great basin

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

Quick camp on Miller Canyon Fan, western Utah

D. Craig Young · July 26, 2025 · Leave a Comment

Waypoint: Miller Canyon Alluvial Fan, Sevier Valley, Utah

After a warm day of landform reconnaissance in the Great Basin of western Utah, I camped in a small back-berm playette on the broad alluvial fan of Miller Canyon extending from the House Range in western Utah. The playette – a miniature dry lake – formed behind a relict gravel berm of pluvial Lake Gunnison, building over thousands of years as loessic alluvium scoured from the hillslopes settles behind the abandoned berm. This is the modern setting on the expansive alluvial fan – a small dry lake nestled behind a beach long after the once vast pluvial lake faded and dried, its lakebed shrinking to the playa of the Sevier Basin. The berm provides a stage for photographing storms that try and fail, evaporating into the evening skies of the Great Basin. The variegated color of a juvenile Brown-headed Cowbird greeted me as I rolled out of my sleeping bag the following morning. Altogether, a somewhat typical experience during geoarchaeological fieldwork in the Great Basin Desert. Keep going.

[2024.05.15 — Bonneville Basin Recce with Brian Codding (Univ of Utah) and Daniel Contreras (Univ of Florida); aka, The Strandline Society].

“These images and words are a reflection, simply and wholly, of my respect for our public lands and the public science and occasional art I am, and we are, able to do there. Our ability to create and think are not trivial, and wild space and healthy ecosystems nourish such things. It is here that we will find our better selves, even as the misdeeds of a few threaten much that, until recently, provides for our common good. Keep going.“

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

#naturefirst #keepgoing

Embracing Distractions: Mason Valley – Seaman Range – Lunar Craters

D. Craig Young · May 26, 2025 · 2 Comments

NvGO Notes 2025.03.14

**Biconic**. Young volcanic cones rise in the Lunar Craters National Natural Landmark, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

Maybe high points don’t have to be the goal. I established my High Points quest in the 1990s to encourage my exploration of the Nevada outback. I knew summit goals could guide me as I traversed Nevada’s Basin and Range and grew familiar with its amazing variety of desert landforms. Over 30 intervening years, I was not as persistent in my high-point pursuit as I could have been – I missed several years or went months at a time without visiting a summit, but my exploration has been almost ceaseless as I worked on a wide variety of geoarchaeological projects and managed to summit 130 of Nevada’s 317 (or so) named ranges. I grew more patterned and regular as I began writing about the excursions. I am, however, due for change.

I love walking hills and will continue to do so, but the list has become mildly oppressive. My desire to experience Nevada’s variety of places and landforms is no less, but I found myself focusing on the summit without slowing to take time and experience a place. The value and pleasure of creating images and mapping landforms was, at times, forgotten or set aside. I will also admit that as I age, I am getting slower on the uphills (and downhills), so more time is needed to attain each summit, taking time away from other desires. I rarely, if ever, sit to watch for wildlife or changes in lighting on an outcrop or rock art panel. Something is often missing.

**A start**. A pair of Lesser Scaup take flight in Mason Valley WMA, Great Basin Desert, NV

**Roost**. Double-breasted Comorants await the morning sun, Mason Valley WMA, Great Basin Desert, NV

I begin to realize this as I circle the Worthington Hills in south-central Nevada, looking for a way through the recent snow. The ridges below the summit look great in parting clouds, but I am alone and cutting steps on the steep slopes I had hoped to climb does not seem prudent. I thought I had best leave the Worthingtons for another time and head to a lower set of hills on the White River near Hiko, snow-cover should be less there. I did not want to ‘waste’ a drive this far into southeastern Nevada and not get a summit, so I drove on – Distraction #1. Although I was surrounded by amazing scenes of snow-lined and cloud-wrapped peaks above Joshua Tree sharpness, I did not pause.

**Lost snow**. Horizons fade in a late snow in the Great Basin Desert, NV

As I approach the Hiko Hills, I find a long stretch of irrigation pivots fenced behind ‘no trespassing’ signs. It is late in the day, so I decide to venture around the fields and gain the high point in the morning. I turn into the foothills of the Seaman Range and eventually find a faint two-track that leads to a secluded alcove among a maze of granite outcrops, like a lonely version of the Alabama Hills. Distraction #2. A desire to explore the outcrops begins to take precedence; attention to the nearby hills fades.

**Towers**. Granitic outcrops of the Seaman Range, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

**Hanging on**. A juniper tree clings to the granite of the Seaman Range, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

**Whale rock**. Heavy shapes in the outcrops of the Seaman Range, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

**Way through**. Clasts and texture in the granitic outcrops of the Seaman Range, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

I set camp and wander until after dark, returning to my little camp as snow begins to fall. There is enough wind to push the feathery flakes sideways, and soon an inch or two of snow powders the bitterbrush and sage and covers my tent and field boxes. Distraction #3 – these are getting healthier as I push the any high point further from my mind, wanting only to wander the granite for images in the morning light. I will probably have fog in the desert!

The squalls clear overnight, and the moon takes over, adding bright ambience to haunting calls of a Great Horned Owl. I crawl out of the tent in the pre-dawn as the moon sets beyond Mount Irish. Snow brightens slowly, while the fog teases from the canyon of the White River, far to the east. It is not adding to the intrigue of the nearby hoodoos and spires, but at least I was not wrong completely; it is here, sort of. I grab my gear and lose myself among the rocks.

**Last blue**. Sunrise approaches the snow-spattered outcrops of the Seaman Range, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

**Crystal layers.** Weathering release in the plutonic granite of the Seaman Range, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

I cannot say that I came away with portfolio imagery, but it was the most fun I’d had in a long while photographing. Distraction #4 – I could not care less about the Hiko Hills except to enjoy the fog along their distant slopes. I would not be hiking any hills today, and that was OK.

After a wonderful morning, the snow melting almost immediately with the sunrise, I head back onto Highway 93, traipsing through a couple Wildlife Management Areas, eventually turning toward Lunar Craters National Natural Landmark. Distraction #5 – I was now excited about scouting locations, thinking about landforms I could document, and enjoying an excursion without goals. I became practically joyful considering how the ‘distractions’ allowed me the freedom to develop a refreshed approach to Second Friday and excursions into the Nevada outback.

**Before or after**. A dash of color in the cold of blue hour, Seaman Range, Great Basin Desert, NV, USA

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I never thought I would climb every high point on my list, it has always been aspirational, something to keep me going, something to highlight the lesser-known places – why else would I even think about visiting the Hiko Hills? But I really do not need the list, the intrinsic value, beauty, and curiosity of our public lands – now facing challenges unpredictable – is aspiration and inspiration enough. We will see where the distractions lead.

Keep going.

**Spring flight**. A Red-tailed Hawk searches the Lunar Craters National Natural Landmark, Great Basin Desert, NV

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

#naturefirst #keepgoing