great basin

A Traverse from Antelope to Stone Cabin Valley, central Nevada

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

Storms looked promising over the central Great Basin, as weak monsoon moisture drifted northward. It is Second Friday, and I am focused on a long traverse, almost 150 miles, linking Antelope Valley with Stone Cabin Valley. Wandering the alluvial fans and pediments between the Monitor Range in the west and the Antelope and Hot Creek Ranges in the east, it is one of the longer north-south traverses missing from my Nevada maps.

I leave Highway 50 turning south into Antelope Valley. A vast expanse of coalesced fans extends into the distance, their surfaces stabilizing, older and older, as I work my way up-fan and southward. I climb a rough, sometimes graded road to a pass into Dry Valley. Pinyon and juniper woodlands close around me, the road damp from last night’s rain. Dry Valley and Sevenmile Wash drop into Little Fish Lake Valley where storms begin to pop along the indistinct break between the Antelope Range and the Hot Creek Range — the break seems structural rather than elevational although there is a subtle pass at Long Canyon. I stop to watch the clouds at play.

The skies have cleared by the time I set camp at Upper Fish Lake, where I watch a few wading birds and listen to the coyotes who seem to be denning near Warm Spring on the opposite side of the shallow lake. With the sun setting earlier as we move toward the fall equinox, the guiding constellations — Sagittarius and Scorpio — surround the galactic core of the Milky Way come into view. I am going back in time a bit, using a Canon 6D and its nice sensor to revisit astrophotography again. I lack a compelling composition, but this is practice, getting my hands around a camera I have not used in a few years.

In the morning, I traverse the amazing Box Canyon before climbing to McIntyre Summit and into Stone Cabin Valley. I push along a long bajada to reach Highway 6. I can continue the extent of the valley after an eastern detour to avoid private lands. The boundary of the Tonopah section of the Nevada Test and Training Range turns me back toward the Monitor Hills (a high point excursion earlier this year). I regain Highway 6 in Ralston Valley where I turn west on pavement toward Tonopah.

Keep going.

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

#naturefirst #keepgoing

The recce roadside in black-and-white imagery

“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.“

American Avocets in Surprise Valley, California — A morning on the causeway

D. Craig Young · April 25, 2026 · 6 Comments

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

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.

Image Gallery

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