Winnemucca to Hwy 395 north of Susanville, Part 3

Black Rock Desert

Well, here we are again, traveling from Winnemucca, NV, to Highway 395 north of Susanville, CA, and we’ve just made it to the west end of the Jungo Road where it intersects with NV S.R. 447 (formerly S.R. 34) just south of Gerlach. You’ve probably noticed that I haven't been blogging much recently. I'm not really sure why. Sometimes the work I do takes the writing right out of me, partly because I do enough writing many days that I'm totally done with that by the end of the day; also, I don't really have much time after work before I have to do dinner, then get ready for bed—at least if I want to get enough sleep, which I do want (I don't always succeed). Another thing contributing to the recent spate of sparse blogging—besides taking care of personal things that have been taking a lot out of my energy during my days off—is that my writing effort during the fall and winter months has been going toward writing bits of fiction (a novel?), which I've been working on intermittently during the last two years.

Anyway, all of that—work, trying to get enough sleep, personal issues, and writing fictional to non-fictional stories—has placed blogging low on the list.

Now I'll upload the photos for this post, and we'll go from there. Just like a real journey, we’ll see how far we get!

Smoke Creek Desert

At the end of the last post, we'd driven quickly through Gerlach and had reached the northwest side of the Smoke Creek Desert. I hadn't taken any photos while zipping through Gerlach, but I often stop, and I've even stayed overnight at least twice. So let's backtrack before moving on.

Gerlach is a small town that brags of several mottoes, including "Center of the Known Universe," "Where the Pavement Ends and the West Begins" and "The Time That Town Forgot." More can be seen on the town sign, above, or in this nicely enlarged version of the sign by the RGJ. As indicated by the sign, Gerlach is technically pronounced Grr-lack rather than the Grr-lock one hears so commonly these days. I shot these photos of Gerlach on a trip that FMOH and I took back in the spring of 2014. Like the June, 2018, trip that we—you and I—are reprising, he and I had just come into town from Winnemucca on the Jungo Road. We were bringing the motorcycle back from Nevada, mirroring this trip taking it out to Nevada.

While in town, we did the usual thing of stopping to eat at Bruno's Country Club, probably getting Bruno's Famous Homemade Ravioli. By 2014, Bruno was no longer making his ravs personally, so I don't think they were quite as authentic, nor were they quite as good.

Unlike many trips, this time we stopped at the bar for a couple beers; we weren't driving on that afternoon or evening, but were, rather, staying at Bruno's Motel. Bruno Selmi, the Basque owner of the cafe, bar, motel, and only gas station in town, died in May of 2017—he can be seen in the photo above the bar (the older man on the right).

After checking in to our room at the motel—and after duly going back to the bar to get a second room when the first smelled either of gas or dead mouse—we wandered out onto the far western edge of the Black Rock Desert, where we had a view somewhat atypical of most views of the desert. This section of the Black Rock is a section you don’t want to drive into: it’s usually muddy, and it’s very possible that you’ll get stuck. The getting stuck part typically happens at night when an unsuspecting traveler, one who is already out on the desert somewhere to the east, decides to get off the desert—and instead of driving to the usual take-out spot north of town, sets their sights on the lights of Gerlach and makes a beeline for town. The next thing our unsuspecting—or willfully ignorant—traveler knows, they are stuck, possibly axle deep, in the mud at the west end of the main section of the Black Rock Desert. Fortunately for them, they aren’t far from Bruno’s gas station. Maybe someone will risk a vehicle to come and pull them out!

It’s possible one could wend their way through the merely salty white section of desert to the pavement on the east edge of Gerlach, at least in the drier years, but I don’t recommend trying it. I personally know at least one person who tried this one night back in the 1980s; the getting stuck was epic.

The next morning after breakfast, FMOH and I headed west.

Now let’s get back to my June 2018 trip, which I was taking all by myself (cue pint-sized pity party). I had just made it to the northwest side of the Smoke Creek Desert and had taken the photo seen earlier and in my last post.

