D. Craig Young

Thru the Heart of the northern Great Basin: A brief transit of Hart Mountain and Warner Valley

D. Craig Young · March 31, 2026 · 1 Comment

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.

Ducking out. A Hooded Merganser takes flight, sloughs of Flagstaff Lake, Warner Valley, Great Basin Desert, OR, USA

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.

#naturefirst #keepgoing

On the border with obsidian, dust, and eagles — Hamlin Valley, Nevada and Utah

D. Craig Young · February 1, 2026 · 2 Comments

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.

#naturefirst #keepgoing

Looping Monitor Valley, Nevada — a new approach to the landforms and landscapes of the Great Basin

D. Craig Young · January 18, 2026 · 7 Comments

I sat recently, looking at loops on maps. Along with my high points and study localities, I have charted the many routes traveled during excursions across Nevada and elsewhere. The east-west highways cut through north-south, basin-and-range structures, with secondary roads, paved and not, traversing valleys in a regular looping pattern. I have long wanted to complete as many Nevada loops as possible, exploring each basin and each range.

For the past few years, I have been focused on high points, reaching the apex of 130 of Nevada’s many ranges. I have explored the basins as well, and my work often highlights the landforms of the valley floors and margins, as that is where wind and water coalesce to arrange the dynamic landforms I am most interested in. With great intent, I create these ‘interests’ (e.g., high points, roads) as motivation and planning targets for my Second Friday excursions. I have realized, however, that I have been, maybe, too focused on summits, often missing opportunities to delve deeper into the surrounding landscape. I am, therefore, putting less emphasis on high points and shifting to basin traverses, finishing my road loops, if you will. So here we go, Darren and I are in Monitor Valley (April 2025), in the heart of the state.

There are several small obsidian sources, of poor quality generally, in the southern Monitor Range. I was interested in seeing the outcrops, if any, so we searched the area of White Rock Canyon and McCann Canyon, finding some decent nodules below massive tuff outcrops. It is, however, easy to see why this is not a prominent regional toolstone source, even in an area where obsidian is uncommon generally. The nodules are weathered and often almost crumbly; it is not good glass, although rare nodules are attractive. The Horse Heaven area is beautiful with amazingly healthy floodplain grasses. I am surprised by this and will consider another visit.

Mount Jefferson is the summit of the Toquima Range, an area I must get back to! High to the west of Monitor Valley, the vast summit area, spread between the mountain’s north and south summits – south being the high point at 11,932 feet – is the location of some of the most amazing high-altitude archaeology in the Great Basin. The sites exemplify the traditional awareness and use of alpine resources at a time that the valleys were drying overall. It makes little sense that I have yet to wander the summit tablelands – so many choices in the Basin and Range. Soon, yes, soon.

**Landforms at Diana’s Punchbowl**. *Qp1*: Early to Middle Pleistocene alluvium and tuffs; *Qaf1*: Late Pleistocene alluvial pediments (erosional); *Qaf2*: Holocene alluvial fans (depositional); *Qsp1*: silt plain, fine-grained alluvium and loess; *Qsp2*: silt plain with spring discharge distributaries and wetlands. *Qtf*: Travertine and carbonate tufa of spring mound.

Photo of Diana's Punchbowl, Monitor Valley, Nevada — **Sunset bowl**. Monitor Valley, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

We camp near Diana’s Punchbowl, a carbonate travertine mound forming an anomalous hill, with a crater-like, water-filled throat, rising from the valley floor. I like how the groundwater discharge forms a complex of spring distributaries on the silt plain of the valley bottom. Alluvial fans of several ages and origins rise above the inset floodplain, the spring, and its prominent mound. We did not have ideal conditions to create interesting photographs, but it is an awesome place to sit and think about the origins of groundwater and the proximity of the heated magma plumes that underlie the thin crust of the central Great Basin.

Just after dawn, north of the hot spring, we found a gray ghost. The light-colored male Northern Harrier was busily building a nest with his darker mate. It was a splendid watch, catching this activity in the valley wetlands near Potts Ranch. This opportunity made up for the underwhelming light of the morning at the Punchbowl.

As we headed north, approaching Hwy 50, a new sound clicked from beneath the hood, competing with the typical clatter of the diesel engine. I have heard this in other circumstances and realized my alternator would not last much longer. Long enough to get home, probably, but we had hoped to circle south through Antelope Valley, east beyond the Monitors. So, prudence prevailed, and we turned west, heading home for a necessary repair. The valley loop will be there still.

This new, basin-centric approach should be enjoyable. As I look back, I need to take more time to better document the unique landforms and general character of the valleys, as I did with the high points. It’s an evolution but should produce opportunities to learn more about a place, from valley floor to mountain summit. We will see.

Keep going.

Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.

#naturefirst #keepgoing

Martis Dogs: A chance encounter with Coyotes near Truckee, California

D. Craig Young · December 30, 2025 · 1 Comment

Martis Valley, California, a few miles north of Lake Tahoe and just below Donner Summit, is often significantly colder than the surrounding mountains and almost always colder than the valleys of western Nevada. It seemed as cold as ever on this April morning (2025) even though it was a few days into spring. This morning, the valley’s reputation as a ‘cold sink’ is deserved. But where’s the snow? Only patches peek out from the shade of the forest floor; it is already drier than I expected.

I had driven from Nevada to do some documentary photography for a National Register nomination highlighting a complex of traditional properties and archaeological sites along Martis Creek, a tributary of the Truckee River, which flows from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake in western Nevada. I traveled against its flow on my short journey into the mountains. My problem, on this frozen morning, is that there are millions icy crystals reflecting the sunrise from every surface and seemingly hanging in the air. The bright highlights were impossible distractions from the necessary documentation. I would have to wait for some mid-morning warmth, at least.

