Finding a Thesis: Farther into the Palmetto Mountains

Magruder Mountain from Lida Summit.

The sun went down on that 1976 campsite perched somewhere on the south side of the Palmetto Mountains, and I eventually fell asleep, curled up in my barely adequate sleeping bag on the ground near my '76 Opel. Fortunately, by this time on my thesis hunt the evenings were almost balmy, so I didn't freeze the way I had during that earlier, colder stop a few miles north of Belmont. Was this trip later in the spring?—or was it really that much warmer at the same elevation but 75 miles to the south?

I arose the next morning and dinked around a few nearby workings (possibly near the Blue Dick Mine) while I grabbed a quick bite. Then I once again got out my paper topo sheets—this time it would be the Goldfield 2° sheet and the Magruder Mountain and Lida Wash 15' maps—and determined my course for the day. I would at least plan to get up to some of the prospects and workings near Excelsior Spring, and I'd try to hit a few prospects to the northwest near the Palmetto Mine.

A portion of the Magruder Mtn 15' quad courtesy of the USGS
via their Map Locator & Downloader.

I relaxed a bit as I drove down the alluvial fan road, feeling not nearly as tense as I had the day before, and then I made my way up and over Lida Summit, which sits at an elevation of 7460 feet (although it apparently was at 7400 feet as recently as 2004!).

Lida Summit looking west.

The view looks about 55 miles across the relatively low hills of the Sylvania Mountains, across intervening Eureka Valley, across a low northern part of the Inyo Mountains, and across Owens Valley south of Big Pine, at the distant peaks of the Sierra Nevada. The highest peaks in the view, toward the right approaching a dark hill beyond and below the sign, are Mount Pinchot at 13,494 feet (4113 m) and Striped Mountain at 13,179 feet (4017 m).

When I had planned my stops early in the morning, I didn't know I'd be passing by the old site of Palmetto, formerly a silver-mining community, now a complete ghost town.

The Palmetto historical marker (also read it here), in front of an old millsite.

The rock work of the millsite.

Abandoned stone building.

Looking through the old ruin up toward the highest point of the Palmetto Mountains, 9285 feet (often called the "Blue Dick Benchmark").

Both Peakbagger and SummitPost list the elevation of the Blue Dick Benchmark as 9289 feet (2831 m). SummitPost has a good story about oldtimer Blue Dick Hartman, for whom the nearby Blue Dick Mine was named. A somewhat more detailed version of him faking his own death can be read awkwardly in this Newspapers.com view of the 1954 Tucson Daily Citizen.

Another view from the ruin (Google Maps location).

And so, on that long-ago day, I pulled myself away from the site of Palmetto and drove up a good, bladed road into the main part of the Palmetto mining district. The sun was warm as it shone through the windows of my non–air-conditioned, little blue car. I wound my way upward into the piñon-juniper zone, which to this day often feels hotter to me than the lowlands of the same area. Maybe the air is stagnant in the trees, maybe it's something about expecting more coolth from the shade than could possibly be created by these desert trees, maybe it's the sun reflecting off the dirt of the road and the dirt between the trees. I'm not sure, but I still don't look forward to hikes in the trees, especially those of the juniper persuasion, preferring the sagebrush zone below or the alpine zone above.

I stopped at a place, maybe at the end of one of the roads, where there was an old shack (or two? or three?), a wooden framed adit or two, many rusty tin cans, a couple shot-up 55 gallon drums, old and new shards of glass, garbage and rubbish, jumbles and scrap—in sum, the usual stuff and old junk often found in old mining areas, always variable from place, always worth looking through or at least taking pictures of. I ate lunch and then wandered around, looking at the old workings and mine dumps, finding a boat load of orange shaly chips, probably float from the Ordovician Palmetto Formation.

As for the broad geology of the area, I'll try to get into that next time...

Previous Posts in this Series:
Thesis: Finding an Area
Finding a Thesis: Battle Mountain to Austin to Gabbs
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line Road
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line to Belmont
Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District
Finding a Thesis: A Joshua Tree Aside
Finding a Thesis: Into the Palmetto Mountains

Finding a Thesis: Into the Palmetto Mountains

Looking southeast from Goldfield Summit. Stonewall Mountain is barely peeking through the gap.