A ways farther down the west side of the Smoke Creek Desert, I pulled over for a quick examination of some tufa. There are many spots to see tufa domes, mounds, and hills along the west side of the Smoke Creek Desert; this mound, Hill 4081, was a new one to me.

I climbed up through the cheatgrass and scattered tansy-mustard tumbleweed and looked around. Here we’re looking off to the northeast, more or less back toward the Junction of C.R. 447 and the Smoke Creek Desert Road. The Granite Range, unsurprisingly underlain by granite, rises steeply beyond the distant Smoke Creek Desert playa. The foreground is green because...water. It’s a wet part of the basin, possibly because of the entry of perennial Smoke Creek into the desert just south of where we’re standing. It’s also more elevated than the playa, and covered with grass (at least cheat grass) and various scrub.

I love tufa mounds, so I stood looking around for a few minutes, taking lots of photos. This photo looks off more to the north. The distant bluish hills just right of the tufa dome are part of the Buffalo Hills, which are underlain by a pile of volcanic rocks.

More tufa! More volcanic rocks! The hills in shadow between the tufa masses are some volcanic flows forming the eastern foothills of Burro Mountain.

From this point on Hill 4081, I got back on the Smoke Creek Desert Road, went south a short distance, and then turned west on what Washoe County considers the continuation of the Smoke Creek Desert Road, and what Google Maps refers to as the Smoke Creek Road: a dirt road that heads west up Smoke Creek.

to be continued...

Google Maps location map.

Related Posts:
Winnemucca to Hwy 395 north of Susanville, Part 2
Winnemucca to Hwy 395 north of Susanville, Part 1
Things You Find in the Field: Sulfur at Sulphur
Blue Mountain (2012)
Pulpit Rock (2012)
Smoke in the Black Rock & Smoke Creek Deserts (2102)
Where in the West: Black Rock Desert (2008)
Where in the West - June: A Second Look (2008)
Where in the West - June (2008)
Name That Place (2008)

Tales of the Mojave: We're Almost Ready to Go

The Road South:

Our story—the 1981 story of Allie and I doing recon down in the Mojave—began in Reno in the spring of the year and ended unexpectedly and abruptly in Needles before the end of June. I no longer remember exactly how long we spent in the east-central Mojave, but we looked at six different target areas—depending on how you count them—and we probably spent at two to five days in each area.

"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. ...
- from 'Manual of Muad'Dib' by the Princess Irulan"

-Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965

A Caravan Camper on a white truck
in front of a mine dump in eastern Nevada.

Allie and I left Reno in a dull gray, four-wheel drive Chevy pickup truck topped with a matching Caravan Camper, a type of heavy-duty metal camper shell with carpet kit, similar to the one I have now. We were equipped with an ice chest full of food, drinks, and ice; a 5-gallon water cooler or two; sundry camping gear; assorted tools; one spare tire (only one!); and all kinds of exploration equipment and supplies. We had sample bags and sample books, Estwing rock hammers and rock chisels, triplet hand lenses and little magnets on rawhide straps, and little plastic squeeze bottles filled with a 10% dilute solution of hydrochloric acid (HCl). The acid bottles were usually held tight in leather cases that could be slid onto belts. We also had a carefully stowed glass bottle of non-dilute HCl, so we could make additional dilute acid as needed. (HCl was easy to get back then, and the bottle came meticulously packed in vermiculite within a sturdy cardboard box.)

We had files of topographic maps, geologic maps, published reports, books, and copies of company reports in plastic file boxes that would help to keep everything organized while also protecting it from water and the pervasive Mojave dust. We had Brunton compasses in leather holders, ready to attach to our belts. And we had various mapping paraphernalia: mechanical pencils with black, blue, and red leads; colored pencils; pens and markers; and six-inch C-Thru® protractor-rulers of various scales: 10-50, 20-40, 10-20, and 30-60. We had field notebooks to hold notes and sketches, and we had aluminum clipboards that would protect our maps, air photos, and reports. We carried everything we needed for any particular day’s traverse in Filson® survey field vests[1], on belts, or in backpacks. A geologist, fully attired and field ready, is easily distinguished from desert rats, ranchers, and routine hikers.

