Trail Option

A personal geography of landscape and place, art and geo-science.

Recce

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

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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.

Sage Sparrow. A sparrow feeding at dawn, Hart Mountain, OR, USA

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.

Distant butte. Beatty’s Butte from the sagebrush plain of Hart Mountain, Great Basin Desert, OR, USA
Lost Tree. Ghostly skeletons after the fire of 2024, Hart Mountain, Great Basin Desert, OR, USA

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.

Warner view. Poker Jim Ridge from Hart Mountain, Great Basin Desert, OR, USA

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.

Field Station. Our HQ for many field seasons, the infirmary of Hart Mountain CCC Camp, Warner Valley, OR, USA
Playing guitar on the porch of our field station, 1991 Field School, Hart Mountain CCC Camp, Warner Valley, OR, USA
Playing guitar on the porch of our field station, 1991 Field School, Hart Mountain CCC Camp, Warner Valley, OR, USA

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.

Color falls. In autumn 2023, before the fire. Hart Mountain, Warner Valley, OR, USA

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.

Nesting look. Northern Pintail peeks cautiously from a wetland pond, Hart Mountain, Great Basin Desert, OR, USA
Pairing. Clark’s Grebes on Hart Lake, Warner Valley, Great Basin Desert, OR, USA
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.

The scout. Chukar checks the scene, Hart Mountain, Great Basin Desert, OR, USA

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

#naturefirst #keepgoing

Obsidian Traces: Mapping Majuba

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Patterned Ground Video Series #3

Obsidian, a form of volcanic glass, is a key constituent of traditional toolkits — and the detritus of tool manufacture — found in archaeological sites throughout the Great Basin of western North America. It was preferred, in many ways, because of its absolutely sharp edges and the relative ease with which tools and edges can be created. Skilled toolmakers can create complex, almost artistic, hunting technology, while even the most unskilled user can fracture a piece of obsidian to create a utilitarian cutting edge, if need be.

In the volcanic rocks of the Basin and Range geologic province, obsidian is relatively common and can be found in prominent glassy outcrops or as cobbles and gravels spread across the landscape. Its utility to traditional foragers needing a reliable toolkit and the availability of obsidian as raw material result in its common presence in archaeological sites — sometimes it is the only material present to indicate the passing of people through the Great Basin past.

Recce route at Poker Brown Wash in the region of Majuba and Seven Troughs obsidian sources.

What kind of stories can obsidian tell archaeologists? Formed during volcanic eruptions, each obsidian has a unique geochemical signature. The obsidian from Volcano #1 can be easily distinguished from the obsidian of Volcano #2. If we find obsidian from Volcano #1 in our site, we know that people visited Volcano #1 to get toolstone or that they traded with people who had visited Volcano #1. We can think similar things if we find artifacts or waste material made of obsidian from Volcano #2. If Volcano #1 is far away from our study-site, we can surmise that either people or obsidian trade items moved a long way. Maybe obsidian from Volcano #1 is common in older parts of the site, while obsidian from Volcano #2 is only from more recent deposits; it becomes clear then that the movement of people, raw material, and artifacts changed over time — maybe it was different people or maybe access to Volcano #1 was cut off by new inhabitants around that obsidian, so the villagers began to rely on Volcano #2. Any way you look at it (or argue about it), there is a lot of potential information in obsidian artifacts. But to fully realize that potential, we also need to know about the volcanoes!

Where were the original eruptions? Is the obsidian localized or is it spread over vast areas? Many obsidians erupted millions of years ago; in the meantime, mountain-building earthquakes and eroding rains and rivers have erased the original volcanoes, but yet the obsidian can still be found. If we are going to ask questions of the obsidian at archaeological sites, we need to know the natural distribution of obsidian raw material created by past volcanic events.

I have been searching the Patterned Ground of ancient obsidian nodules to help my archaeological colleagues create better maps relating archaeological sites and their artifacts to the raw material of obsidian toolstone. We know many of the ‘primary’ locations (i.e., a few spots on a map), but the forces that rearrange the volcanic remnants of the Great Basin landscape leave many unknowns — many sources are not spots, they are vast blobs, often tens, even 100s of miles across. Sometimes a single geochemical source — obsidian from the same eruption — is separated by mountain ranges with little or no obsidian in between. In Obsidian Traces, I continue to search for clues in the patterns of the obsidian landscape of the Great Basin.