Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things: Another Trip to Wheeler Peak

So, with some of my current field work complete, and with MOH fortuitously on his seven days off, we took a trip out to Wheeler Peak yesterday. I browsed through some old photos and found that this year's early May trip was the earliest of any year, except for trips that I would place into snowshoeing or other winter categories.
Consequently, although these first two photos are similar in location and orientation to several I posted last year as snow comparison photos, they are earlier than those by at least three weeks. Nevertheless, they do show that Wheeler Peak has more snow on it in early May, 2010, than in late May, mid June, or late June of previous years. No surprise there, really.
The Great Basin National Park website correctly reported that Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive (the paved road that goes to 10,000 feet) was open to Mather Overlook...
...so we drove up and walked around the rocky point, which is at the end of a short dirt road and not far above the 9,000-foot elevation sign.
I was fascinated by how the snow highlights a fracture set across the face of Wheeler Peak, the fracture set being sub-parallel to the ground surface on the right (north) side of the peak. Enlarge the photo to see these fractures, and also to see the rock spire standing above and behind the foreground trees, also on the right side of the photo.
We walked around, finding plants and birds and rocks and things.
Plants included a lot of sweet-smelling, unusually tall and somewhat twisted Mountain Mahogany, manzanita, small Ponderosa pine trees (I think), distant leafless aspen, and distant limber pine.
We saw and heard a few birds, including a small group of Clark's Nutcrackers, a raven or two, and at least one chickadee.
As for rocks, they were everywhere, in roadcuts leading up to the overlook, forming whole hillsides and slopes across the way, scattered all over the ground over which we walked, and jutting out as cliffs to make good foregrounds for pictures and good sitting spots between meanderings. The rocks at Mather Overlook are probably part of the late Precambrian McCoy Creek Group. They come in a variety of whites, pale greens, and purplish grays, with occasional other colors like this nice orange. The metaquartzites are shiny, sugary, and show swirled to laminated bedding.
This pale green metaquartzite is cut by a sugary, white quartz vein, probably a metamorphic sweat-out vein. This type of vein most likely doesn't contain gold, but given the proximity to the Osceola gold district located on the west side of Wheeler Peak, one never knows.
The ground, besides being littered with loose rocks and rock outcrops, was turning green with grass and soon-to-be wildflowers. The air was crisp and refreshing at 36° F (2° C), and the views into Utah were spectacular.
We finally turned away from the mountain, walked back to the Prius, and drove down the hill to the 6,825-foot elevation of the Lehman Caves Visitor Center. We were glad to find that the NPS website was incorrect about the Cafe and Gift Shop operating hours. We went inside and had lunch with chocolate milkshakes.

SITF: Mud Cracks on Mud Cracks (Original and Next Generation)

Seen in the field: Some more mud cracks! This time, we've got younger, still wet mud cracks on top of older, dry mud cracks.
The newer mud on the right is from late April, 2010 (almost active at the time of the photo); the older, sandier deposit on the left is known to be post-2008, probably from sometime earlier this year. The somewhat irregular and thin, crackly-looking younger mud cracks cover and sink into nicely formed, almost perfectly hexagonal mud cracks. The only area in the two photos where the more recent, still-wet mud shows sub-hexagonal shapes is in the upper right of this last photo.

Too bad I won't get to check out this muddy, crackly, alluvial area to see what develops next!

Seen in the Field: Fluffy Polygonal Ground and Mudcracks (Two Generations?)

Continuing on with the mud crack scheme, I ran across this small field of polygons the other day. Note the lath and 8x8 for scale. In the wide photo above, we're looking to the east, the next two photos look north and show an area mostly to the right of the darker brown area on the right side of the wide photo.
This part of the field shows the fluffy nature of some of the polygons. This photo not only has the same lath (hard to spot) and 8x8 for scale, but also some size 7 footprints that walk across from left center toward the lower center.
Here are the same large fluffy polygons enlarged, with the same footprints.
This photo is from somewhere in the central area of the first, wide photo. The larger polygons are separated from each other by mud or dirt that filled in after or during continued to repetetive formation of the polygons, possibly by both dessication and freeze-thaw action. Dessicration cracks (mud cracks) have formed mostly inside the larger polygons, but some of the cracks cut across the polygon borders.

At first I thought that the large polygons were just a large version of mud or dessication cracks — and maybe they are — but this type of patterened ground is often associated with periglacial areas — though these weren't found in a periglacial region, more like an upland steppe or desert area. These muddy areas have recently been exposed to repeated freezing and thawing (winter and spring); temperatures will reach 90°F or higher come summer.

So, do these pictures show two generations of mud cracks — large and small, early and late — or are two processes at work here? (This is not my "two generations" post; that post will probably come up on Friday, unless I get impatient and post it tomorrow.)

Our New Garden 2010 Version (with a Crystallography Lesson)

We've been gestating (incubating?) a garden indoors for a couple weeks, using a seed-starting kit, and this is what the garden looked like a few days ago after it snowed. (We had started moving the little sprouts outside during the day, using a plastic storage bin as a mini-greenhouse.) Note the chocolate mints, which were planted in the ground last year - they are now in pots, having been taken out of the ground so they wouldn't take over the entire garden.
This morning Two days ago on May Day, the garden was looking like this.
The little sprouts, still in their original heater box get some water.
Then, after being transplanted to their new, roomier accomodations, they get some more water.
Here's our experiment in cubic closest packing, also called face-centered cubic packing (fcc). Successful cubic closest packing would have given us 7 rows of 4 per bin.
That didn't really work, because the rows stuck out too far on the sides, so we went back to body-centered cubic packing (bcc), which gave us 6 rows of 4 per bin.

(Surely only a mineralogist would think of these things.)

Seen in the Field: Mud Cracks with Snow and Cone-shaped Graupel

Callan Bentley at Mountain Beltway has had a couple posts up recently about mud cracks. And, not being one to pass up a possible mini-meme, I thought I'd start with these: snow on top of dessicated, somewhat fluffy mud. These are from about a week ago, after a graupel storm.
The graupel storm began with agglomerations of tiny round balls and other snow crystals, then this strange, conical graupel started falling.
I've never seen conical graupel before - the ice crystals (snow) are elongated down the length of the little cones, radiating outward from each cone's point. It's as though the cones were once round graupel balls with the ice crystals radiating outward from the center of the balls. I don't know how they formed. Any ideas?