We also had a pile of camping and cooking gear scattered in the back of the truck: pots and pans; plates, bowls, and utensils; a gas Coleman stove and fuel for said stove; sleeping bags and sleeping pads; a tent, which we didn't use while down in the Mojave; a tarp or two; and other miscellany. We may have rustled up some of the gear from a stash in the company warehouse—though had we not been timely in choosing gear (and we were late that year), we would have been out of luck. A certain person's name was used to describe what happened if you didn't grab your gear in time, or if you got stuck with second-rate supplies. Had his last name been Gibbs, it would have been called "getting Gibbsed." 

U.S. 95, looking south, just a few miles north of Beatty.

Before leaving Reno, we spent a little time pondering two particular questions: 1) should we take a thermometer and 2) should we abstain from beer and other alcohol? We debated back and forth about the thermometer and finally decided to leave it behind. Maybe we'd feel cooler if we didn’t see the expected 3-digit Fahrenheit temperatures!

If the creosote has bloomed, the field season is over.

Speaking of temperatures, when we got to our first locality, the temps we encountered didn't seem too bad, though it took a little time to adjust after coming from the higher and cooler elevations of Reno. We adapted. We devoured lots of fresh fruit. For lunch we’d have half avocados, their centers filled with Italian salad dressing, and we’d roll whatever else came out of the icebox in flour or corn tortillas.[2] We also prepared our own variant of south-of-the-border food, using lots of hot peppers, gobs of hot sauce, and unlimited spicy guacamole. We figured there would be something medicinal in mixing the spicy fire of the food with the scorching heat of the desert. And in fact, these were the only foodstuffs we could bring ourselves to eat in the heat. And throughout the day, from sunup to sundown, we drank gallons of water, juices, and sodas—and zero beers.

To be continued...

Notes:

^[1] It looks like the standard survey vest isn't being made anymore—at least I don't see it on the C.C. Filson website. Perhaps that's because so many geos are now wearing safety vests much of the time. I hope my current beige style-12 and orange style-8 vests will last indefinitely: I still use them on field trips, while hiking, and on most sampling and mapping excursions. My beige vest is partly held together by duct tape; a gaping hole in the lower right area developed after carrying a leaky acid bottle inside the inner pocket. (I really don't like having things hanging from my belt, though I did used to wear my Brunton that way. Now I stick it in one of the side pockets.)↩

^[2] This was called a "Bill Rehrig" lunch, although we didn't use that term until many years later.↩

Tales of the Mojave: An Intro

Intro

I'm going to move into what I hope to be the blog-publication of a few of my old stories, which I began here quite a while ago with several posts that became the Caliente series and other posts that were part of my Finding a Thesis series (which I haven’t finished). I'm not sure how far I'll get into this new project, but it's something I want to start in order to see how my writing has progressed from the first drafts, which I probably began in the late 1990s. I'll no doubt be interspersing this Mojave set of posts with other field notes, road trips, or miscellany like Friday Fault/Fold, etcetera; we'll just have to see how it goes. Also, at this point the old stories have become tied up with some fictional stories or novel I've been playing with. The fictional book or novel doesn’t really have a plot yet, and it also has a lot of completely made-up to deeply modified or wildly intertwined adventures. I'm attempting, here, to remain true to life.

The Mojave

You can check out any time you like,
but you can never leave.[1]

My memory of the Whipple Mountains, where we'll be heading shortly, extends back to 1981, when Allie [2] and I conducted some preliminary geologic reconnaissance (recon) during June for Northern Exploration Company (NEC). It was my first visit to the Mojave Desert of southern California. (I can’t speak for Allie, but I think it was hers, also.)

The Mojave Desert is outlined in red.
Image courtesy USGS, modified from here.

Hell, that's not strictly correct. Looking back carefully, I really can't say that I had never been to the Mojave before 1981—though I do often say that very thing, not usually thinking about the technical boundaries of the Mojave The boundaries, right, largely though not completely faithfully, follow the range of that well-known Mojave denizen, the Joshua tree.

