TrailOption
A personal geography of landscape and place, art and geo-science.
In search of place, pattern, and process
Stories are out there, keep going (trails optional, take the other).
Field Notes
The TrailOption Blog
Nevada High Points #130 – Pilot Mountains
Every once in a while, on these high point wanders, I choose a really good route. Not that there are bad routes, but I often end up choosing a misleading side canyon of riparian bushwhacking, leading to bouldery talus below false summits. Other times I get to the evident high point where I notice a confusing array of summits of similar elevation, so I question my maps and wander around visiting each one. Again, this is not a bad thing, it is always good to be in the hills – unless the light is fading, or a storm is coming. My route on Pilot Peak, however, was perfect.
Nevada High Points #129 – Royston Hills
And just in time, because this is supposed to be a High Point story! As it happens, however, the Royston Hills provide a long, quiet wander with none of the small drama of my short overland drive. The drive had left me on the low, eastern slopes of the Cedar Mountains, with the geographic boundary between the ranges marked by a mature dendritic drainage that pushes basinward to the south. I can map several surfaces of the inset floodplain that cuts and isolates the bounding pediment lobes. The youngest floodplain may only be a few years old; it is now dry and likely only flows in significant storms.
Images are experience, nothing artificial
Image Collections at LightOpt Photography.
Patterned Ground
Video experience in geomorphology and geography; cartographic landform dictionary
Archaeologists ask questions about the technology and culture of people, past and present, to better understand changes in human adaptation and lifestyles across time and space. And yet, archaeological observations wrestle with geological problems. People leave traces of their passage on landforms shaped by natural processes–the dynamic landscape influences and alters people’s behavior and continues to alter and mask the materials and patterns left behind. We must understand these processes, along with the climatic and environmental conditions driving them, before we can find answers in the sample of artifacts and features we are fortunate to encounter and document.
