A quick excursion to the landforms of the Rose Spring Site, the type-site of the iconic Rose Spring projectile point. While the variation and nuance of projectile point types receives common attention, the Rose Spring series has long been the marker for the transition from dart to arrow technology in the Great Basin.
WayPoint 2026.06.19
I am out doing some ground-truthing for a broad landform-age model to evaluate the potential for buried archaeological resources in areas of the Mojave Desert where Joshua Trees are one of keystone species. (Lousy default thumbnail, I know).
American Avocets in Surprise Valley, California — A morning on the causeway
I can almost remember the first time a saw an American Avocet. I cannot, of course, recall the exact day, but it was on an early excursion to Warner Valley, Oregon, sometime in 1988. Probably. I loved birds, but I was not as quietly infatuated with them as I am now. I recall, however, the dramatic coloring and upright stance of this confident shore bird. My wife has similar memories of brilliant Avocets at the Fernley Wildlife Management Area between Winnemucca and Reno. Because the Avocet is distinctive and lacks the relative sameness or subtle distinctions of so many bird families, I can see why it might be many western birder’s ‘entry point’ to a lifetime of birding. And they are so fun to photograph.
In June of 2025, leaving a geoarchaeological study in northwestern Nevada, I crossed into Surprise Valley, California, traversing the basin floor on the causeway through Middle Alkali Lake. The shallow lake, sometimes nothing more than a dry lakebed, is the floor of the once vast pluvial Lake Surprise, its relict, Pleistocene-age shorelines ringing the much higher valley-margin hillslopes. Small, gravel islands emerge from the shallow lake, paralleling the roadway. The gravel, left from roadwork along the causeway, catch the rising sun and glow warmly in the shallow water. Clear skies reflect from the smoothness of the mirror lake.
I am moving slowly westbound along the causeway when I notice a Willet wading calmly in grass protruding from a narrow shoreline. At the same moment, I notice a flat-bed pickup, the only other vehicle for many miles it seems, practically tailgating me. A pair of collies stare intently from the sides of the cab. No fault of the guy heading to chores, or whatever, I’m barely moving. There are no turnouts on this section of the causeway, so I pick up the pace to get to the other side. I will turn around and let the man and his impatient dogs get on with their morning.
Working my way back to the wading Willet I find a turnout on the eastbound side of the causeway that will fit my rig. While Willets are nice to see, what had caught my attention just as ranch-life had barreled down on me was the flash of contrast; the black, white, and pink, of American Avocets! There were six or so outstanding birds wading or roosting on the gravel bars poking above the reflective waters.
I waded slowly from the causeway shore, staying close to the road but getting to level ground. The birds did not seem to care. Avocets tend to be less skittish than many shorebirds. I move slowly getting low to the water – the Willet had already had enough of me – but the Avocets went about their business. Two more flew in, landing with easy steps in the shallow water.
The light was perfect. I spent an hour with the birds, getting a myriad of singles and pairs reflected easily in the low-gradient light of early morning. A pair seemed to be considering nesting spots while others foraged in the grass and gravel. It is a pleasant pause before my journey home, as I am soon southbound on Hwy 447 toward Gerlach and Pyramid Lake. The Avocets have a summer ahead of them, wading the segmented lakes of Surprise Valley, I am better having spent some time with them.
Keep going. (Thanks to Desna for the Avocet as birding ‘entry point’ story idea).
Thru the Heart of the northern Great Basin: A brief transit of Hart Mountain and Warner Valley
After meeting with a team from the Idaho Museum of Natural History at Owl Cave, a lava-tube rockshelter on the Snake River Plain, I turn west on Hwy 20 to traverse toward Craters of the Moon National Monument. It is a busy, blue highway*, not as enjoyable as I hoped. It winds around lava flows and mountain slopes until dropping to Mountain Home, Idaho. Here, I find another blue road along the Snake River from Grand View to Marsing, where I jump west to Hwy 95. It is a long loop, and I would have liked to take an overland route from Grand View, ID, to Jordan Valley, OR – I must save that for another day.
Well into Oregon, I eventually turn west at Burns Junction. My goal is Hart Mountain, so I traverse along the base of the Steens Mountains in the Alvord Basin; one of my favorite routes, in an area I have yet to explore enough. It is a perfect time to drop south along the base of the Steens’ eastern escarpment. The late sun rakes low and casts long shadows toward Whitehorse Valley. It is a good road to Alvord Hot Springs and on to Fields. I turn toward Catlow Valley as it gets dark.
I need to find a camp spot somewhere on Hart Mountain. It is turning into a long drive-day and now going deep into the night. I decide to turn onto a two-track where I find some closed roads intersecting. The closures provide a small turn around, so I set a camp just before the marked sign. I am short of refuge lands, and it is time to stop. It is a lovely, dark evening, I set the tent and turn in.
A Sage Sparrow and a Brewer’s Sparrow sing to greet the sunrise, and I am out of the tent before dawn. Beattys Butte, an ancient volcano with very good obsidian, looks nice in the south distance. There is color in the few clouds over the Steens Mountains, so I get some nice simple photos.
