Lassen: View of Lakes

Lakes in the far distance, looking southeast.

From just southeast of the summit near Lassen Peak on Highway 89, a great view of two California lakes comes into view. The stitched-together photo is stitched shows an apparently disconnected highway in the foreground; what you are really seeing is a couple of very sharp switchbacks going downhill past the outcrops of volcanic rocks in the closer foreground.

Location of above photo: the hairpin turns SSE of the summit south of Lassen Peak, on Highway 89.  From TNM 2.0 Viewer, courtesy USGS.

The lakes are Mountain Meadows Reservoir AKA Walker Lake (MSRMaps location), near Westwood, CA, and Lake Almanor (MSRMaps location), near Chester, CA.

Two lakes, with Lassen Volcanic National Monument in the upper left. From TNM 2.0 Viewer, courtesy USGS.

Both are part of the electrified chain of lakes and reservoirs along the Feather River and its tributaries, which goes all the way downstream to Lake Oroville and Oroville Dam.

A somewhat enlarged view of the two lakes.

Mountain Meadows Reservoir is in the distance on the left; Lake Almanor, a large lake, fills the slightly closer distance from the middle into the right of the photo. Note the trees on the far right.

Possible fire scars from the Chips fire.

In this last photo, we've gone all the way to the right (west) of Lake Almanor; the trees on the far right in the previous photo are now left of center. Above the patch of trees right of center, a steep hillside and part of a table mesa have brownish slopes that may have been denuded by the Chips fire in the late summer of this year.

Sulfur (?) at Sulphur Works

Minerals and other growths at Sulphur Works.

Once again we are at Sulphur Works, Lassen Volcanic National Park, on the side of the road near the boiling mud pot, where MOH and I spotted some very neat greenish yellow crystals, which might be sulfur (upper right, center, and lower left).

A somewhat closer view of crystals in the upper right of the first photo.

The crystals seem a little long and pointed to me for sulfur, and copiapite, a sulfate known to occur in the area, usually occurs in scaly masses or crusts, so copiapite seems unlikely.

Greenish yellow crystals from the lower left of the first photo.

Because of the location right next to the boiling mud pot, I couldn't just walk over to examine the crystals. People have been known to break through thin crusts at the hydrothermal areas in the Lassen area, burning themselves, so I didn't even think about it!

Close up of pointed, needle-like crystals.

These crystals may be elongate versions of the Sulfur no. 1 shape shown at mindat.org. If you can't see the java applet at mindat (for some reason, I can't see it at the moment), go here to Sulfur at The Mineral & Gemstone Kingdom; it's the "Sharp Bipyramid" on the right. Or, view the applet at the source, smorf, by searching for, or using the dropdown menu to get to Sulfur. It's the second of the four crystals listed.

Photo examples of similar Sulfur crystals: 1) elongated crystals from the Jemez Mountains, NM, and 2) needle-like crystals at TheodoreGray.com, also shown here.

So, is it Sulfur or something else?

UPDATE 14Oct2012: In the comments, Ron Schott added a similar picture of Sulfur crystals from a fumarole at Nisyros Volcano, Greece, if anything, even more needle-like than these.

Related Posts:
Mud Pot at Sulphur Works
Fumarole at Sulphur Works
Views of Lassen

Close Encounters: Coyote on the Summit; Coyotes in a Wash

Coyote appears near the top of the summit.

I have to admit, I rarely have had a camera handy when I've come close to coyotes out in the field—or, rather, when they have come close to me. And I didn't have one this time, either: these are MOH's pictures of one healthy-looking coyote near the top of our current hiking hill in the Sonoma Range.

Coyote moves on down the ridgeline.

Most of the times I've seen coyotes up close and personal, they have come to investigate me rather than the other way around. Once, I looked up from taking a stream sediment sample in the middle of nowhere somewhere north or northeast of Hot Creek Canyon in south-central Nevada, and three coyotes were standing 20 feet from me across the dry wash, staring at me. Maybe they were wondering what I was doing out there, as I sometimes did when the temperatures approached or exceeded 100° F. All my stuff was in the shade of a fairly tall tree (by Nevada standards, that's any tree you can't jump over). The coyotes were just barely out of the bushes and small trees on the other side of the wash.

I stared back at them. We held a mutual staring contest while I considered whether they were dangerous. Were they rabid? No, they looked plenty healthy, of average size. Two may have been smaller than the one, possibly it was a small family or pack. Were they considering me as a possible dinner? I have no idea, but I considered my options, then carefully bent over and grabbed my two and a half pound sledge, which was leaning against my pack.

They still hadn't moved. I moved the hammer into a more threatening position and walked toward them. As I stepped from the shade into the sun, they quickly disappeared into the brush. I never saw them again, but as I walked down the wash toward my helicopter pick-up point awaiting me at the end of the day, I wondered whether they had followed me, and I turned around to look back more than once.

Accretionary Wedge #50: The Fire at Field Camp

I had been thinking about doing a repost for this wedge—Accretionary Wedge #50: Field Camp/Trip Moments, being hosted by Evelyn Mervine over at Georneys—but realizing that the wedge is supposed to be about *one* fun moment, song, etc, put me into a tiny bit of a quandary  For me, field camp was a long, long time ago. By and large, many of the specifics of my memories of field camp have faded, and some (many?) of the specifics really shouldn't be reported online because they involve other people (plus or minus myself) doing things that shouldn't be reported without the permission of those involved, or shouldn't, perhaps, be reported at all. Not that we were the rowdiest bunch of field camp attendees of all time, or anything; I'm sure we weren't. As for fun field *trip* moments...well, there have been many, and a lot of those fall into the same category of things NSFO (not safe for online). I'll leave you to your imaginations. Or maybe I should just post sometime about shooting and rock throwing contests I've won out in the field...