South from Goldfield, the country drops off fairly abruptly, as if preparing the traveler for their eventual departure from the Great Basin, which would happen about 127 miles to the southeast and 3020 feet downhill if the traveler continued in a southerly direction, approximately here at an obscure pass north of Vegas. In other directions, egress from the Great Basin would occur about 104 miles to the ESE and 4741 feet slightly uphill (downhill, uphill, downhill, and uphill several times) at Hancock Summit on S.R. 375, the E.T. Highway, or about 79 miles southwest and 7480 feet uphill (downhill, then uphill, then downhill, then back uphill) at "Ed Lane Peak" on the crest of the Sierra. These measurements would be as the crow flies.

The country dropping off south of Goldfield Summit. The mountains in the far distance are the northern part of the Amargosa Range on the Nevada-California boundary at the edge of Death Valley. 

By road from Goldfield Summit to Lida Junction, Highway 95 falls away 1401 feet in about 13 miles (a 2% grade); from Goldfield Summit to Beatty, it sinks another 1389 feet in about 52 miles (0.5% grade). About 86 more miles south of Beatty, the road arrives at its intersection with the Great Basin Divide, located at a vague point on an alluvial fan approximately corresponding with the junction of 95 and S.R. 156. The grade from Beatty to this point on 95 north of Vegas is almost nil. It's no wonder that the decline south of Goldfield seems noteworthy.

Lida Junction and the now defunct Cottontail Ranch.

The Cottontail Ranch was for sale when I took this picture in August, 2010. Other photos from that era can be viewed here.

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Back to finding a thesis: Upon leaving the Kondyke District back in 1976, I drove south through Goldfield and then west on old Highway 3 (now S.R. 266), a paved road that shoots off of Highway 95 at Lida Junction toward the Palmetto Mountains, my next stop.

The road to Lida.

After about 19 miles of paved road, I came to the small town of Lida. Lida, currently inhabited by a smallish number of ranchers and probable retirees, is often referred to as a ghost town because of its old, abandoned buildings and townsite dating back to its short heyday in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

An old building in Lida (Google Maps location).

Populated areas, even those with a very small number of people, kind of spooked me back then – and I continue to prefer unpopulated areas when doing field work – so I made some hurried, almost furtive passes through town and then turned northward onto a dirt road, heading for one of the prospects I planned to visit the next day. The road ascended a fairly steep alluvial fan on the south side of the Palmetto Mountains. I'm no longer sure which road I took, and though I remember it being one that took off from the highway near Lida, it could have been one of a few on the west side of Lida Summit.

I make my way up the fan: I’m on a narrow, two-track dirt road in my '72 Opel. I cross a sand wash and drive past a cottonwood tree, at which point the road turns sharply and pushes itself upward. Sitting in my Opel, I am below the tops of head-high sagebrush. There is nowhere to turn around should I need to, and I’m not sure I could back through the turn and sand near the cottonwood tree. As I proceed up the fan, I notice a light-colored 4WD pickup coming down the road toward me. A little apprehension sets in: other than continuing on this road without stopping, there isn’t much I can do. I’m sure that if I stop, I will not be able to start up the hill again, but will have to attempt backing down. I look nervoulsy for places to pull over, but there aren’t any, just more and more waist- to head-high sagebrush. As I approach the truck, it pulls off the road and stops, flattening the big sage without effort. I smile and wave a little, and drive on by, not stopping. What could these more experienced people think of a young woman driving up this road in a clearly unsuitable car?

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At this juncture, while I’m driving past the pulled-over truck, it’s worth pointing out that there is a thing called The Code of the West, which consists of a variable number of generally unwritten rules. One of the codes is about not asking where other people are from or much of anything about their past. Back then, I took to this first Code of the West – "Don't inquire into a person's past. Take the measure of a man [sic] for what he is today." – quite heartily: I didn’t like being asked questions about myself, and I didn’t like talking about myself. This part of the code, developed in the time of the early west when people would escape misfortune, debt, and calamity in the east by coming west and making some clean start, could allow me to continue to be semi-anonymous even amongst people I knew, and allowed me to go unnoticed, something I preferred back then.

