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.

High Water Across the West: Not at West Gate!

I was surprised when driving through central Nevada back in early May that things didn't really look all that green or wet, at least as compared to what I'd already seen in northern Nevada along the Truckee River, at Rye Patch Dam and the Humboldt Sink, at the Pitt-Taylor Reservoir and in Winnemucca, in Carlin Canyon, and at Honey Lake. Still, I expected Eastgate Wash to be running, because it does so often, at least in my memory. I didn't have a chance to check the wash out at Eastgate, where I expect it was running, but here it is at West Gate...dry on May 3rd.

At least the nearby West Gate windmill was pumping, so there was plenty of water for any blue bellies that might happen by.

High Water Across the West: Rye Patch Dam and the Humboldt Sink

Rye Patch Dam on April 19th. The water in Rye Patch Reservoir is high, but not at the high water mark that can be seen just past the spillway.

I'm moving slowly on this mini-series about the Humboldt River while working essentially 12-hour days and while (hopefully) recovering from some long-lasting bug I caught on the road or out in Elko more than two months ago. Also, my current work schedule of  9 to 10 days in a row gives me 2 to 3 days off that don't involve driving, so my off days tend to be filled with chores and not that much writing. Anyhoo, there I was traveling south on I-80 past the big bend at Humboldt Station, where I had stopped to take a few photos of the water in the Pitt-Taylor Reservoirs, when I decided—rather spontaneously—to drive down to Rye Patch Dam. As you can see from the first photo, the reservoir is high, but not quite to the high water mark.

Rye Patch Reservoir and Majuba Hill.

Here we're looking just west of north across a shallows, and we can see Majuba Hill just right of center in the distance. The main, deeper part of the reservoir is long and linear where it follows a canyon cut by the river into Lake Lahontan sediments.

The same view in June, 2016, from Google Earth.

A few Western Grebes swim in the shallows.

A closer view of one grebe.

I couldn't resist this view of the Humboldt Range.

Snow-capped Star Peak hides behind clouds. The Cordex Pit of the Florida Canyon Mine operations might be barely visible below Star Peak.

After my brief sojourn at the Rye Patch Dam overlook, I proceeded back to the interstate, speeding ever southward and then southwestward as the road made another broad bend near Lovelock. I was shocked at what I saw when I drove past Granite Point.

The Humboldt Sink had water in it!

At first, I thought it might be a mirage, and although these photos don't really do justice to it, it was indeed water, a small lake that has persisted, at least through my last drive by the area a week ago on June 11th.

A closer view of the Humboldt Sink and the West Humboldt Range.

And that's all for now, time for work! I've got a few pictures of even more water from another trip, but I can't promise when I'll get to it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Water Across the West: Honey Lake

I've recently had the opportunity to travel across part of the Great Basin of eastern California and northern and central Nevada, and have noticed a lot of high water, almost everywhere. Honey Lake, which has been dry to only partly filled during the last several years, is once again a lake. The first two photos are from the 11th of April; the last three are from the 25th.

The lake is beyond full for what has been typical for several years, with bushes drowned around the edges and fences under water. In fact, you can see a bit of a fence or gate in the picture above, near shore, a little right of center. Most of the fenceline is completely under water.

Here's a relatively broad view of the lake taken on April 25th.

I cropped the previous photo so it would closely match the first photo from the 11th.

And this photo matches the second photo from the 11th. If you look closely at the two matching sets, you can see that the water was slightly higher on the 11th, and had gone down a teensy bit by the 25th.

I have several years of pictures of Honey Lake: there are these comparison photos from 2007 through 2011, these few photos from May and June of 2015, and one photo from early March, 2016. Even more photos can be found by searching the blog for "honey" (along with a few from nearby Pyramid Lake). Most of my photos through the years have been taken from the Honey Lake Rest Area).

More From the Road: The Colorado River Aqueduct

When I drove to the area on the south side of the Whipple Mountains where I ended up camping amidst downpours and nearby lightning, I thought I'd grab a few photos of the Colorado River Aqueduct, which passes through just north of CA Highway 62 on its way to the greater L.A. area, but an RVer was camped just beyond the aqueduct overpass, so I blew it off until I left. (I'm not terribly social while in the field, especially when traveling alone.) On my way in, I took one shot showing the signage and the overpass (first photo). In the Whipples (and elsewhere), the aqueduct goes underground in several places, usually to allow passage of large dry washes. It's at these points that dirt roads can cross. The sign says, "Private Right of Way. Any Person Entering Thereon Does So at His Own Risk. Permission to Pass Revocable at Any Time. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California." It is probably referring to the road paralleling the aqueduct, rather than the road crossing it, but who knows.