So when did I first visit the Mojave? Well, let me think. Sometime in the late '70s I was in Vegas for an archaeological conference—we had driven all night to get there and had beheld a truly spectacular thunderhead near Tonopah. Before that, I’d seen (and drawn and photographed and summarized) the Charlie Brown Outcrop during the third field trip in Larsen's Geology of Nevada class. On the way down to the Charles Brown Highway, we had camped in the Beatty dump on Thanksgiving night after a particularly mediocre meal at the C-rated Exchange Club. Fortunately for everyone involved, there had been plenty of beer afterward to settle the stomach.70

Beatty is technically just inside the Mojave Desert, and the Charlie Brown Outcrop isn't far from its center. So yes, using almost anyone's definition of that southern desert, I had been there before '81. Nevertheless, I usually think of June, 1981, as my first foray into the area, and indeed it was the first time I had been south of Shoshone on the California side or south of Vegas on the Nevada side...

Our Carryall probably had 4 doors.
Photo credit: CZmarlin.

No wait! Most maps place Baghdad, Arizona, in the Mojave, and I'd been to Baghdad during field camp in '73; that was the place we'd gotten a Carryall stuck in the sand while trying to take a short cut back to Flagstaff. We weren't even supposed to have gone that way, but we'd purposefully drifted to the rear of the caravan and then left the pack. It had taken us an hour to dig out. We had finally made it back to Flag for dinner, only to find that no one had even missed us! The mishap instantly became one of the highlights of field camp, albeit one with apocryphal overtones: We exaggerated our difficulties while building road to get unstuck, we gleefully inflated the story during the two-hour drive back to Flag, and we greatly hyperbolized the event while telling the story over beers later that evening.

This little spate of reminiscing has brought me to the realization that I still don’t always think of the Mojave by its technical definition, and that in 1981 I generally thought of the Mojave as a big hot unknown encompassing the entirety of the southern California desert, or at least the part of it that lies south of the Garlock Fault. Back then I often thought that the SoCal areas north of the Garlock, including the broader Death Valley region, belonged to a kind of never-never land that should really be part of Nevada. I still often think the CA-NV border should run along the crest of the Sierra, though I’m not sure where that line should jog eastward to leave the main bulk of southern California in California, and somehow place Clark County of Nevada in SoCal.[3]  Perhaps the new border would look something like this, with the CA-NV border in white, and the southern CA border in yellow:

Google Earth image with proposed new borders.

Later in my career—later being when I worked at Former Mining Company, AKA Forminco—we, the southern explorationists of Forminco's Western District used the presence of cholla as a key factor when trying to push our district north into Nevada, as far north as the Gilbert mining district in the Monte Cristo Range northwest of Tonopah. The Nevada District had responded with uncharacteristic equanimity and had let us in, mostly because they didn't really want that part of Nevada.

Anyhow, back in the early 80s I liked placing the northern boundary of the Mojave at the Garlock Fault: It made geographic and geologic sense to me at the time, and it affirmed a feeling I had, when driving south across the Garlock, a feeling of dropping off into another, lower land. And as far as I was concerned, the eastern boundary of the Mojave was the Colorado River. My boundaries, however, held as little water as most Mojave washes—for one thing, there really isn't an elevation drop when driving south across the Garlock along U.S. 395 or S.R. 14, and even though there is quite a drop when coming into the Mojave from the west at Tehachapi, one has at that point crossed the southern Sierra Nevada, so a drop is to be expected; and for another thing, the Mojave is really defined as more of an ecologic or biologic-climatologic region than a physiographic region—and I knew that, so I always spoke of the "Mojave Desert of California" when referring broadly to all of the southern California deserts, or even those just south of the Garlock, hoping that the phrase would exonerate my technical sloppiness.[4]

Google Earth image showing part of the western Mojave, a bit of the Garlock Fault (dark blue), and U.S. 395 and S.R. 14. Ignore the road marking for 58; it is inaccurate.