Another, possibly newer part of the code says that the person going uphill has the right-of-way. This rule applies whether you are hiking, riding a horse, driving a carriage, or driving a vehicle. It’s especially true on dirt roads and in all mountainous country. It is incumbent upon the person going downhill to find a place to pull-over or to back up to the last pullout point. I mention this not lightly. A few years ago in northern Idaho, I found that the locals would not give way to a non-local going uphill (me) under any circumstances, even on private land not belonging to them but leased to the company I was working for. Possibly the CA plates I was runnning didn’t help matters any, and so I vowed to retrieve some old AK or NV plates for use if I ever went back. I don’t know if that would have corrected their rude, non-western behavior.

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Back to the Palmettos. I continued up the road, not knowing if I would come to a dead end or if I would find a turnaround point. At the rocky base of the mountains, the road turned sharply to the left, culminating in a flat area large enough for me to turn around by making a full circle rather than by making one of those awkward, multi-point turns. A charred circle of rocks marked the place as a campsite, so I gratefully settled in, ending the day on a flat point overlooking the valley and mountain to the south. The campsite was more comfortable than my previous one near Belmont, and the weather was warmer. I watched the sun set while eating a camp-made dinner.

The view from my campsite may have looked something like this before the sun went down, although it was taken from Lida Summit, looking east.

I would spend most of the next day looking at various prospects on the south side of the Palmettos, driving up this road and then that. Fortunately, the roads had been bladed, so I wouldn't have to concern myself with the logistics of stopping, backing up, or turning around.

To be continued...

Previous Posts in this Series:
Thesis: Finding an Area
Finding a Thesis: Battle Mountain to Austin to Gabbs
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line Road
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line to Belmont
Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District
Finding a Thesis: A Joshua Tree Aside

NOTE: Some of these reconnoiters may have occurred during more than one trip, although the trips would make one fairly nice loop or out-and-back from my back-then location north of Reno.

Finding a Thesis: A Joshua Tree Aside

South of the Klondyke district (our previous stop on this journey) and just north of Goldfield, one reaches one of the northernmost populations of Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) — or the northernmost population, depending on what range map you use. These unusual plants continue southward past Goldfield toward and beyond Beatty. They occur in dense stands or forests in several places, notably along Highway 93 approaching Caliente, Nevada, and in a few places in the Mojave Desert of California.

To take the pictures I've included here, I drove off Highway 95 onto the Silver Peak Road about three to four miles north of Goldfield. Joshua trees are scattered all along the five to six miles between 95 and Alkali, Nevada.

Looking NNE toward Tonopah and the Klondyke Hills.

Joshua tree with Hasbrouk Peak to the left (reddish hill underlain by Tertiary volcanic rocks) and the Klondyke Hills to the right (brownish hills in front of the volcanic rocks of the southern San Antonio Range).

Joshua trees, especially those near Goldfield, make me think of my Former Mining Company days and Roquemore, who was the head of the Nevada District. (We were divided into four districts for exploration and management purposes, with Nevada being covered by one district’s worth of geologists. Our district, the Western District, covered all Pacific states up and down the coast from SoCal to Alaska, and we claimed Hawaii, though we were never lucky enough to be stationed there). Roquemore told me — years after my thesis-hunting pass through the Goldfield area when we were exploring Mineral Ridge near Silver Peak as part of a Nevada-Western joint venture — that Dusty, a dark-haired young woman working in the Nevada District, always waved at Joshua trees every time she saw one; she would wave while saying, “Hi.” Dusty had claimed that Native American tribes, or a particular tribe, believed the Joshua trees held or were the manifestations of the spirits of their ancestors, an assertion that I haven’t been able to verify by Googling.

While listening to this story on that day gone by, we drove past another two dozen Joshua trees, and Rock waved out the window, saying, “Hi,” in a immitation high-pitched voice.

Wild horses amongst the Joshua trees.

I'm not sure what the Nevada District geo-types were doing in Joshua tree country. We of the Western District would later claim as ours all areas where chollas could be found, and gave this new territory, which went as far north as the Gilbert mining district in the Monte Cristo Range west of Tonopah, the name “Cholla District.” Possibly the Nevada geos were out looking at something down near Caliente; possibly they had ventured into Goldfield, Silver Peak, or even as far south as Beatty. Nevertheless, every time I see a Joshua tree, I think of Rock saying hi in that high voice, I think of Dusty’s story about the spirits of ancestors in Joshua trees, and I find myself, on occasion, waving.