Back to field camp. One fun or memorable moment or time [there, I've done it: used "fun" as an adjective three times now!] was at our last mapping project in the Swisshelm Mountains of Arizona, helping to fight a range or brush fire that had broken out across part of the map area. It was an exciting thing for a new field geologist to experience; at the same time, there was a certain tension involved: would we succeed? would our map area be ruined? (there were good and bad points to this latter possibility); would we get burned or injured in anyway? For the latter consideration, I think we were mostly in the invincible category at the time and probably didn't think very much about the danger to ourselves or about our overall safety, which was not treated as a huge deal back then the way it is now.

I was mostly involved in shoveling dirt onto hot spots around the edges, and in helping to move water containers to the lines. It was hot and smokey, the visibility was low, and my memory is tinged with orange. Memorable aspects of the day: we joined together in a common cause, we were fed dinner by ranchers also involved in the fire fighting, and the fire was stopped. I'm not sure whether we really cared that much about the range fire, at least not as much as the local ranchers or other fire fighters did, and we made jokes about hoping that the fire would at least burn down the cholla forest located on one of the east-west spurs of the north-south mountain—hoping at long last to be able to map that part of the spur, or to at least be able to walk through the area without massive attacks from stray cholla balls.

No such luck, though. The fire burned through the forest, blackening the cholla and dropping cholla balls all over the area, if anything making the forest more impassable than before.

Afterward, our mapping continued, under what turned out to be more difficult, not less difficult, circumstances: The limestone units and contacts in the upper hills had been reddened and obscured by fire retardant dropped from bombers.

P.S. There is some confusion between jumping cholla and teddy bear cholla, with the former being more likely to grab onto you and being restricted to the deep southwest (California and Arizona deserts), and the latter being somewhat likely to grab onto you and being found as far north as the Gilbert mining district northwest of Tonopah, NV.

This may be a jumping cholla rather than a teddy bear cholla, judging from the pictures shown at the previous USDA links. Keep this video in mind if you ever hear of anyone "flaming" chollas. It might be a case of revenge.

UPDATE 5Oct12: Possibly we stayed here, at Faraway Ranch. The location looks good, the view of the area on Google Maps looks okay, although I can't tell if the buildings are right, and the pond might be gone.

In the morning...

In the morning after I wake up—while I'm drinking my first, second, and maybe third cup of coffee—I often think of things to write for the blog, how to write them, maybe even what pictures to use.

I also think of things to write while I'm on the way to work, bouncing around in the front seat of a pickup truck (actually, the ride is usually pretty smooth and solid, I just thought bouncing just sounded better). A moving truck is not a great place for writing (there is *some* bouncing), especially because all I have is my semi-smart phone; perhaps if I had a tablet...

My thoughts while riding or driving into work typically run along the lines of...well, maybe it's time for some drilling stories...let's see, there was the guy who yelled and threw things when he was mad at his helpers, which was almost all the time. Ugh. Or, there's a story or two floating around about drill rigs brought onto staked claims in order to make a discovery before the company that owned the claims, thereby being able to, hopefully, make claim to at least some of the already staked ground.

And then, once again, I'm back here at my computer, it's early morning, and the briefest hints of coffee are trying to course through my veins, trying to rev my brain. Ideas are at a standstill; I don't get very far...until I'm back on the road and the ideas start popping. Another story, or general story idea, will come into my head: mud and getting stuck stories. Hey, there's one just over that not-so distant hill! It happened not long ago, and, remarkably, I have a few photos for it! And not too much farther down that road and over the next hill or two to the south, there's a mud without stuckness story...and that leads to a more typical claim jumping story...which leads to another claim jumping story out of sight from this road but down a road I was writing about last fall and winter before I got distracted by our recent move.

But then, I'm sure I'm missing something...maybe it's the details...because when these ideas start while I'm on the road (any road will do, me driving or sitting as a passenger, either way), other ideas come in and crowd out and confuse the first ideas, which then sometimes include other people's stories: other accounts with drillers, other encounters with mud, other overstaking problems. Which story to tell? What details to use? And, without a tablet, and even with a small notebook, how will these stories make it from barely incipient idea to fully written account?

One story would be about the driller (and set of helpers?) that got thrown off a job down in the south-central Mojave one spring (I hope it was spring and not summer) for showing up to work drunk and carrying a small flask of whiskey or JD. The driller that came to replace him had an interesting time using one of the two only pay phones in town—and so did I, although I used the other of the two pay phones in town—but the guy that had real problems with the one pay phone, which was sitting there on the corner of Main Street and the cross street that formed the junction that made the town, was one of our claim stakers, who was out there running a soil grid across the claims he was staking. And his problems with the pay phone had something to do with the druggy nature of the town, the drugs being the second main reason for the town, the first reason being the intersection of two sub-major (major in the Mojave) roads.

And so the ideas come and go, just like that, while I'm sitting here in the morning partly coffeed up, glancing constantly at the clock so I won't be late: sometimes the ideas get written down, sometimes they don't. These kinds of stories generally don't have photos to go with them, and the Mojave stories are not likely to have photos any time soon or in any systematic fashion: collecting the photos would take almost as long as the original years of exploration.

And now, with one last chug of ever-so-good nice-and-hot coffee, I leave this post behind and start getting ready for work.