Can You Believe We Are Still Doing This?!

No, not blogging...

...attending the annual Consultants and Independents Hospitality Suite at the Northwest Mining Convention. Apparently the first one was in 1986. Yes, those are 26 X's. Count 'em. A couple independent or consulting geologists started this bash back in 1986, to show that you didn't have to be big to throw a great party. Previously, the big parties had always been thrown every year by the famous, now defunct, S&D.

I don't have a full set of the mugs. Darn it!

The NWMA holds its convention the first week of December every year, and already has the announcement up for the 2012 meeting. The meeting site location alternates between Reno and Spokane. The next one will be in Spokane.

Finally Some Snow... and Icicles!

Icicles!

It's been a pretty bleak winter as far as snow and precip goes, with an early largish snow dump in early October, followed by... a lot of nothing other than some few and far between minimal snow showers and some minor snow in early to mid December. We've had cold mornings off and on, nothing unusual there, but we've had way more sun and unusually warm days compared to the previous four winters that MOH and I have spent here at our little house in the hinterland of eastern Nevada. This winter, we've had highs in the 50s to upper 70s in October, highs mostly in the 40s and 50s in November, highs mostly in the 30s to upper 50s in December and January, with four days in a row above 60°F right after New Year's day. So far, we've only had one high in the 20s, on December 5th, and no highs in the teens or lower. We have had a few scattered lows below 0°F, but nothing approaching our usual number of sub-zero nights. Consequently, what little snow we have gotten has not stuck around. Lowlands have been completely dry, midlands even to 7000 feet have been dry, and uplands have been largely snow free, at least below 9000 feet or higher. Elm beetles actually made a comeback last week; they must have thought it was spring. Hopefully not.

A couple days ago, it snowed! Six inches fell one day, two inches the next, and at least another inch fell the third day. Now, we're back in melting mode, creating what seem like the first icicles of the year, though maybe we had some back in October.

More icicles, including one making a fish-hook-like shape.

We don't have the usual ice field on the north side of our little house; instead, we have dry soil and gravel beneath a few inches of snow. Maybe we'll get a little more precip in the next day or two (hopefully not as freezing rain).

Alaska! Send us your snow!!

Yes, We Met in SeaTac

"I'm by the ak ticket counters. See you there!" This text message was awaiting me while I was still on the plane — the return flight from my Xmas trip to Alaska — immediately after landing in Seattle. Excitement much? Yes!

"Not quite at the N gates, so will be a few minutes!" Darn, the plane hadn't yet pulled into one of the North Terminal gates, so I was in an immobile plane, stuck with all the other passengers, waiting. Finally a gate opened up and we pulled in. Then, there was the long trek to the interterminal train, the ride on the train, a hike through the main terminal because I got off at the first stop, and a walk out past security to the old main part of the terminal, to the ticket counter. I was practically running!

And there she was: Dana Hunter of En Tequila Es Verdad! I recognized her right away.
I was starving, having not bought any breakfast on the plane, so we went to the first little bar-diner, ordered lunch with wine and beer. And we talked. And talked. After a while we moved to another little bar-diner, a darker one, and that's when we took each other's picture. The second place was dark, so my photos, except for this first one, turned out a little blurry.
Dana, who was going to have to drive away from the airport, had switched to coke. I stuck with the Alaskan Amber, which seemed rather sweet after drinking mostly Alaskan IPA while in Alaska. The amber is proof of my presence at the blogger meetup (as are the pictures I took).
Too bad we didn't get pictures at the first place we stopped, but we were too busy talking — about sci-fi, geology, blogging & writing, cats & chickens, work, life, and pennyroyal tea. Maybe we'll get more time at our next meetup, which will hopefully be a geology field trip.

The Geographic Center

While returning from a recent recon trip out in the middle of nowhere, driving back to Highway 50 on another endless Nevada dirt road — in this case the Monitor Valley Road, AKA the Old Belmont or Belmont Road — MOH and I came across this sign marking the approximate location of the Geographic Center of Nevada.
I say approximate because several different lat-lon locations can be found here and there on the web, with two USGS locations being about 0.75 to 1.5 miles northeast of the sign.
The sign is at the junction of the Monitor Valley Road and a side road going east into Wallace Canyon in the Monitor Range.

Points on Google Earth: Geographic Center (the sign), USGS 1 (located in 1962, and USGS 2 (located in 2003); click to enlarge.

The Monitor Valley or Belmont Road cuts northeastward across the Google Earth view, with the dirt road to Wallace Canyon heading east (right) from the point marking the location of Geographic Center of Nevada sign. Highway 50 is off in the distance to the north, cutting east-west beyond low hills of the northern Monitor and Toquima Ranges.

USGS 1: the 1962 USGS point for the center of Nevada is at N39° 19' 11.7" and W116° 38' 13.3".

USGS 2: the 2003 USGS point for the center of Nevada is at N39° 19' 48.0" and W116° 37' 56.0".

The sign on the side of the Monitor Valley or Belmont Road is at N39° 18' 44.5" and W116° 38' 52.9".

The two USGS points are marked on the ground with rebar and a notice, and a point about half way in between is marked with orange cones, as shown here and here. To arrive at the site, you can drive Highway 50 east from Austin, NV, for about 26 miles, until you come to a sign for "Belmont Road." Turn right on that wide dirt road, and go south. About 14 miles of driving will bring you to the sign and the fairly main side road to Wallace Canyon. A half mile before that, a smaller dirt road cuts east toward the Monitor Range; that road will bring you closer to the actual geographic center, with the 1962 location being about half a mile east of the main road and about 500 feet north of the side road. The 2003 location is about 3900 feet northeast of that.

It was quite cold while MOH and I were there — we thought it might have been 10°F or lower about an hour earlier — and the sun was going down. We didn't try to find the actual center of Nevada; we instead took pictures of each other standing in front of the sign and called it good enough.

Geographic center of Nevada on Google Earth; click to enlarge. All three points show up as one at this scale.

After getting back in the truck, we rolled north, making it to Highway 50 just as the sun was setting.

Read More:
Nevada's Geographic Center at Backyard Traveler by Rich Moreno

Journey to Nevada's Center at Nevada Landmarks

The Geographic Center of Nevada at CmdrMark.com

LFD is Going Dark on January 18th

Looking for Detachment will be going dark tomorrow, January 18th, in solidarity with Reddit, Boing Boing, Wikipedia, and other sites protesting the SOPA and PIPA bills. Read more on my Stop Censorship Header | Stop SOPA post.

I will be doing this (provided it actually works) by changing my Blogger template in the following way. Just before the tag, which currently looks like this:
I will be adding this script:

<script>
       window.location = "http://sopa-blackout-template.blogspot.com/";
</script>

The template will then look like this:
I'm doing this rather than replacing my template with the blackout template, for simplicity's sake. I'll simply erase that bit of code from my template at the end of the protest. At LFD, this blackout will run for 24 hours beginning 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (12:00 am January 18 EST or 9:00 pm January 17 PST), running until 0:50 UTC on Thursday, January 19 (12:00 am January 19 EST or 9:00 pm January 18 PST).

Thanks to Sara J Chipps (although I'm redirecting to a different URL), App, who created the SOPA blackout template, Robert David Graham at Errata Security, and Jae Kim at Future of Social Network.