Geology is "Hot" because...

1. I get to climb around on rocks and balance myself in precarious positions.


2. I get to wear field boots,


3. and field sandals (see above).


4. I get to fly around in helicopters and stay out in the field all night when idiot pilots forget to pick me up.


5. I get to have a breccia collection.


6. I get to find v.g. (visible gold) out in the middle of nowhere (well, near Beatty, NV in this case).


7. I get to stop at roadcuts and look at rocks, which I've been doing at least since I was 5 (my first memory of a roadcut was from age 5, a particular slaty cut in eastern Nevada).


8. I get to have strange geology dreams.


9. I get to write geology poems and geology songs.


10. I get to find faults everywhere, and it's a good thing, not a bad thing.


11. I get to travel, even on days off.


12. I get to go mapping.


13. I get to find geology everywhere I go, even on vacation.


14. I get to work in the desert, with snakes and things.


15. I get paid to drive and paid to eat.

I get to know that subduction really happens, and that it has been happening for a long, long time. And I get to know that one really neat woman, the geologist and geophysicist, Tanya Atwater, contributed greatly to ideas of plate tectonics when those ideas were still being formulated. Her work, along with geological work done in, on, around, and over active and erupting volcanoes, constitutes part of my current definition of "hot" geological science.

Menard, H. W., and Tanya Atwater, 1968, Changes in direction of sea floor spreading. Nature, v. 219, p. 463-467. Reprinted in Plate Tectonics and Geomagnetic Reversals, p. 412-419, W. H. Freeman Co. San Francisco, 1973.

Atwater, Tanya, 1970, Implications of plate tectonics for the Cenozoic tectonic evolution of western North America. Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer., v. 81, p. 3513-3536. Reprinted in Plate Tectonics and Geomagnetic Reversals, p. 583-609, W. H. Freeman Co., San Francisco, 1973. Reprinted in U.C.S.D., Scripps Inst. Oceanography., Contributions, Vol. 40, Part 2, p. 1249-1271, 1970.

This post is being submitted for the December Scientiae Carnival, which is being hosted by Isis the Scientist, who loves Naughty Monkeys and Star Trek.

scientiae-carnival

Bowman Creek: A Tribute

Old bench at Bowman Creek.

And now, I'll finally get around to why I drove up that old road to Bowman Creek, why I hung around there for a couple hours.

I looked for our old camp at Bowman Creek a while before I actually found it. When I had been back there with geo-colleague BS in the late 1980's (maybe 1988), I had been able to find the site by driving right to it. This time, everything seemed overgrown: the bushes higher, denser, and harder to walk through, the creek overgrown with trees and wild rose.

The actual campsite, out on the fan away from the creek, is fairly easy to find. I was looking, however, for a particular spot on the creek, the spot where Bob Shannon - our intrepid expediter, camp builder, and drilling arranger - had built a bench under the shade of some creekside trees. In fact, he had built every single one of our many camp structures through the summer - here and there across Nevada - inlcuding various forms of camp shade.

The bench that Bob built.

I had remembered a bench made of nice wood built into the side of a tree with a large trunk, sturdy, fully in the shade, right next to the creek. What I found instead, was an old, gray, and sun-weathered bench made mostly of 2x4's and other dimensional lumber, a bit rickety looking but still sturdy, with some of the boards missing. It looked like it had not been built into or right against a large tree, but instead had been built on the ground, and was now near a swarming mess of water birch tree trunks, all smaller than the trees I remembered. The original tree, however, may have been cut down, leaving the bench resting on the ground, possibly upside down; the only clue being one leg of the bench, on the right in the above photos, which is made of non-dimensional wood, perhaps part of a tree. I found old aspen or cottonwood trunks lying around here and there, trunks about twice the size of most current creekside trees.

So, I don't know. I have a clear memory, and I have the above pictures that don't quite match.

View from the bench.

I walked over and sat on the bench, sure that I was not the first person who had used it since our 1970's camp, sure that it was the same bench I re-visited in the late 1980's. I sat there listening to the rushing creek waters, and thought of Bob. The first time I came back, BS collected grasshoppers for fishing bait in the tall grass on the far side of the creek (there are trout in the creek), while I sat and reminisced.

It was close to midday. In the afternoon - a time corresponding to our back-then arrival in camp after a day of geologizing across the valley - the bench would still be in the shade. Shade was important when we first arrived in camp in early September; later, shade was unecessary.

Fall leaves overhead.

I sat on the bench, remembering. The leaves overhead had not yet fallen, though they looked ready.

Bob died sometime in the 1980's from a brain tumor, sometime back before my last visit to the creek with BS. Bob was old when I first met him—his sun-browned and craggy face matched the mountains and deserts in which he lived and worked. He was rugged, even austere, yet warmhearted and good-natured. At the Bowman Creek camp we showered with hot water in wooden, closed-in shower stalls that Bob built; we sat in the deep, brown-and-emerald-green shade next to the rushing, ice-cold creek on the bench that Bob built. We kept our beer in a wide spot in the creek, just below that bench.

A place to put the beer.

From the bench, I looked over toward the creek, toward the pool in which we chilled our beer.