To make use of the extra time, I started to scout for the requisite shots, but I was quickly distracted by the calls of a pack of coyotes. They were nearby, but in the woodlands that ring the open meadow of the valley bottom. I turned toward the forest, following a wide trail in the general direction of the melodic howling. The clustered trees favored me, as I soon caught a glimpse of a pair of yearling pups. Nipping and wrestling, they failed to notice me even though I was relatively close. They would tussle and then stop to sing and yelp. It was musical.

Soon, mom appeared behind the pair pushing them onward, into the forest toward a nearby meadow. Unlike the unaware pups, she caught sight of me immediately. We shared a long gaze, implying that it was fine to share the trail but not to follow her little pack.

I watched for a while, sticking to the trail to let them wander without watching me too closely. They were now quiet and got to business in the meadow, running among deep grass, sage, and willows as their hopeful hunt began.

As I lost sight of them, a Mountain Chickadee stopped by to see what all the ruckus had been about. By then the song-dogs had disappeared completely, and it was time for me to get to work.

Keep going.

Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.

#naturefirst #keepgoing

Time for the visitors: Photographing comets at the margins of the Great Basin

D. Craig Young · December 6, 2025 · 10 Comments

I seem to have driven above the fall colors of central Utah. The Old River Bed of the ancient Great Salt Lake, where I had been walking an ancient delta earlier in the day, was far behind me. With the light fading, I realized I was too late in the season – beyond the middle of October – for peak color in the aspen groves of the Wasatch Mountains. Never mind ‘peak color’, I was clearly too late for leaves of any kind; the aspens formed rows and rows of picket-lined, skeletal woodland, no leaves in sight. My goal this autumn, however, was something different.

I have had a long interest in the night sky. While I completed college courses and picked up a nice collection of books on astronomy, none of that prepares you for a night under a desert’s canopy of stars. Before I wandered deserts, living in the cross-timbers of northern Texas, telescopes had my attention, and I even fumbled around with camera mounts in high school, trying to connect a Canon AE-1 to an 8” tracking scope. I never solved that puzzle. My astrophotography has advanced little since the early 1980s.

However, comets.

In 1986, while I was at college struggling through physics class, my dad tracked Halley’s Comet as it approached perihelion on its ±76-year orbit. My grandfather had seen it as a boy, and my father wanted him, his father-in-law, to see it twice. Although I did not get to share in that effort, I have the picture my father captured from our front porch after several attempts at various locations. An engineer, he was able to get his AE-1 attached to a modified tripod to get the image. Although he recorded settings for several of his attempts in a notebook (high-quality paper metadata!), his best image is almost an afterthought; a classic moment of ‘one last image’.

So, my fascination with comets, and photographing them, has been transmitted across generations. The lumen-tailed visitors connect us to calendars of expansive scale, with predictable orbital cycles of centuries to many, many millennia. Some pass by only once, surprises from discovery to departure. As they approach the sun, the solemn apex of their journey, cyclical or not, they increase in brightness, shredding mass in the solar headwind, but their ultimate display remains a mystery of our night sky; an experience unpredictable to even the most experienced astronomer.

I have taken to photographing the celestial visitors, building on my father’s passion in the spring of 1986. My imagery could be more creative, certainly – this post is personal motivation for the next visitor.

Comet Neowise lit up the morning sky for several days in 2020. I captured its sudden drama, maybe as a sign of new days beyond the Covid pandemic. It was bright in the morning sky, and I only needed to walk into the hills above our home to set up a photo. I remember thinking it was fascinating that I could do this without having to travel at all, a unique spectacle just outside the house. I now wish I had found some landscape interest to go with its brilliance – I have time, it will be back in about 5,000 years.

I had slightly more success with Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS four years later. On a night Desna and I thought to go into the hills above Washoe Lake to simply look for it, I captured a ‘portrait’ shot with wonderful detail of its tail and anti-tail (the anti-tail appears to point toward the sun, but it is a rare trick of perspective as the earth crosses the comet’s orbital plane). It was for Comet Tuchinshan that I climbed into the leafless and windy Wasatch, hoping to capture its image against the backdrop of the Milky Way. I was not happy, at first, with the light pollution from the towns in Utah’s Sanpete Valley, but the image has grown on me, remembering my camp on the windy ridge of Skyline Road. It is nice to have two very different views of this exceptional comet – a comet that will never be seen again.

As I drafted an early version of this post, thinking about my father’s Comet Halley, I learned of the appearance of Comet Lemmon in the fall of 2025 – just last month. I was leading a project in Yosemite National Park, testing the boundaries and depth of several archaeological sites on the park’s boundary. I had little free time, but I also knew I could not complete this post without at least trying to capture an image of the most recent visible comet. I waited into dark on a hillside below the road to Tioga Pass, and soon enough Comet Lemmon revealed itself. It reflected a subtle, suggestive light, difficult to keep an eye on, but a careful, long exposure revealed its short-lived spectacle. I will have to wait a millennium for this one to return. It was worth it.

For the past couple years, my searches for fall color have been timed poorly. I will, however, have chances next year. These comets are once-in-a-lifetime, so I am happy to have spent at least one night in a buffeted tent, far above and beyond the leaves of autumn. Icy fragments of the cosmos, luminous for a moment in an evening sky, are worth missing the perennial colors of our locally wonderful trees. I will camp in the color next year, I hope – unless there is another comet.

Keep going.

Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.

#naturefirst #keepgoing