On Mud and Getting Stuck

Mud can create a sticky situation. It helps to be paying attention to the condition of the road when driving through Nevada during any month of the year, even in the summer when mud is not prevalent and the springs are often dry—but they are not always dry.

While I was working for Northern Exploration Company back in the late 1970's, we had a large claim staking crew out in central Nevada. A couple of the claim stakers—in their zeal to drive as close to the claim-post site as possible, a thing that all good claim stakers excel at—failed the spring test by not getting out to see if they could walk through the green, grassy area ahead of them. “Don’t walk when you can drive,” is a good policy when doing exploration—but please don’t drive through things that look like springs without checking them out. The claim posters drove full speed ahead into the grassy area around the Northumberland spring and sank their truck up to the sideboards in mud. The truck stayed stuck in the mud for several days before a bulldozer arrived to pull them out.

I prefer to be in four-wheel drive rather than two-wheel drive when driving over any questionable terrain—especially mud, sand, and snow. It's true, however, that if you get stuck when already in four-wheel drive, you are really stuck. In four-wheel drive you might drive farther into a muddy area before getting stuck than you would in two-wheel drive, and you will have a longer distance to dry or passable land. You will also have to work harder to get unstuck. If, however, you were in two-wheel drive when you drove into the muddy area, you might get stuck in a relatively small mud hole that wouldn't have caused any problem had you already been in 4WD. And now that you are stuck in 2WD, switching to 4WD might not help out at all.

Once upon a time, I got stuck in mud near a now-former gold mine in northern Nevada. But hey, what am I saying, that I got stuck—I wasn't driving. We were up there taking soil samples along claim lines in the early spring, when the ground was still muddy. There was one especially bad mud hole, and R. decided we could make it through. He drove the truck into the mud hole fast, thinking that the speed would carry the truck to the other side. It didn’t. We were stuck, right in the middle. Because his truck didn't have a handyman jack (always be prepared?), we walked back to my truck (fortunate to have two trucks, eh?) and got my handyman jack. BTW, the little jack that comes with your truck, which is often located somewhere under the hood, is usually of little help in getting unstuck.

Being stuck in mud requires either building a road underneath the truck, being pulled out with a bulldozer, or waiting until the mud dries out. We didn't have a dozer, and weren't about to sit around waiting until mid-summer. So, we looked around until we found a flat rock to set the jack on, and then we jacked up the truck — all four tires, one at a time — to place sagebrush under and in back of each tire. We would have to build a road behind the truck to get out — if we went forward, we would simply have a truck on the wrong side of an impassable mud hole.

It was a long, tedious procedure: after we got all four tires of the truck set back down onto semi-solid muddy sagebrush, R. got in, put the truck in gear, and spun out all the brush we had collected, putting the truck right back down in the mud. So we again jacked the truck up, four times, once for each tire, and put even more sagebrush under the tires. [Rocks or boards work better for building road, but sagebrush was what we had on hand.] R. got in again, put the truck in gear, and spun it back into the mud. On the third try, we got enough sagebrush underneath and in back of each tire that we had enough traction to back out of the mud hole. By that time we were thoroughly tired of both mud and sagebrush—and, we were left with a much longer distance to carry our soil samples.

Another Day

This is what it’s looking like these days where I’m working, at least on the north-facing slopes. As Kim pointed out, the aspect effect is important to consider this time of year, as is elevation. Some of the south-facing slopes here are currently clear of snow, some are not. Where they are snow-free, they are muddy. Consequently, I'm sticking mostly to frozen and muddy roads these days and not doing much hiking around (where would I find an outcrop - maybe in a roadcut). I hear that real spring - with no mud being the definition of real spring - often doesn’t come to this part of the woods (desert? upland steppe?) until May or June. Until then, my boots and truck will be full of mud.

Exploration on Mars

There’s been some talk recently about Mars - although strangely enough I can't find the all the links right now - maybe Mars is being talked about because it’s in a very close position to the earth, or maybe because of the landslides.

Here's an opinion: I think it’s about time that we sent real geologists to Mars, the Moon, and anywhere else we can get to, and see what is really going on. I suppose our unmanned probes are getting better, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing like a real person for making observations and testing hypotheses. As geologists, we are trained observers, as my dad likes to say, and so I’d say we should get into the field Out There.

Once upon a time, I thought I might be one of the ones to go into space to explore, because when I was young, I really though we would be colonizing other planets or going on long space treks to other solar systems, soon, Any Day Now. That’s what I thought—maybe it was a Star Trek thing, maybe it was an Isaac Asimov thing. By the time I was 18 or 20, however, I could see that we would probably not take to space in any meaningful way in my lifetime, or least not until I was probably too old to be considered for colonization or exploration. So, I’ve stuck to exploration here, on this planet.

And that’s worked out well for me, overall.

More Work Today

I'm continuing to add old posts I had created elsewhere before starting here on Blogger. In the meantime, I'm still at work, keeping track of drill rigs and drill sites while logging a seemingly endless array of RC chips. So, just a quick note, and I'm off to work.

Defying Death?

Well, I've just sat down to relax after a long day of work, and find out there's a kind of geological meme going around about death-defying geological experiences. Geotripper, what have you started?!

As a rule, I personally try to avoid death-defying experiences, and consider things like downhill skiing and white-water rafting to be extreme enough, and I haven't done either of those things in a good number of years. Many of the stories I could tell, would really be of other people, or would be about getting stuck in 4WD a long way from anywhere.

So here goes: Flying around in a helicopter 50 feet off the ground while contouring around the hills and mountains of the Great Basin -- rather than flying a grid so that the U-Th-K spectrometer wouldn’t need any elevation correction -- was death defying enough for me. And then when our end-of-field-season replacement pilot forgot to pick me up one night, and then when he simultaneously forgot where he was supposed to pick me up, well, that isn’t really death-defying, I don't think. It's merely very inconvenient. I stayed out overnight with water-proof matches, one wool sweater, a small snack, less than a cup of water, and one so-called helicopter blanket (kind of like those thin, reflective “space blankets” but bright orange on one side, so you might be able to flag down a wayward or lost helicopter). It was early October in central Nevada, in the high country, in a not particularly warm year.

I learned that it takes about a half hour to collect enough sagebrush to keep a fire going for about a half an hour, and that sleeping wrapped in a space blanket, in amongst the low branches of a juniper tree, with a few bushes stuffed around for “insulation” is downright ridiculous. I walked out the next day, and met the only other geologist in camp -- he knew right where I was and brought a candy bar for my breakfast -- while the rest of our crew and the pilot searched diligently for me three miles to the south in a different drainage area.

But, like many geologists, I too have stood on barely cooled basaltic lava (non-explosive, definitely not pyroclastic).

Update: Check out Highly Allochthonous for a lot of stories, many in the comments.

Update-Update: Geotripper is keeping a list of all posts for this impromptu carnival.