5
3 . ...Jk J*Jk Wagon wheels half-buried in Nevada's Forty-Mile Desert. Rock Hunting By NELL MURBARGER Photos by the author Map by Norton Allen T ALL STARTED when Ed Green told me there were opals in the Trinity Range, not over 15 miles from Lovelock, Nevada. I knew for certain that if there was an opal, a fossil or any other kind of a rock for that matter — Ed Green would be the person most likely to know about it. Born in the old mining camp of Lewis, near Battle Mountain, Ed moved to Lovelock Valley about 60 years ago. During those years he has punched cattle and hunted wild mus- tangs, driven stage, prospected in nearly every canyon in the Trinity and Humboldt ranges, helped launch half- a-dozen boom camps and owned and operated many mines. My acquaintance with Ed goes back several years — and the tips he has given me for feature stories have always been good. So we made a date to go to the Trinities. It was one of those custom-built mornings — clear, a trifle chilly and bristling with promise—as we headed out the Lone Mountain road toward the long brown line of hills edging Lovelock Valley on the west. From beneath a tarpaulin in the back of Ed's truck issued the cheerful, half-muffled rattle of canteen, grub box and pros- pecting picks. Beside us in the cab rode our rockhound friends, Nellie Basso and eight-year-old David. As our road took its way through long lanes of huge old cottonwood trees, across brimming irrigation canals and past level fields of green alfalfa, it seemed to me I had never known a desert oasis more intensely beautiful than this Lovelock Valley! I knew I wasn't the first to entertain this thought. While irrigation, here, has been a development of the past 50 years, the natural bounty of this wide valley has delighted men's eyes since wagon wheels first broke the crust of the Great Basin. This was the Big Meadows of the emigrant trains—one of the most an- ticipated campsites between the fertile 16 DESERT MAGAZINE Along Pioneer Trails in the Trinities

Along Pioneer Trails - NeoNovamembers.peak.org/~obsidian/pdf/murbarger_1955.pdf · from Lovelock, Nevada. I knew for certain that if there was an opal, a fossil or any other kind

  • Upload
    lethuan

  • View
    218

  • Download
    0

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

3 . ...Jk J*Jk

Wagon wheels half-buried in Nevada's Forty-Mile Desert.

Rock Hunting

By NELL MURBARGERPhotos by the authorMap by Norton Allen

T ALL STARTED when Ed Greentold me there were opals in theTrinity Range, not over 15 miles

from Lovelock, Nevada.I knew for certain that if there was

an opal, a fossil or any other kind ofa rock for that matter — Ed Greenwould be the person most likely toknow about it.

Born in the old mining camp ofLewis, near Battle Mountain, Edmoved to Lovelock Valley about 60years ago. During those years he haspunched cattle and hunted wild mus-tangs, driven stage, prospected innearly every canyon in the Trinity andHumboldt ranges, helped launch half-

a-dozen boom camps and owned andoperated many mines.

My acquaintance with Ed goes backseveral years — and the tips he hasgiven me for feature stories have alwaysbeen good. So we made a date to goto the Trinities.

It was one of those custom-builtmornings — clear, a trifle chilly andbristling with promise—as we headedout the Lone Mountain road towardthe long brown line of hills edgingLovelock Valley on the west. Frombeneath a tarpaulin in the back of Ed'struck issued the cheerful, half-muffledrattle of canteen, grub box and pros-pecting picks. Beside us in the cab

rode our rockhound friends, NellieBasso and eight-year-old David.

As our road took its way throughlong lanes of huge old cottonwoodtrees, across brimming irrigation canalsand past level fields of green alfalfa,it seemed to me I had never known adesert oasis more intensely beautifulthan this Lovelock Valley!

I knew I wasn't the first to entertainthis thought. While irrigation, here,has been a development of the past50 years, the natural bounty of thiswide valley has delighted men's eyessince wagon wheels first broke thecrust of the Great Basin.

This was the Big Meadows of theemigrant trains—one of the most an-ticipated campsites between the fertile

16 D E S E R T M A G A Z I N E

Along Pioneer Trailsin the Trinities

As Americans pushed westward along the Emigrant Trail, pausedat cool Big Meadows, then plunged into the vicious Forty-Mile Desert,they paid little attention to the jasper, obsidian and opal, the tufadomes and the Devil's Postpiles along their route. Today, from a well-settled West, modern Americans travel these same trails, but withouthardships, seeking relics of those early days and the gems thepioneers missed.

valleys of Utah and the east flank ofthe Sierra. Here, in the midst of lux-uriant forage, plentiful water and coolshade trees, weary wagon trains pausedto recoup the strength of their peopleand animals, and to prepare for thehazard-fraught crossing of the Forty-Mile Desert, lying ahead.