Bob Shannon is gone now. He was the first and oldest of our collective group to die. He and his wife, who he always called “She,” had purchased a modest dream cabin along the western bluffs overlooking Walker Lake, just a few miles north of Hawthorne, NV. Now he lives on in me, and in another female geologist he encouraged in his warm and slowly sagacious way, and he lives on at Bowman Creek, where one piece of his multitude of handcrafted camp contraptions remains. We tore down the rest of his constructions each time we moved camp, dismantling outhouses, showers, shade awnings for trailers and tents, and all else into their component parts of 2x4’s, 4x4's, and plywood: pieces to be hauled by 4WD to our next campsite.

Looking up the fan toward the base of the Toiyabe Range.

There being no beer to be had, I walked back up to my truck and moseyed on.

Bowman Creek: The Camp

Photo of the creek crossing.

We camped at Bowman Creek during September and October, although the camp had been there through much of the last part of the summer before I actually arrived. I had been part of a second camp group before that, and when several students left both camp groups to go back to school at the end of summer, those of us who remained joined forces at Bowman Creek.

Instead of bringing the trailer up the road I described earlier, the first crew had driven the trailer in on the other road and had then driven it down the alluvial fan until they finally found a creek crossing point.

Photo of the place I had my tent.

Camp was a large affair, at least by summer's end, with a camp trailer, several 8x10-foot canvas tents, a large mess tent, and then, when the claim stakers came, a large Quonset-hut-like building, which replaced the smaller mess tent. We had hot showers at Bowman Creek camp, with creek water piped into camp through black plastic piping. It came down the alluvial fan from a higher elevation, so the water had good hydraulic head. At camp, it was then piped into 55-gallon drums on top of one or two wood-frame shower stalls. It was usual for the water to be heated during the day by solar heat, but with September turning chilly and clouds moving in for days at a time, the water was finally heated with propane. It's one thing to take a creek-cold shower at the end of a hot day (icy, brrrr!); it's not any good at all to do that at the end of a chilly day, a chilly day that is rapidly getting colder because the sun has already gone behind the shadow of the Toiyabe Range.

A view across Big Smoky Valley of the Toquima Range.

We had great views across the valley from all places in camp. The photo above shows what the view from my tent door would have looked like. We had similar, though more expansive views from our outhouse located somewhere higher on the alluvial fan. It was a wooden structure, and it was open to the east for the view, built without a door. We had a system of leaving a red flag visible, so you could tell from a distance whether the outhouse was already in use.

A view across the valley looking toward the center of the Northumberland caldera, with dust from a vehicle marking the Northumberland dirt road.

The view from the Quonset-hut area was nice, too; we could see the entire Northumberland caldera, and could also see down the valley toward Mt. Jefferson and Round Mountain. Round Mountain was mostly just an old town, then, but the current operation at the Round Mountain gold mine had already begun, though it was initially much smaller.

Friday Fault Photos #9

On a fairly recent road trip to Baker, NV (gee, I almost wrote Baker, CA - yikes! - so many *fond* memories from there), I took the opportunity to look around while MOH was getting gas, and discovered that you can see the Snake Range decollement or detachment fault from town.
In case you need to have the low-angle fault pointed out, here's a great photo with a power line running parallel to the fault! Upper plate rocks are dipping westward (to the left), and lower plate rocks, besides the white-line mylonite right along the fault, are obscure.
Ah, then we drove up Wheeler Peak, where the road is closed part way up the mountain to the upper campground, and we had this great view of part of the Snake Range detachment fault, with a snow-covered mountain in the background. The detachment fault is a little difficult to see, but is essentially following a somewhat curved or arched line where all the tilted upper plate rocks end. The snow-covered mountain might be Mount Moriah, one of the highest peaks in Nevada.
And here's the Snake Range detachment fault again, this time from the rock glacier on Wheeler Peak. Bristelcone pines grow on the rock glacier, and can be seen in this photo mostly toward the far edge of the glacier. More info can be found about the detachment fault, the geology of the area, and the bristlecones in my series on Wheeler Peak.

Way out west, they got a name
For rain and wind and fire
The rain is Tess, the fire's Joe and
They call the wind Mariah [Moriah, in this case.]

See these sites for lyrical references.

First Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving I had in Nevada was spent while on a required field trip during my first semester as a grad student, a long time ago. The field trip was the third in a series of three, and although a lot of the married students really complained about their family obligations, there weren't many of them, and our old professor was quite set in his ways.

So, off we went, to southern Nevada, spending the entire Thanksgiving break on a geology field trip. There were several highlights of the trip, one of which is a famous outcrop in Death Valley, which MJC Rocks at Geotripper posted about some time ago, and another of which was a poker game inside tents near Lake Mead.

What I remember best, though, was eating Thanksgiving dinner at the only place open in Beatty on Thanksgiving Day, the old Exchange Club, which may not be open anymore. The Exchange Club sits at the main intersection or corner in Beatty, where Highway 95 makes a turn to the east if you are headed south toward Vegas from Tonopah or Goldfield.

That dinner was my first Thanksgiving dinner in Nevada, and my first Thanksgiving dinner in a casino (fortunately there haven't been too many of those). The dinner was okay, but that's the only time I've ever eaten in a restaurant where a "C" rating from the health department was so prominently displayed.

The second most memorable thing about Thanksgiving in Beatty: we stayed that night in the Beatty dump, sleeping on the ground. Now, this wasn't the infamous Beatty Dump - though many jokes have been made - just the local landfill.

Here's hoping that your Thanksgiving dinner will be a bit more inspiring than that first one, and that you will have a better place to sleep.

Not the Beatty dump - it's just any old mine dump in Nevada.