-between world, half here and now, half there and then.

As usual, the road back, at least from the lookout to Caliente - those last 25 miles or so - was shorter on the way out than on the way in, though not necessarily smoother.

Links: Deep Time and Time

It being the start of a new year (the year 2010 to be precise), I have a few deep-time links for all you deep-time lovers (or would that be lovers of Deep Time?):

• The 2009 Geologic Time Scale: GSA



• No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end: Hindered Settling, Mar 2007



• The Geologic Time Scale is Mind Boggling: Edward de Leau, May 2007



• How the Discovery of Geologic Time Changed our View of the World: ScienceDaily, Sep 2007



• "We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end": Laelaps, Oct 2007



• Time: All The Rage, Feb 2008



• The times they are a-changin': Laelaps, Apr 2009



• Time Almost not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau and Deep Time: Geotripper, Aug 2009



• Fading Into Insignificance: Mather Point, Grand Canyon National Park: Geotripper, Dec 2009 - this is a great use of photography and zoom lenses to create a sense of scale, which is then a metaphor for deep time, with the background being the Grand Canyon, a perfect example of deep time!



• Deep Time: SERC at Carleton College



• Mapping Deep Time: About.com: Geology



• Understanding Deep Time: Boulder Area Sustainability Network (BASIN)



• Hutton's geology: ‘No vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’: OpenLearn

Happy New Year!

Accretionary Wedge: A Time Warp!

For this month's Accretionary Wedge – Let’s Do a Time Warp!- I’d like to warp forward an unknown amount of time, with whatever special technology and safety suits are required, to see the next large-scale caldera-forming eruption. Inactive large-scale calderas are found scattered through the Tertiary of Nevada; active examples include Yellowstone caldera in Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone Lake with Mt. Sheridan in the middle distance on the right and Mt. Moran of the Tetons in the far distant center. NPS Photo by Jim Peaco, 1987.

The calderas formed by these large-scale volcanic eruptions are truly huge, and some people have taken to calling them “supervolcanoes,” although it should be noted that the U.S. Geological Survey says,

“The term supervolcano has no specifically defined scientific meaning. It was used by the producers of a British TV program in 2000 to refer to volcanoes that have generated Earth's largest volcanic eruptions. As such, a supervolcano would be one that has produced an exceedingly large, catastrophic explosive eruption and a giant caldera,”

and the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory says, using the word “supervolcano” in quotes,

“The term "supervolcano" implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning the measured deposits for that eruption is greater than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles).”

I don't much like calling these things supervolcanoes myself, although there can be a certain utility in using the word when talking to lay people, and I'm glad to finally see widespread recognition of eruptions that are much, much larger than the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington - and much larger than the eruption of Mt. Mazama, which formed Crater Lake, in Oregon.

Geology and volcanology have seen some warranted increase in notoriety and recognition since the release of movies like Supervolcano, and since the publication of supervolcano articles in popular scientific magazines like Scientific American and Discover, however overdramatized or inexact the popular renditions might be. The Wikipedia article Supervolcano, for example, says that "Supervolcanoes are relatively new to science; they were previously unknown because they do not fit the stereotypical model of volcanoes." This statement is incorrect: very large-scale explosive caldera-forming eruptions have been known to geologists for quite some time. Hey, I knew about them way back in the dark ages, before I reached the age of thirty!

Potts Hot Spring, West Thumb Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park. NPS photo by J Schmidt, 1977.

Time warp! Now we jump into the unkown future, and we are able to see the exact unfolding of the next large-caldera-forming eruption at Yellowstone. We are finally able to answer our many questions. When will the next caldera at Yellowstone erupt, how long will the eruption take, where will the ash flows flow, how thick will they be, and how hot? Will we all be on Mars or orbiting in space so we won't be wiped out? Where exactly in the developing Snake River Plain will the caldera form, will the magma come through Yellowstone Lake thus making the normally and hugely explosive eruption even more explosive? These are some of the many questions that occur to me when thinking of the Yellowstone area. I'd prefer to watch this sometime in the distant future, and not too soon on any human scale.