This recon program was completely mine. Prior to that summer, the target areas of grass-roots ventures I'd been involved in had been at least partly chosen by others. I did the research in the spring, generating several targets across the region, from Tehachapi to Barstow to Needles[5], and I decided where to start. We'd begin in a few relatively low areas along the Colorado River—the district boundaries of NEC were such that someone else was in charge of Arizona, so like an aquaphobic saguaro in reverse, I wasn't supposed to cross the Colorado River—and we'd work our ways toward higher elevations, hoping to get ahead of the summer heat.

Because of a delayed start to my recon targeting, it was late in the field season, probably the first of June, when Allie and I finally left Reno to drive as far south as Parker, Arizona. I wondered how long we'd last down there in the heat of early summer; we knew it wasn't the most auspicious time to begin field work in the Mojave, but we hoped we could stick it out and find a property or two to stake.

My first recon program! I was both excited and apprehensive.

To be continued...

Notes

^[1] Felder, Don, Henley, Don, and Frey, Glen. "Hotel California" (lyrics) perf. by the Eagles. Hotel California (album), Asylum Records, 1976.↩

^[2] Names have been changed.↩

^[3]Northern boundary of Southern California, at Wikipedia.↩

^[4] In reality the Mojave Desert is an ecologic area defined by plants and climate, which extends as far north as Beatty, Nevada, and which doesn't include all of southern California's desert, because some of that area belongs to the Sonoran Desert. Whether the Whipple Mountains is in the Mojave proper seems to depend on who draws the map. These stories will take place mostly in the deserts of southern California, and I'll usually refer to that area as "the Mojave." ↩

^[5] A target area can consist of a whole region (like the Mojave Desert itself), an entire mountain range (like the Whipple Mountains in the eastern Mojave Desert or western Sonora Desert), a large or small mining district (like the Savahia Peak area in the Whipple Mountains), or a smaller area around one old mine or prospect (like the Dollar Bill Mine on the south side of Savahia Peak.).↩

More Dust Devils

I often have occasion to see dust devils while traveling through Nevada, especially in the dryer months, but any time of year can afford the right conditions: a dry playa or dirt road (and other surfaces, read more here) and thermally unstable air. And so, while driving through the Fortymile Desert and about to pass by the Nightingale Hot Springs exit on I-80 back in early October —  the exit name combines two locations into one: Nightingale is from an old mining district and ghost town  in the Nightingale Mountains north of the freeway; Hot Springs is from the geothermal area at Brady's Hot Springs just south of the freeway — I noticed a large plume of dust rising from the desert just north of the highway. I pulled off, securing a viewing point near a powerline road crossing the main road going north to Nightingale.

Several dust devils, including the large, obviously whirling one, and a few tiny ones. Photo looks southwest toward basalt covered hills on the east side of the Truckee Range.

The large devil and three small ones apparently trailing it.

The same large dust devil, this time with two tiny ones seemingly leading.

Here, the same large dust devil appears to get all torqued out of shape!

Later, just for good measure, I took a photo of this devil, also in the Fortymile Desert; our view is southward toward the West Humboldt Range.

This last devil was located about 14 or 15 miles east of the group near the Nightingale Hot Springs exit. The white, rectangular thing on the horizon in the left part of the photo is a semi heading north on U.S. 95, about to reach I-80 near the old site of Trinity (MSRMaps location; Google Maps location).

Across the West and Back Day 2: Across the Salt Lake Desert

MOH and I left Nevada and entered Utah shortly after getting back onto I-80 following our brief sojourn in West Wendover, and began crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert (and Bonneville Salt Flats).

When almost to milepost 16, I took an obligatory photo of Floating Island, no doubt named for the mirage that often makes it look like it's floating above the salt flats. Here, the mirage is minimal but present. (See better photos of Floating Island with strong mirage here.)

Floating Island.

It turns out that Floating Island *may* be at least partly underlain by our old friend, the Ely Limestone — or perhaps it's underlain by a Utah equivalent, the Lake Point Limestone, or another Utah equivalent, the Erda Formation. On the interactive online Utah state geologic map, clicking reveals that Floating Island is listed as being underlain by the Oquirrh Group (with the symbol PP - Pennsylvanian undivided?), consisting of such formations as the "Wells, Weber, Ely, Callville and other Fms" — at the same time, the map shows the symbol PPe on the northeastern side of Floating Island. PPe is the usual symbol for the Ely Limestone in eastern Nevada, but perhaps it could also refer to the Erda in Utah. For me, the island is too far away to make any snap judgements!