Grass, to provide sustenance formules and oxen, was cut; water bar-rels and kegs were filled and drought-shrunken wagon wheels soaked totighten the tires. Even to the best-equipped, the Forty-Mile loomed as aspectre of madness and death, and Ifound myself wondering how manymore emigrants would have fallen bythe way had it not been for the advancesuccor provided by the Big Meadowsof Lovelock Valley.

We had left the watered flatlandsnow; had passed the lambing sheds andpole corrals of a deserted sheep ranchand were worming our way ever higherinto the dry treeless hills.

As Ed's truck rounded curves andbounced its way over the ruts, old pros-pect holes moved into view—one after

another—each telling its mute story ofsome forgotten miner and his hopes.

The low canyon we had been follow-ing, narrowed. Our road roughened,as the hills grew rockier and steeperand 15 miles west of Lovelock wetopped the summit of the Trinities andEd coasted the truck to a halt.

Beyond and below us spread a starkworld of broken ranges and heat-washed flats, of gray sage and dimpurple horizons — a wild, unpeopledvastness, in which it seemed as if aman might lose himself from the knowl-edge of everyone.

From our vantage point, a mileabove sea level, we could trace thethin line of the road as it wound sinu-ously downward to Granite SpringsValley, 1200 feet below us in eleva-tion and a dozen miles distant. Center-ing that dry expanse lay the glisteningwhite oval of Adobe Flat, and beyondrose the tiered ranges of the SahwaveMountains, the Bluewings, the Night-ingales, the Seven Troughs.

"The north end of Pyramid Lakelays about 40 miles straight west of

here," Ed was saying. "That littlespeck of green down yonder is LowryWells—the only water in this part ofthe range—and just beyond the Wells,a road turns north to the old miningcamp of Velvet.

"And this," he concluded, "is wherewe leave the main road and take offfor the opal fields!"

Turning to the right on a faintly-visible trail, we bounced over a lowrise and down a northerly-trendingslope for a couple of miles to the baseof a conical butte topped by volcanicrock.

"This is it!" said Ed. "Try that ra-vine on the east side of the butte. Andif you find any opal you can't lift, I'llcome and help you!"

They weren't precious gem opals,but they were opals, nonetheless, andthere were many of them.

They occurred as bladder-like fillingsin a whitish-to-brown rock, probably ofalgal origin, but in which the calciumcarbonate formed by the algae appearsto have been replaced by silica andopal in such a way as to preserve allthe organic details. From minutespecks and paper-thin seams, thoseglassy-smooth fillings ranged upwardto an inch in diameter and varied incolor from opaque white to pastel yel-low and pale blue. One specimen evenexhibited a sky-blue face marked bya vivid crescent of darker blue.

Most of the rock carrying the opalswas wholly or partially embedded in

; TO wiNNEMUCCHy;:.-. ^ o",..;. --; s

••- ••••"-IT! <s"v

• '" ' : o "••••:-••

\ NEVADA

AGATE. OBSIDIANOPAL £ JASPER

J U L Y , 1 9 5 5 17

.Ed Green inspects one of the tufa domes which mark an ancient

beach line of prehistoric Lake Lahontan.

the ground. One such piece, whichshowed an exposed area no larger thana teacup, proved to be as large as awater bucket, with nearly every inchof its surface studded with small specksof opal!

While none of the opals we foundpossessed any value other than as in-teresting cabinet specimens, jasper,from the same hill, was beautifullycolored and agatized. Mottled in shadesof buff and brown, some of the pieceswere handsomely splotched with clearagate, while other specimens borestrong resemblance to beautifully aga-tized wood.

Climbing the butte, we found itseroded cap composed largely of glis-tening black obsidian, in a massiveformation several feet in thickness. Ad-joining this was a thick layer of grayvolcanic glass which had been thor-oughly prospected by some earliercomer, perhaps in a search for perlite.

From the obsidian deposit, we cir-cled the top of the butte to its south-west side and there discovered a seriesof overhanging ledges, their under sur-faces speckled thickly with strangereddish-brown nodules.