Looking south from Conway Summit; photo from Wikimedia.

Along those same lines, I have long planned to be standing on Conway Summit, looking south across Mono basin, when the next caldera-sized eruption occurs at the Long Valley caldera, whenever it will be erupting the next version of the Bishop Tuff (Bishop Tuff II ?). The wind will not be to the north while I'm there watching; that would make conditions unbearable (read: deadly), and it would destroy the visibility. I'm thinking, however, that Conway Summit - at about 30 miles or 50 kilometers away - might really be too close. The ash-flow tuff, which would probably go mostly south the way the Bishop Tuff did last time (about 760,000 years ago), could conceivably run northward and boil off the water in Mono Lake, instantly covering all existing tufa spires, domes, and other formations, preserving them for the future of our time-warped future time. One might not think favorably of the natural destruction of Mono Lake, but then at least the L.A. basin wouldn't be taking any of it's water anymore.

Accretionary Wedge #17: Let's Do a Time Warp!

A Slow Day?

Is it a slow day? That is the question! To slow, or not to slow...

I'm having a bit of a headache this morning; so far I'm not ready to call it a migraine, but most of my headaches become such by the middle or latter part of the day. Oh, woe is me! :(

I'm also, perhaps, having just the incipient bit of a cold virus, which I will probably fight off by tomorrow, especially since we will be getting to sleep an extra hour, and a recent article has it that fall forward is one of the best things we do for ourselves every year, never mind some recent opinions or bloggish uproar about the article. [And UPDATE - here's another well thought out blog post that explains things in great detail, and also explains why fall-back is a good thing, why spring-forward is a bad thing.] I'm mostly referring to the once-again brouhaha about whether scientific-type bloggers should 1) blog at all, 2) ever dare to state a scientific statement, question, or opinion - reasoned or otherwise - on a blog, or 3) dare to refuse to use a real name, when, as everyone knows, we might have our houses robbed or our persons abused if random internet-type people could actually google us and find where we live and whether we happen to be at home or not. I'm also not stating that the "bloggish uproar" is in any way negative - or positive - I am, at this point, merely noting its recurrent presence. [And P.S. to any internet-type stalkers or creepish types - the Silver Fox has caretakers and guardians, with guns and ammo, posted at all her many and several places of residence, wherever they may be.]

It does seem like a slow day to me. I'm waking up slowly, am drinking coffee slowly, am getting ready (for what?) slowly, am writing slowly, and my head feels like a mass of thick-bedded limestone: gray, thick, and easy to dissolve in cold, dilute hydrochloric acid. In fact, that dissolution may have started sometime in the night while I was sleeping, for all I can tell.

On a less satirical [or facetious?] note: the sunrise was beautiful, the weather warmish for 43oF [note: the little "o" is going to henceforth stand for degrees on this blog, as I've gotten tired of writing out "degrees" and have also gotten tired of going into the html editor and typing the appropriate ascii code for the degree symbol], the clouds heavy and cloudish [note: I will also continue to use such silly, idiotic, or ridiculous made-up words like "cloud-ish," with or without a dash, as is my right as a writer]. It was dark when I walked out the door to get into my truck. [Boo hoo.] Tomorrow morning it won't be so dark, but in a month it will probably be darker. Alaska Al, if he is reading this longish, slowish, braided and meandering blog post, would probably tell me (or you) to toughen up or tough it out - it's been dark in the mornings in Alaska for more days than it has been down here, and they are probably, by now, losing at least 7 minutes of daylight every day.

I'd post a Halloween picture of some sort, but MOH and I didn't manage to do Halloween this year. [Doing Halloween is kind of like doing lunch - it's something you do, and it's optional.] I might post a picture from last year's doings, but I'll have to think about it. It's really a kind of scary - oooooh! - picture!