I stopped to take a few more photos on the way out during the early morning of the next day (after having coffee, of course!). These photos can be used to help illustrate a few stories I have about doing recon and exploration in the Whipple Mountains area—stories that date back to 1981, resume in 1983, and continue off and on after that through the late 1980s. (That's really why I went out of my way to drive into the area in the first place.)

The entire aqueduct, where above ground, is surrounded by a fairly hefty chain-link fence and more "No Trespassing" type signage in English and Spanish.

In this second view (above), Savahia Peak and its detachment-tilted Tertiary volcanic rocks, which we saw earlier, is sticking up a little.

View of the aqueduct looking through the chain-link fence.

While working in the area during a misconceived June recon program (June: ugh and yikes!), my field partner and I fantasized about cooling off in the water by tying ourselves off to the fence with ropes. We didn't think we'd want to be sucked downstream into the next underground section of the aqueduct, even though that section is a relatively short one: only 204 feet (61 m). But the rope idea, that might work!

From the Road: Conway Summit

I'm having a little trouble keeping up with the road trip--for one thing, the mobile app thingy doesn't really work very well, so it's easier to just wait until I have wifi, and I don't get any of that when camping (!)--but here are two photos from Conway Summit.

The first looks south at Mono Lake. The Sierra Nevada is on the right, and the White Mountains are on the far left (they don't look impressive in this photo, but they are). The Mono-Inyo Craters, with the caldera rim of the Long Valley Caldera beyond it (they are indistinguishable in this photo) form the hills that provide a nice backdrop to Mono Lake. You can barely see Paoha Island in this photo; it's the light-colored island behind the dark land mass left of center. The dark land mass is Black Point, a 13,300 year old basaltic cone. Negit Island is easy to see: it's the smallish, dark-colored band to the left of Paoha and Black Point. Paoha and Negit are both volcanic islands, although it looks like the lake is low enough that Negit is not currently an island. The lake looks really low--I thought they were maintaining it at a higher level; maybe it's the drought, maybe the water accord has failed.

The roadcut across from the Conway Summit pullout (just below Conway Summit, actually) exposes grusy, unglaciated granite. There's also quite an exposure of glacial till in the hill above the granite, and in the hill and roadcut leading up to the summit proper, which you can see when driving north or south on 395.

One Year Ago Today Compared to Last Month: Mud and Snow v. Mud and Water in the Fernley Wildlife Management Area

A year ago today, a thin snow highlighted some Lake Lahontan shorelines on basalt-capped hills out in (or near) the Fernley Wildlife Management Area (FWMA):

Snow on low hills across the dark brown playa in part of the Fortymile Desert on January 5th, 2013.

About a month ago, there wasn't any snow on the ground, buy the playa was dark brown, muddy, and in places very wet.

The same two hills on December 3rd, 2014 (location near Milepost 59 on eastbound I-80).

There was quite a bit of water near the main part of the FWMA a month ago; photo looking southeast toward Hazen from eastbound I-80
between Mileposts 55 and 56.

The roadside marshes were full of water a month ago (near Milepost 57).

A second view of the marshes near Milepost 57.

I'm always pleased to see a lot of water in the FWMA area and roadside marshes. I'll get a chance to see them in a week or so. I wonder what they'll look like then! Hopefully the water table will still be fairly high. And hopefully the marsh and water birds will be swimming, wading, and having a great time!

Update from the Road: It's Finally Fall

So there I was, traveling west on I-80 late last week — just after our first rain sans snow (except for at the high elevations of a few mountains east of the Sierra, like the Humboldt and Sonoma Ranges, which top out at 9836 and 9396 feet respectively), and before our most recent larger rain and snowstorm of this past weekend — when I came to the marshes that border the west end of the Fortymile Desert.

One of the marshes bordering the west end of the Fortymile Desert,
just northeast of Fernley (location).

I was pleased to see that the marshes were fairly rich in water, and that even the median between the eastbound and westbound sections of freeway had patches of water. The volume of water in the marshes, in the median, and in the adjoining playa and Fernley Wildlife Management Area varies considerably, and though the area has been somewhat drier than usual this last year, I've never seen the marshes completely dry. I enjoy driving this section of I-80: I often see birds in the marshes, including American avocet and black-necked stilt.

