First Day Off After Nine

Early morning: This was my rousing view of clouds and the foothills of Winnemucca Mountain when I awoke this morning. This photo now seems to represent what was a somewhat inspirational beginning to what turned into a busy, erratic day. Perhaps the day was also a bit like the clouds: scattered.
Early evening: It was a hectic day, seemingly, and I'm finally relaxing with a cold beer — a Rotator IPA in a Ruby Mountain Amber pint glass. I think the only reason the day seemed hectic was that I did things other than what I planned, things that weren't on my TTD list, so I felt as though I didn't accomplish anything. Instead of relaxing and blogging (both were on the list), I did a modicum of unpacking, a bit of arranging, and quite a bit of rearranging. I did get two things on my list done, including having a relaxing hot bath. And, for things not on the list, I accomplished the hanging of a peg strip near the front door of the apt, which now looks like this (sign compliment of furnished apt):
By the end of the day, prior to beer, I didn't find a Father's Day card to my liking. Whereas it seemed that the cards in our moved-away-from town were dorky and quite repetitive year to year, it seems as though the cards in this new town, while ostensibly or superficially quite varied, trend overall either toward the overly sentimental (for either myself or the way I view my dad), or they are raucous musical and noisy things that I'm pretty sure he wouldn't like. Consequently, because I'm already late in mailing anyway, I'll probably dig through the many cards I have on hand, which I've bought for myself not to use but to look through and enjoy (art cards), then I'll pick one out and hopefully get it sent by tomorrow afternoon when the mail gets picked up at our nearby apt-based boxes. With any luck, the card will arrive in AK by Monday, only one day late.

In the meantime, I'm expecting a phone call from MOH. He's on his northern adventure, checking out oil fields and small towns in northerly areas that I've never visited. (I'm jealous, in a way, but am getting daily pictures of campsites, rivers, and the way my old truck currently looks as a mini-RV. One thing I've learned is that the Yellowstone River is quite beautiful, though a long way from here.)

And now, my beer is still cold but needs to be refreshed with a new one, the sun coming through the open-to-the-freeway window — open to let swamp-cooler air on high out — is warm. After beer I'll have a dinner either of mint chocolate cookie ice cream or mini-ravs and milk. That will be the end to what I now see as a good day.

P.S. The "our town" tag refers to the old place in the hinterland of eastern Nevada, and the "wnmca" tag refers to a uniquely named town in north-central or north-western Nevada (depending on how you view Nevada geography).

P.P.S. I am finding myself, as I've mentioned before, considerably shorter on time for blogging while working the industry-wide normal 10-hour days and having a door to door driving/riding time of 45 to 60 minutes, depending on particular logistics. These logistics create what are actually 12 hour days, longer than my previous 10-hour work days plus 30 to 45 minute max round trip times (10.5 to 10.75 hour days compared to ± 12 hour days). I'm still adjusting, rather slowly, to my lack of blogging time. I'm not awake enough in the morning to do much serious (or very good) writing or link finding, and the short evening is often crammed with brief winding down, dinner, getting ready for the next day, enjoying a netflix-streamed old TV series episode or two with MOH when he's here, OR just crashing, OR reading the internet but not blogging. Haven't figured all that out quite yet — and I haven't quite scheduled time in for any excercise besides what I get at work, walking up and down metal-grated stairs and walking back and forth down my rubber-padded cement-based core-logging lane.

P.P.P.S. Wrist and elbow overuse pain (started in one arm, is now also in the other becuase of using the other almost exclusively at times) has also limited what I have been able to do on the computer. The pain, soreness, inflammation, whatever it is, is better. It all probably began from packing and lifting/carrying boxes; consequently, any unpacking I do puts me at least slightly at risk of a longer healing time. (RICE: REST, ice, compression, elevation — need the former, acheiving very little of the latter - how does one raise the elbow without using it or other possibly compromised muscles? Meh.)

Park Meme

Lockwood started it (I saw it first at Mountain Beltway). He grabs two new lists from National Geographic “Our Amazing Planet“: the Ten Most Visited National Parks and the Ten Least Visited National Parks (in the U.S.). Says Lockwood: Bold the ones you have visited, and italicize the ones you’ve never heard of before.



Most visited:
10: Glacier
9: Acadia
8: Grand Teton - see The Tetons in Brief.
7: Cuyahoga Valley
6: Rocky Mountain - I've been near this park, not sure if in it.
5: Olympic - only seen it from a distance and from the air.
4: Yellowstone - see Accretionary Wedge: A Time Warp!
3: Yosemite
2: Grand Canyon
1: Great Smoky Mountains [NOTE: I corrected the spelling on this one!]

Least Visited:
10: City of Rocks NR, Idaho
9: Cumberland Island NS, Georgia
8: Florissant Fossil Beds NM, Colorado
7: Chiricahua NM, Arizona
6: Tonto NM, Arizona
5: Dry Tortugas NP, Florida
4: Katmai NP & Preserve, Alaska (I would like to see this one.)
3: Kalaupapa NHP, Hawaii
2: Hagerman Fossil Beds NM, Idaho
1: Russel Cave NM, Alabama

Haven't seen very many on the most visited list, none on the least visited list. Hmm...

The Tetons in Brief

This is just a quick follow-up to the time warp post, which included a photo showing part of the Teton Range barely rising over the horizon south of Yellowstone Lake.
The photo shows the Grand Teton (left), Mt. Moran (center), and Eagles Rest Peak (right), looking southward across Jackson Lake. I took this photo on a long-ago visit to Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park about twenty years ago in early-mid June of 1990.

It was almost two years after the Yellowstone fire of 1988 (cached page, current page not working as I write this; also see Wikipedia: Yellowstone fires of 1988). We planned to come back the next summer, in 1991, and stay at Jenny Lake Lodge, although we never did.
That's me, in the middle of a hike up Cascade Canyon. The peak is Mt. Owen. I have very few pictures and zero slides from our Yellowstone - Grand Teton expedition, so these will have to suffice.

Links: Heat Flow - Geothermal Gradient - Yellowstone

This is a new series, wherein I post some of the links I find and save when doing research for other posts, rather than saving them as drafts.

About.com Geology: Geothermal Energy

NPS: 6th Biennial Scientific Conference on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: Sublacustrine Geothermal Activity in Yellowstone Lake

NPS: Yellowstone National Park home page

SMU: Geothermal Map of North America 2004 (and other maps)

SMU: Geothermal Lab on Heat Flow (lots of maps)

University of Akron: Misc Wyoming Geothermal Info

USGS/YVO: Heat Flow and Geothermal Energy at Yellowstone

USGS/YVO: Preliminary Assessment of Volcanic and Hydrothermal Hazards in Yellowstone National Park and Vicinity (link only)

USGS/YVO: PDF Document of Above

USGS/YVO: Yellowstone Volcano Observatory home page

Wikipedia: Geothermal Gradient
Wikipedia: Yellowstone Lake

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!