Friday Field Photos #3

The road in: the Northumberland Mine Road

Just a few quick photos from my first drilling project. Above, the photo shows the long, somewhat winding road in to Northumberland Canyon, which heads east off of old Highway 8A (now Nevada S.R. 376) a couple miles south of the turn off to Bowman Creek, and which goes through the north part of the Northumberland caldera.
Drill site number one is on top of the orange-colored hill. The old Bowman Creek camp is way in the distance across Big Smoky Valley, on the east flank of the Toiyabe Range, just behind the left part of the orange hill.
Drill site number two is at near the base of the white, tuffaceous cliff on an inconspicuous flat area above the bushes. The white cliff is just below the vitrophyre (not basal but close to it) of the Tertiary tuff of Hoodoo Canyon, the orange-brown welded ash-flow tuff forming the top of the hill. The same volcanic formation makes up the orange hill in the second photo.

These drill sites, and many others, were drilled a long time ago by a company that doesn't exist in the same form that it existed in back then. Back then, well that was the late 1970's, and we were drilling for uranium in the second uranium boom. (There have been, so far, exactly three uranium booms - not sure how the current one is doing.) We drilled with conventional, non-RC rotary rigs (and core rigs) in the days before reverse-circulation rotary rigs were standard on exploration drilling programs. Sampling was not considered a problem because we probed the holes with a down-the-hole logging tool that measured gamma and total counts, and also gave us a bunch of electric readings (S.P., resistivity, and conductivity, I think). The down-the-hole logs were almost enough to do the intracaldera stratigraphy without even looking at the rocks, once I had looked at the rocks and logs long enough to figure out what the Hay they meant.

Ah, those were the days? First drilling program, not knowing a darn thing about anything! But we did dance next to the drill rig; I'm not sure I could really put a picture of that up here, though! Nowadays, dancing would be considered unsafe, and we would be considered almost too young. Maybe I can dig up a photo of a late night by the fire: drilling went into a very cold, icy, but mostly snow-free December.

Have Truck... Continued

The Ballad of Paladin


I kept thinking about my truck and the title of that last truck post, and this song kept bouncing around in my head from early days of watching black & white TV. Have Gun Will Travel, an early favorite of mine, about the west.

The Ballad of Palladin: Recorded by Johnny Western, Written by Johnny Western, Richard Boone and S. Rolfe, 1957.

Travel to Northwest

I will be/am en route and at the Northwest convention in Reno for the next couple days. I may already be behind on any comments, but will try to stay in touch, and do have mobile reading capability, but do not always have mobile commenting capability (it seems erratic or I just don't get it). Any posts in the next couple days will have been pre-posted.

If any other Geo/Bloggers will be at the meeting, I would probably be able to meet Thursday after the LLLL session or at the evening bash. I'll be there, passing my business cards around to any and all interested parties.

And now, just too tired to do anything but get to sleep!

Where in the North: December

Click photo to Enlarge.

Note: that's In the North, not In the West; I'm diverting from the usual WITW series for a northern area (WITN), just in time for winter, if it ever comes.

This photo, taken from an airliner in mid-winter, shows a portion of a long fjord. A road runs through this area, and there is a small town or village in the picture, probably not very discernible. I don't know much about the geology, except that the area has obviously been glaciated.

Where in the West: Mt. St. Helens

A view of Mt. St. Helens, looking to the northeast, with Spirit Lake to the left.

Back in early November, BrianR of Clastic Detritus won the Where in the West contest that you can sometimes find here on this blog. I didn't get around to posting a second look at the mountains in question, which were Mt. Rainier in the distance, and Mt. St. Helens in the foreground. So here are a couple more pictures of Mt. St. Helens, which as many people know or remember, erupted with a bang on May 18, 1980.
Above, a somewhat mysterious view of Mt. St. Helens, looking almost due east, with the Toutle River in the foreground and on the left side of the photo.

A close-up photo of a portion of the Toutle River.

Better photos of Mt. St. Helens can be found by rummaging through the Mt. St. Helens links above, and from derivative links therein which will include this YouTube "video", and also see this Geotripper post by MJC Rocks (along with a couple photos of Mt. Rainier).