It was a cloudy day, overall, but nevertheless you could see a good 90 miles to the far peaks.

Looking ESE across the desert at the Cedar Mountain, and the crest of the Stansbury Mountains beyond that.

It became clear about halfway across the desert that distances were more than usually deceptive. The eastbound road markers on I-80, which begin with milepost 1 exactly one mile east of the NV-UT border, essentially mark the distance you have travelled across the desert from its western edge at just east of West Wendover, NV (in fact, you travel almost exactly a mile from the state line before ramping down onto the flats). Just before milepost 21, we passed a road sign indicating that it's 22 miles to the Knolls. The Knolls exit is just past the eastern edge of the salt flats, so I knew we were just almost exactly half way across.

View Approximate half-way point in a larger map.

It seemed like we had been driving forever! The low hills in the distance, marking the other side of the desert, only looked about 8 to 12 miles away, though they were really about 21 miles off. We knew we had another "almost forever" still left to go!

Milepost 39: Finally we were approaching the east side of the broad, flat crossing.

Exit 41, Knolls, one mile past the first sand dunes at the east edge of the desert. Milepost 40 is visible in the photo, not far beyond the exit sign.

At the exit for Knolls (a siding? some hills?), we knew we were getting close to one of our favorite rest stops, Grassy Mountain. The rest stop is known for a short hiking trail and a sign saying "Watch for SNAKES and SCORPIONS."

Despite this sign, I've never seen any of either...

...although we did see a horned lark noshing on a pretzel.

More commentary has been added to a second warning sign.

The second sign says, among other things, "DANGER: Sex, Sleds, and Snowboards."

Finally, on a day perhaps as cloudy as the one shot here in 2011, we started out on a little leg-stretching expedition.

And I'll have to save the hike for another post...

Photos to this point in Day 2 have been added to the day's trip log on Google Maps, along with the ones from West Wendover, which I forgot to add after the last post:

View Day 2: Elko, NV to Vernal, UT in a larger map.

Related Posts:
Across the West and Back Day 2: A Side Trip in West Wendover
Across the West and Back Day 2: Pequop Summit to West Wendover
Across the West and Back Day 2: Looking for an Old Roadcut
Across the West and Back: The First Day
Intro to Recent Western Loop Trip

Sites Worth Exploring

I've added a few sites and blogs to my sidebar, mostly in the "Other" category but also in the "Roads and Highways" category:

NoeHill
NoeHill in The West
NoeHill in Nevada

CALIFORNIA BLOG

Geology on US Interstate 80 

westernviews.us

Mountains, Deserts and Glaciers

SouthwestDesertLover

Check them out!

Pulpit Rock

MOH and I came upon Pulpit Rock from the east on our last tour through the Black Rock and Smoke Creek Deserts. I have some old photos lying around somewhere, maybe even some digital ones, but in case I couldn't find any, we pulled over on the side of the road so I could grab a few more. We once hiked up to the rock; I suspect the photos from that hike are on photographic paper in 4x6 mode, filed away in an archival box. (That reminds me: my project to digitize everything. Ha ha ha.)

The rock, placed in the pillar category by the U.S.G.S., has obviously been named for its shape. It's not far from the Nobles Trail (or Nobles' Trail), which passed through the Kamma Mountains not far to the south, so maybe the name originated with emigrants on the trail, but I've found little history about the rock, other than that it's considered sacred by more than one group of Native Americans. It's also been used as a nesting site for golden eagles, ferruginous hawks, and prairie falcons (p. 3-43, last link).

MSRMaps location; Google Maps street view.
Almost immediately upon pulling over, we noticed two large birds perched in an upper alcove of the rock formation, and at first we thought they were golden eagles.
I took some more pictures simply to identify the birds. This photo, when enlarged on my camera, made me wonder if the birds could be bald eagles, because the coloring seemed off for goldens.