Driving through the refuge, I feel the desperation of the Hart Mountain fire of 2024; it did incredible damage. It is greening now, but woodland groves are mostly gone. A few interesting but distant ‘white elven’ trees – skeletons of once flourishing trees – stand in lonely silence. There is an historic-era rock wall at the summit of the Hart Mountain switch-backing road. I have passed this spot dozens of times before the fire, I am sure I have not noticed it previously.
I drop off the Hart Mountain fault block to visit the CCC camp in Warner Valley. At a nearby campground I meet a couple working on the Oregon Bee Atlas. Their passion is contagious as I hear about the systematic work around individual plants where bees are observed and netted. They have an interesting, if morbid, collection. I learn that bees are not long-lived, and these have given their short lives to science and census. It is a little confusing.
I taught an archaeological field school in Warner Valley for several summers in the early 1990s, after attending my field school here in 1988 and being a crew-chief for a few years after that. I basically lived in this historic camp at the base of Hart Mountain for over a year, cumulatively. Like many places of fond memory, it has lost some of its aura as it ages, and I age along with it. I photograph the CCC building, sad in its new paint. The waterfall above the camp is in bad shape, the fire burned the canyon as in a chimney, obviously raging upward, destroying a vast aspen grove in its path.
After checking out the relatively high water levels in Flagstaff Lake, one of the many segmented lakes in the basin of Warner Valley. It was dry when I was here in the fall of 2023, and I spent many years trying to understand the processes and landform evolution, including the distribution of ancient wetlands, that were influenced by the lake level variation. The birds bring hope and resilience after the scars on the mountain.
I follow the backroad between Plush and Adel, Oregon, down to Twelvemile Creek. I turn up the two-track that Des and I had followed with Todd and Rollie, the fish-squeezers working for Fish and Wildlife who shared our camp during several Warner Valley field seasons. I had collected rounded obsidian nodules in the drainage over thirty years ago, and I collected more from upper reaches of the creek recently. I can document their setting more completely today.
The road from Adel continues to Surprise Valley where I rendezvous with Desna at our friend’s place in Lake City. Des arrived just before I pulled in. Sandhill Cranes are singing in the lower fields, a lovely afternoon. It is nicely motivation for our annual breeding bird census on our designated track through Surprise Valley. We do our annual bird count tomorrow.
Keep going.
*Blue Highways: A Journey into America, by William Least-Heat Moon. Little, Brown, and Company, 1982.
Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.
On the border with obsidian, dust, and eagles — Hamlin Valley, Nevada and Utah
I have been mapping the distribution of obsidian nodules in the landforms of the Cedar Mountains, where caldera remnants of volcanic tuff and glass have been incorporated into debris flows and alluvial fans the formed well before the last ice age. These ancient landforms, extending well beyond the eastern mountain front, host clasts of the Modena obsidian, a toolstone source of the eastern Escalante Basin. We continue to work on documenting and describing this resource, and I hope to share much more about it here. Today (May 2025), however, I am taking a break to drive a traverse of Hamlin Valley, north and east of our project area.
It is a long loop from my camp in Echo Canyon State Park, and I planned to meet our field team in the late afternoon. There was not a lot of time to explore, but I could get a feel for an area I had not seen much of previously. Heading toward the eastern border of Nevada, beyond the southern end of Lake Valley, I pass through the north end of the Wilson Creek Mountains and through the crunchy, old mining town of Atlanta. I follow some distant Pinyon Jays, birds I have missed closer to home for some reason, but they do not let me get close. I am left only with their laughing calls. That’ll do.
At Wells Summit in the Limestone Hills, I finally look into Hamlin Valley. I had been here before, but I was drawn north into the great wide open below the Snake Range. This time I will turn south to go the length of Hamlin. The valley is bounded by the Mountain Home Range on the east, but the extensional space of the vast valley is amazing. At the remnants of Hyde Well, the valley is over 15 miles wide, but it appears endless in the late-morning haze.
I turn south, rambling on roughly graded dirt and crossing the dry Hamlin Valley Wash, a distant tributary of the once vast, now dry, Lake Bonneville. I am now in Utah, moving along uplifted pediments built of ancient alluvial fans faulted upward to become dissected ramps of sediment, shed from the Mountain Home Range long ago. The wash and road are soon confined between toes of the relict fans extended from both sides of the valley. A Golden Eagle meets me halfway, flying low as it trolls the dissected slope overlooking the dry wash.
Once imperceptibly wide, the valley’s southern reach narrows between the White Rock Mountains (Nevada) and the Needle Range (Utah). The valley begins to close as private lands of small settlements, ranches, and homesteads confine creative travel possibilities. When you reach the southern end of the valley it literally pours into Modena Wash; the drainage divide is at the valley margin, not in the bounding hills of the Indian Peak Range. Modena Wash drops quickly through white-streaked, volcanic outcrops into the Escalante Basin.
The valley deserves more time, and I will be back to spend time among the relict fans and low-flying eagles. For the moment, I am back in the obsidian, full circle.
Keep going.
Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.