I passed through Fernley, stopping briefly at the Gilpin rest stop (AKA Wasdworth rest area), always a good place to find excellent fall colors.

Trees at Gilpin.

And a closer, brighter view.

I had already crossed the main bridge over the Truckee River, between the west Fernley and west Wadsworth exits, and I had been surprised to see that the trees along the river were still yellow. They had been, I thought, nearly at peak about two weeks prior, so I really didn't expect to be seeing much besides some faded golden brown leaves or maybe even mostly barren trees.

Instead, fall was in full swing, and I was reminded that the same was true just almost exactly a year ago when I passed through and decided to exit at Painted Rock to get a closer view of the leaves.

Cottonwood trees along the Truckee River, October 24, 2013.

The river and colorful trees, from the one lane Painted Rock bridge (location).

This year, I didn't exit anywhere along the river (besides Gilpin/Wadsworth), opting instead to move through the canyon as quickly as possible (such are the vagaries of a traveling life).

After driving into Reno, I navigated the notorious Spaghetti Bowl, turning north onto 395. Eventually I stopped at the Honey Lake rest area.

Maple tree at Honey Lake rest area, October 30, 2014.

Same maple tree on October 24, 2013.

The changing leaves and general fallishness of the marshes reminded me of a detailed sequence of events from last year — of the bright golden leaves turning and falling in the canyon of the lower Truckee River, of other leaves turning and falling elsewhere along the road, and of the bright yellow aspen leaves in our yard, also turning and falling. We don't have aspen trees in our yard anymore (we had to make space for gardens and trees that don't perpetuate themselves through annoying, ever-present and ever-growing roots and sprouts), so we don't have our own bright colors and fallen leaves (except for on a few small plants in the midst of growing), but I know that fall will always come about this same time every year — often with bright colors — and possibly I will always feel nostalgic for the days gone by.

Varying Water Levels at a Few Reservoirs in California

When MOH and I drove to Butt Valley Reservoir a couple weeks ago, we were surprised by the lake low lake level: it looked lower than we remembered seeing it, although we haven't been frequenting the area routinely for several years.

Standing on a wider-than-usual beach near the boat ramp on the east shore, looking south. 

The boat ramp is the dark, shadowed line below the tall trees on the same shore I'm standing on. The dam is a ways around the corner to the southeast behind the tall trees.

This picnic table from the day use area was moved out onto the beach, presumably as a prank. Photo from August 22nd.

A few days later the same picnic table was at water's edge.
Photo from August 26th.

Although the angle of the photo is a bit different, you can see that the lake has risen by looking at the boat ramp and a couple logs in the background, not to mention the trees. In addition, the beach on the far shore is no longer visible.

It isn't really normal for water levels to be rising this year in California reservoirs, but the lake level in Butt Valley Reservoir (the lake is alternately called Butt's Lake, Butt Lake, and Butt Valley Lake) is notoriously variable. In fact, swimmers and boaters are warned to watch the lake level, as it can rise suddenly if water is released from the next lake up the ladder, which is Lake Almanor. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the warning sign.

Indeed, in case I didn't believe my eyes (or you don't believe my photos), Butt Valley Reservoir contained 35,117 acre feet on August 22nd (probably a permalink, or play around with the dates yourself) and 41,627 acre feet on August 26th (same chart). Total storage capacity of the reservoir is 49,800 AF. The chart of reservoir storage for the month of August can be seen here (a probable permalink).

Meanwhile, the lake upstream in the Feather River watershed so-called "Stairway of Power" was dropping (tabular data), especially after August 21st (graph).

We've all seen some of the recent pictures of the main reservoir at the downstream end of the Feather River system (Lake Oroville above Oroville Dam). I wouldn't mind posting some of these here, but surprisingly, CDWR describes these photos as public domain and copyrighted and not for redistribution at the same time (right click on this one, for example). Instead of photos, view the Lake Oroville storage chart for all of 2014 here (should be a permalink).

What we can discover through various CDEC links and calculation tools, is that the May 2014 peak at Lake Oroville of 1,877,682 AF was considerably below the average May peak of 3,042,972 AF. I've read in comments that the 1990, 1991, and 1992 years were worse California drought years than 2014 (perhaps based on statewide storage, rain, runoff, or wishful thinking?), but at Oroville, storage at the beginning of September was a little higher in all three of those years than it was this year: 1,188,782 AF in 1990, 1,392,300 AF in 1991, and 1,401,554 AF in 1992, compared to 1,100,873 AF on 9/1/2014.