Field Notes 2025.01.15
Winds of change. Squalls building along the Antarctic Peninsula Starting 2025 by abandoning social media so that I might improve my focus on field excursions, research, writing, and photography.
Nevada High Points #128 – Slate Ridge
I am on the road again. Having arrived home from northwestern Nevada only recently, I need to be in southern Nevada for some time in our Desert Branch office and a quick bit of fieldwork near Rogers Dry Lake in southeastern California. It is one end of the state to the other, and from the Great Basin Desert to the Mojave. I enjoy the quick transitions, one ecology to another, Basin and Range to the Walker Lane tectonic silliness, and the travel day provides the opportunity to explore another high point without much of a detour.
Nevada High Points #127 — Painted Point Range
I stood here over 30 years ago, in the heat of a Nevada summer afternoon, visiting Lynn Nardella, a longtime archaeologist and sometime fire lookout. He was on fire-duty, while I was leading a university team doing archaeological survey on the Massacre Rim. Lynn would join us in a few days when we moved to a small excavation in High Rock Canyon, but on that day, he was watching the building monsoon clouds for lightning strikes. I was now standing, in scudding clouds and a piercing wind, at the same small building perched on the summit of the Painted Point Range, three decades later.
Continue Reading Nevada High Points #127 — Painted Point Range
Nevada High Points #126 – Adobe Range
This is a long outing, I am headed for fieldwork on the Old River Bed in the West Desert of Utah, and then on to visit my parents in Grand Junction, Colorado. But first, I cannot pass up a chance to check out a Nevada high point along the way. The Adobe Range rises north of Elko, Nevada, in a generally south-to-north-trending jumble of volcanic hills flanked by broad sedimentary pediments. The hills are not prominent in any dramatic sense, but I have worked several projects along their flanks without taking the opportunity to visit the range’s higher elevations. It was time to change that with an afternoon walk.
Nevada High Points #125 – Dolly Varden Mountains
Sometimes it is simply a nice walk. On my way to fieldwork on the Old River Bed in Utah’s West Desert, I take advantage of the long drive day with a stop in the Dolly Varden Mountains. The Dolly Vardens are the most prominent of a small group of hills between Steptoe Valley and Antelope Valley; I have made this a common stop on my way to Utah-based projects.
Continue Reading Nevada High Points #125 – Dolly Varden Mountains
Nevada High Points #124 – Garfield Hills
I could not see the summit from camp even though it was yet another clear morning promising blue sky from horizon to horizon. Late summer in west-central Nevada, it would get warm later today, so I better get going.