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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

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

Iceland 2005

D. Craig Young · October 20, 2025 · Leave a Comment

Streets of Heimaey. A quiet morning in front of my guesthouse. Vestamannaeyjar, Iceland

Heimaey. The protected fishing port of Heimaey, Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland

Eldfell wind. On the summit of the newest mountain in the world, Eldfell, Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland

Eldfell gust. The summit winds were amazing. Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland

North Sea. The coastline of Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland

Origins. Viewed from Eldfell, Helgafell is an older volcanic cone built during the formation of the island about 5,000 years ago. Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland.

Still standing. A building buried by the eruption of Eldfell in January, 1973. Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland

This train. Somewhere outside Copenhagen, Denmark.

Desert nights in Big Bend

D. Craig Young · July 31, 2025 · 1 Comment

It is the heat that gets your attention – and pay attention because one needs to travel wisely in the late spring in Big Bend National Park, but it is the promise of evening birds and late-night dark skies that holds it. I had dropped into Lajitas, Texas, to attend a photo workshop focused on astrophotography in and around the desert, borderland park. Night photography avoids the intense heat of the day, of course, but we also explored various locations to experience the moods of this variegated landscape.

The Big Bend topography is refreshingly disorienting to me. Unlike the regular, linear pattern of the Basin and Range, the mountains of Big Bend seem circular; we travel around and into them, not over and through. Alluvial fans and consolidated pediments extend from the rugged uplands, these are familiar. The Rio Grande gasps for refreshment, barely any flow this time of year – the canyon marking the national boundary more than the river. The Chihuahuan Desert, its incessant volcanic rocks colonized with a wild diversity of arid-adapted plants and animals, is somehow sharper and coarser than our western deserts. Although the landscape is wide open, I feel like I cannot see as far. Between convoluted ridges, gunsight canyons reveal a surprise of distant ranges and mesas, verifying that the desert knows no borders.

While I am not attracted to group excursions typically, I have great friends at Muench Workshops, and their participants are like-minded and lovely to spend time with. I always learn new bits of technique, and with astrophotography, there can be unique skills to apply in the field and in image processing. I forget most of them almost immediately, but that is not for their lack of unselfish sharing and engagement. It takes practice, and more practice, but it remains so much fun.

While I gave full attention to our daily astro tutorials – we would hide away in a cool conference room during the hottest part of the day, I engaged my wanderlust during late afternoon excursions in search of birds and sunset light. I was then ready to settle in with the group to practice dark-sky compositions from blue hour to well after midnight.

Our little group moved between the mountains and canyons, dropping to the river occasionally; anything to feel the evening releasing the heat of the day. Although Wayne and Matt had locations planned, we often detoured when the light caught our attention. They picked some amazing scenes, but our focus was technique so we could have been almost anywhere in the jumble of desert spires and ridges. We practiced variations on focus-stacking, time-blending, and multiple exposures to battle the digital noise of long exposures, high-ISO settings, and heat-affected sensors. We also practiced various low-level lighting techniques to bring warmth and detail to our scenes. The field craft is a bit fiddlier than I am drawn to typically, and the files take quite a bit of patience (and computing power) to process, but the results are, or can be, amazing.

I mastered nothing on this trip, but I was reminded that improvement continues with practice. I may use few of the skills and tricks that well-practiced astrophotographers bring to their scenes, but there are landscapes and landforms in the Great Basin that I want to capture under a night sky, so I will continue to practice (special thanks to Wayne Suggs and Matt Payne). There is nothing like being under a dark sky in a desert or mountain landscape. It heals concessions we make living in cities of artificial light and constant motion, and it wakes up senses we hide from ourselves most of the time. The photos are then reminders that we should go back to the dark, occasionally, to heal and wake up.

Plus, there are birds to enjoy in the blue hour as we wait for the stars to shine.

Coordinated color. Blue Grosbeak, Los Chisos Basin, Big Bend National Park, TX, USA

Vermillion Flycatcher. Big Bend National Park, TX, USA

Mexican Jay. Big Bend National Park, TX, USA

Greater Roadrunner. Big Bend National Park, TX, USA

Morning drift. Common Nighthawk, Big Bend National Park, TX, USA

Keep going.

In memory of my nephew, Robby Young, who we lost so suddenly and too soon, while I was in Big Bend (June 2024). I did not see him enough, and I cannot see him again. But I will always have a reminder of him when under a dark sky, where the stars feel close enough to touch, even as they continue their journeys, far, far away.