The Finding A Thesis series will continue onward, past Goldfield and into the Palmetto Mountains.

Read more about Joshua trees at DesertUSA.

Previous Posts in this Series:
Thesis: Finding an Area
Finding a Thesis: Battle Mountain to Austin to Gabbs
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line Road
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line to Belmont
Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District

Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District

Some of you might remember, back in the distant past of this blog, a time when I was on my seemingly endless thesis-hunting journey, and I was just about to leave Belmont, the silver mining district and small town in central Nevada:

"I finished up looking around the old dumps, headed back over the pass, coasted downhill through Manhattan and back to Highway 8A, and then I turned left, to cruise south toward Route 6. My route would take me through Tonopah, past the Divide district, into the Palmetto Mountains, and on to Silver Peak."

I thought that Belmont had looked rather interesting, perhaps the most interesting of the areas I had seen so far, its dumps covered with quartz vein material containing as-yet unidentified ore minerals (unidentified to me, that is), but I nevertheless moved on toward my next target, the Klondyke mining district (AKA Klondike district, AKA Southern Klondyke district), an historic silver producing area not far south of Tonopah.

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When I drove into the Klondyke district back in 1976, the only existing maps for the area consisted of the 1962 Goldfield 2° sheet (an AMS sheet) and the 1952 Mud Lake 15' map (in this case, also an AMS sheet; see more about these maps at an earlier blog post in this series). Both maps show U.S. Highway 95 on an old alignment that took it just west of the Klondyke area. These were the days before 95 was rerouted around Hasbrouk Peak in the 1970s (the route change appears to have taken place sometime between the issuance of the 1976-77 and 1978-79 Nevada road maps), and so the maps showed the Highway 95 I knew at the time. And, continuing with the theme of my thesis hunt taking me to, through, and by areas I would come to know more about in the future, it turns out that Hasbrouk Peak is essentially a small hill of gold, one that Former Mining Company would come to drill in the mid or late 1980s.

The 2° sheet shows very little detail; the 15’ map shows a little more:

Goldfield 2° sheet from the USGS via MSRMaps. The hills in the north-central part of the map comprise part of the Tonopah-Divide district, with Tonopah just off the map to the north. The Klondyke district sits in the center of the map in an area marked "Numerous mines."

A portion of the Mud Lake, NV 15' map, via the USGS Map Locator & Downloader. The hills of interest are nearly dead center. Only a few of many prospect pits, cuts, trenches, adits, and shafts are shown.

These maps make it look like it should be fairly easy to get to the low hills of the Klondyke district, but because of a highway right-of-way fence that blocked most dirt roads shown on the old maps, I ended up driving back and forth several times before finding the right road. I’m not really sure how long it took me to find the right road, nor do I know now which road finally took me through the fence, but I do know that I didn't get out of my ’72 Opel, grab the bolt cutters that I didn’t know to carry with me back then, and cut the fence, so I must have found a way around the fence. The old maps offer me no clues, nor do easily accessible air photos.

I did finally arrive at the white, pale orange, and brownish low hills of the area, hills underlain by Paleozoic carbonate and siliclastic units intruded by granite and alaskite.

Vertical beds!

The oldtimers had found enriched silver in quartz veins cutting the sedimentary formations, at least partly below a thrust fault. Chlorargyrite, a secondary silver mineral, was reported to be the dominant ore mineral, something that would have been key to my advisor, a tall lanky man whose interests ran to silver prospecting, silver discoveries, drilling silver properties, and secondary silver minerals (all things silver).

I banged on a few rocks, shook my head with wonder a few times, looked around the dumps for old bottles and such, and went back to the paved highway.

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I revisited the Klondyke area a few years back while on my way into western Esmeralda County to check out a land sale. I got onto the old highway easily, and I nearly immediately found a decent road heading into the low hills. The old right-of-way fence was gone (or moved to the new alignment), and the turn into the area was quite obvious.

Looking north along old U.S. 95 toward Tonopah.

Looking south down old U.S. 95 toward Goldfield.

This turnoff to the low hills of the Klondyke district is obvious, and the fence has been removed.

A lizard!

The partly marbleized carbonates suggest a complex history of deformation and veining.