Aha! The one flying away is a obviously a turkey vulture!
Now, only one bird is left!

We don't know if the alcove was being used for nesting by these birds, or if it was just a convenient perch to wait for roadkill dinner.

Smoke in the Black Rock & Smoke Creek Deserts

Smoke over the Black Rock Desert, as seen from the east on the Jungo Road. Smoke is probably from the Salt Fire north of Redding.
Smoke over the Smoke Creek Desert, as seen from the southwest part of the Black Rock Desert looking toward Gerlach. Smoke is from the Chips fire near Belden and Caribou, CA, and the Peak fire in the mountains southwest of Milford, CA.
Smoke over the Black Rock Desert, as seen from Coyote Spring Dune (MSRMaps location, Google Maps location), looking east toward Trego Hot Springs.
Smoke over the Smoke Creek Desert southwest of Gerlach, as seen from Coyote Spring Dune. Newish jeep for scale.
Mirage on the Black Rock Desert, looking southwest toward Gerlach, the green patch or oasis in the middle ground, and at smoke beyond the peaks of the Fox Range in the background.
Smoke over the southern Smoke Creek Desert, looking south from a point on the Smoke Creek Desert Road, about four miles nearly due south of the mouth of Five Springs Canyon and about four miles southeast of Granite Spring. The darker hills on the left are in the Fox Range near Reynard siding; the lighter hills behind them are in the Fox Range near Wild Horse, Pole, and Rough Canyons.
Another shot from the same angle, with a thin mirage on the desert (click to enlarge). The farther pale blue hills beyond the ones near Wild Horse Canyon, et al, include low hills near Sano siding and Emerson Pass, the Terraced Hills just north of Pyramid Lake, and the Virginia Mountains on the west side of Pyramid Lake.

Photos are from 3Aug2012.

Backroads: Too Cold to Change a Flat, and other Considerations

Upon getting out of the truck at the north end of the Monitor Valley playa, it became rapidly clear to me that it was very cold. (Later, the weather calendar for Eureka showed a max of 28°F and a min of-3°F for the day.) When I pulled off to the side of the road, possibly running over some spiky twigs from the roadside saltbushes, I hoped I wouldn't get a flat tire. I then immediately reassured myself that my fairly new tires still had good tread, and that *of course* I wouldn't get a flat.

By the time we got back to the truck after our excursion a relatively short distance out onto the playa, my fingers were freezing and my face was icy. I once again considered the chances of getting a flat from running over thorny bushes, so instead of turning around in the middle of the road, I drove a short way to a wider turnaround spot. I decided then that I wouldn't change a tire if one happened to go flat: it was just too damned cold. Instead, I figured I would immediately get into the back of the truck and climb into one of our -20°F sleeping bags. (Well, maybe I would have run the heater to warm my hands up first, but I wouldn't have wanted to use much gas. MOH, however, says we wouldn't have had a problem changing a flat, so maybe he wasn't as chilled!)

After getting back on the Monitor Valley Road, we proceeded north past Diana's Punchbowl, a travertine hill with inset bowl or depression containing hot water that will presumably boil any living thing that falls into it (reported temperatures range from 138°F to 200°F), and drove on to Potts Ranch Hot Springs, where we ultimately decided that the water was too cool for the outdoor temperature that I guessed was possibly as low as 5 or 10°F — or maybe it was 15°F with a wind of 7 mph, or 20°F with a wind of 10 mph. The average wind at the Eureka Airport was 7.4 mph that day, with gusts from the northwest, though we remember a breeze from the south.
At some point, either at the hot springs, or more likely as we were heading up the road past The Geographic Center of Nevada, we had a brief discussion about the cold and what we would do if the truck broke down on this relatively desolated, but mostly good, graveled road.

What would we do if the truck broke down out here? Would we walk to the nearest occupied ranch? Well, no, we'd stay with the truck and probably get in our sleeping bags, which were in the back inside the metal Caravan camper.