A piece of jasperoid shows a reddish brown color that I now think of as fairly typical of base metal or silver – base metal districts.

Old junk and mine workings and dumps. There are two shadowed cuts on a low hill in the distance to the left of the 55 gal drum, and a small cut in the dark area to the left of that.

This is the small cut in the dark area mentioned above. Ooh, what’s that I spot just below the bush on the right?

A sample tag. Someone has been here!

Anyone want to claim this sample number?

I headed back to the highway, realizing that I knew a lot more than I did on my first visit to the area, when I really wan't that sure of what I was looking at. I checked out the old alignments once again, and found this particular section that had gone entirely to dirt.

The old alignment joins the current alignment just beyond the first hill, and goes off toward Goldfield.

I then rejoined the active alignment of U.S. 95 and steered my way south toward Goldfield and beyond to the turnoff to the Palmetto Mountains.

Previous Posts in this Series:
Thesis: Finding an Area
Finding a Thesis: Battle Mountain to Austin to Gabbs
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line Road
Finding a Thesis: Pole Line to Belmont

Way Too Much Smoke: Volcanoes (and Rivers and Ridges) in the Pacific Northwest

Mt. Jefferson

There I was minding my own business while flying north from RNO to SEA (that is to say, I was reading a thick book and trying to ignore a seatmate while crammed against the window near the rear of a Q400), when I looked out (to the east) and spotted the peak of an Oregon volcano sticking out through what I first thought was a low, thick cloud cover. I grabbed a few quick shots through a badly spotted and smeared window, while rapidly revising my reckoning about the cloud bank: no clouds, just a very dense blanket of smoke.

Whereas I first estimated I was somewhere over central Oregon south of Sisters or Bend, it soon became apparent that I was probably a little farther north than I thought — and it turns out I was between Sisters and Portland looking at Mt. Jefferson (first photo).

Mt. Hood

The photo above shows Mt. Hood barely sticking up above the dense smoke bank. Hard to say exactly, but it looks like the smoke is about 10,000 feet thick! Hood's peak sits at an elevation of 11,240 feet, and its south shoulder sits at somewhat above 10,400 or 10,600 feet (depending on what part of the shoulder we're actually looking at); the Portland outliers of Troutdale and Springdale in the foreground have elevations of about 100 feet and 300 feet, respectively. As a geographical point of interest, the larger, streamlined island on the north side of the wide Columbia River is Reed Island. The river beyond the island fades gradually and then disappears abruptly in the distance.

Mt. St. Helens

My first view of Mt. St. Helens was of what I call the back side (the south side). It's clearly not an ordinary Cascade volcano by today's standard of nice, symmetrical peaks, although several Cascade volcanoes are known to have created lateral blasts like the one St. Helens produced in May, 1980 — and maybe all or most have done something like that sometime in the past.

Mt. St. Helens

This second shot of Mt. St. Helens (above) shows the South Fork of the Toutle River in the foreground and Spirit Lake in the background.

Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams

Mt. Adams can be seen in the distance, barely sticking up above the smoke, even though it reaches an elevation of 12,277 feet!

North Fork Toutle River

This view of the Toutle River (Google Maps location) shows an area just above the Toutle River Sediment Retention Structure. The berg of St. Helens sits across from a green, tear-dropped-shaped "island" that is marked as hill 11227 on some topographic maps (e.g. this one at the USGS TNM 2.0 Viewer).

Smoke amid the low hills between Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Ranier

One last look at Mt. St. Helens

Mt. Ranier

Mt. Ranier, the tallest Cascade volcano at an elevation of 14,410 feet, rises above the smoke more than any of the others. The clouds obscuring its peak make it appear to be erupting (it wasn't).

A last view of Mt. Ranier, seen as the airplane descended toward SeaTac.

Smoky wisps interfinger with some low hills north of the airport after take off several hours later.

Photos taken 26August15 between 10:13am and 4:59 pm, PDT.

A Bit More about Mt. St. Helens:
Where in the West: Mt. St. Helens — LFD
Mt. St. Helens Field Trip — LFD
It's the 35th Anniversary of the Big Ba-Boom: Mount St. Helens and the May 18th Eruption — Rosetta Stones
Why Have Volcanoes in the Cascades Been So Quiet Lately?  — Eruptions