We had some food (and coffee), along with a Coleman stove for heating some of the water we had brought with us — water we had carefully preserved from freezing by placing in a large ice box. Although our food was really meant for two days and the second day was getting on toward dusk, we could stay with the truck awhile before getting too hungry or thirsty. The nearest active ranch that I knew of, the Monitor Valley ranch, was about 7 miles from Potts Ranch Hot Springs, about 11 miles SSW of the sign for the geographic center, and maybe about 14 or 15 miles back from the place where we started this conversation. Highway 50, at this point, was "only" 11 or 12 miles to the northeast. We had just passed a sign that said a ranch was off to the east up some side road, but I had no idea how far up the road the ranch might be, or whether the ranch was active.

So, had we broken down during the late afternoon or dusk of early evening, we would have stayed with the truck. We could try to spot ranch lights by dark, giving us a better idea of what we might to do by the light of the next day.

Would we activate one of our SPOTs to send a 911 message? Well, probably not right away.

I suspect that the Monitor Valley Road is fairly well traveled ordinarily, although I haven't been on it routinely for many, many years. I would expect at least one or two ranchers or other travelers to come by per day, even in the dead of winter. We would have, therefore, stayed in the truck hoping for someone to come by the next day instead of sending a SPOT 911 call right away and incurring possible search-and-rescue charges. Because we had really only packed food for two days, we might have been getting low on food by the end of the second, unless I still happened to have a stash of old canned food somewhere in the back of the truck, which I doubted.

If no one had come down the road by noon to mid-afternoon of the next day, we would have faced the same choice: walk, stay another night with our dwindling food and adequate water, or SPOT a 911 call. (There was no cell service, as far as I know.) I suspect that we might have stayed another night and then walked or sent a SPOT call for help on the third day, but we didn't end up having to make that choice.
I had been thinking about some of these possibilities since stopping at the north end of the Monitor Valley playa. There, we could have considered walking to the far side of Diana's Punchbowl, where warm or hot water flows in a creek coming from the eastern base of the spring mound. Reasons not to walk? I didn’t know the temperature of the water, our trek would have taken us farther off the main road than we already were, and we would have been going away from the shelter of the truck. (One can always burn tires for heat.) I suppose we could have carried food and some water along with our sleeping bags, but in my mind, no tent means no real shelter, and we didn’t have a tent to carry with us. Additionally, the warmth factor of the water, which I remembered as warm but not hot, was in question. (It turns out that the water was probably warm enough at about 110 to 120°F.) All in all, we would have faced similar circumstances and made similar choices as we might have made farther to the north: we were about 0.5 miles from the main road, about 4 miles from Diana's Punchbowl, and about 9 or 10 miles from the active Monitor Valley ranch.
Had we broken down at Potts Hot Springs, we would have stayed overnight, maybe getting warm in the springs before retiring to our sleeping bags (and maybe not, since the water was only around 100°F), leaving us to face the same choices the next day. Potts, however, is closer to the active Monitor Valley ranch — it's about 7 miles away — making it fairly likely that we would have walked the next day. Seven miles is still a fairly long hike over the repetitive ups and downs of the main road, which crosses alluvial fans coming off the east side of the Toquima Range, but 7 miles is feasible. We would have still been taking a chance by walking away from the shelter of the truck; but in this case, the truck was on a side road and probably not visible to the rest of the world, and we would have been walking down a main road, visible to anyone that might happen by.

An active ranch doesn’t necessarily have people present, but if no one is home, one can presumably break in if needed, make a phone call (if there is phone service), wait for people to come, or send a 911 call via SPOT while one waits indoors.

After all this consideration during the course of two hours or less, I realized that I really haven't done much field work out in the middle of nowhere in very low temperatures during the middle of winter. Also, when I did that sort of thing at all, other field partners were likely to have been waiting back at the motel, ready to go out looking if necessary. For this wintry trip, we had blithely traversed at least 90 miles of dirt roads by the time we had reached the geographic center of Nevada, and I hadn’t given the temperatures and our relative isolation a second thought until late afternoon: those roads and that area had become familiar to me over the years, although most of my familiarity dates back 20 to more than 30 years ago.

I think I'll at least take more food with me the next time I go out into the chilling cold.