"Those are the petrified walnuts I

was telling you about," exclaimed Ed."They're not really walnuts, of course.Nellie sent some of 'em to the StateAnalytical Laboratory at Reno, andthey called 'em chert nodules. But,by golly, they look like walnuts!"

And they did! Hundreds of thenodules, detached from the ledge andscattered over the hill slope below,ranged from the size of a filbert tothat of a small hen's egg. Mostly,however, they were about the size andshape of an English walnut and theirbrown surface was wrinkled in muchthe same manner.

"It was these nodules that led meto find the opals in the first place," Edwas saying. "I was hunting wild horsesone day when a bad storm broke. Icrawled under a ledge and figured Iwould stay dry till the rain stopped.While I was sitting there, waiting, Isaw some of these nodules lying on theground. I wondered what they wereand began cracking them open. It wasmore fun than a picnic! Most of 'emhad only a lot of radiating lines, inside;but in some there would be a nice littleopal."

Gathering a quantity of the nodulesfor later sawing, we scrambled back

down the knoll to the truck. Therewe ate the good lunch Nellie Bassohad prepared, loaded our respectiverocks and discussed plans for that por-tion of the adventure still to come.

Returning to the main road, Ed re-traced our route of that morning forthree miles, after which he swung to theright on a trail that led down the south-easterly face of the Trinities and intoa forest of strange tufa domes—eacha graphic reminder of long-vanishedLake Lahontan.

Age of these strange domes mustremain largely a matter for conjecture,since Lahontan was a dying lake longbefore primitive man first came todwell on its shores. Born possibly 50,-000 years ago as melting glaciers ofthe last great Ice Age spread a widesheet of water over this land, the lakeoriginally had been cold and sparkling,around 900 feet at its greatest depth.Two hundred miles in length and nearly150 miles broad it had extended overa large portion of what is now north-western Nevada and northeastern Cali-fornia.

When time and a moderating climatehad brought the Glacial Age to itsclose, the shores of this great lake hadbegun to shrink and its water hadgrown brackish. With evaporation bysun and wind claiming further toll,the water had eventually become sosaturated with mineral salts that thedepositing of calcium carbonate, inthe form of calcereous tufa, was begun.

Along some sections of Lahontan'sshoreline (notably at Pyramid Lake),this tufa had been laid down as greatbulbous monoliths, high and wide asoffice buildings. Elsewhere it had takenthe form of a rough frosting on bould-ers and cliffsides; and here, on thesoutheast flank of the Trinities, themineral-laden waters had formed thesehigh, conical domes.

Walking over the sandy floor thatseparates these domes like stumps ina forest, we found specimens as muchas 25 feet in height, with a base diam-eter less than half that great. Fromthese granddaddy domes, the exhibitranged down to little kindergartendomes, just getting nicely started whentheir algae-supplying waters vanishedforever.

When sufficiently weathered, thelarger domes showed semi-hollow in-teriors filled with strange, angular for-mations, crystalline in nature. But whythe calcium carbonate composing theinterior of the domes had taken thisform, while on their exterior it hadarranged itself in huge down-droop-ing white petals, not unlike sea-coral intexture and appearance, is a riddle thatall our probing and conjecturing andsubsequent research has failed toanswer.

18 DESERT MAGAZINE

Leaving the enigma of the tufadomes still unsolved, we rambled ondown the wash a couple of miles toU.S. 40, where Ed suggested that theday's adventure might as well includea visit to "The Devil's Postpile," justacross the line in Churchill County.The proposal met with unanimous fa-vor, and after several minutes' drivedown the main highway we were againclimbing into the Trinities, havingturned to the right on a desert trailwhere a nearly-obliterated sign postindicated the way to Jessup, a miningcamp that boomed briefly in the fore-part of the century and still has a resi-dent or two.

Three miles along this Jessup roadbrought us to the postpile. As a matterof fact, there were several piles spottedover an area of possibly 20 acres inextent. Comprised of pentagonal (five-sided) columns of hard brown basalt,each of the columns was as perfectlyformed as though hewn by a masterstone cutter. Some were straight as atelephone pole for their entire lengthof 12 or 14 feet; others were warpedand twisted, as though the material ofwhich they were formed had wiltedwhile in the process of cooling andhardening. Each column was abouteight inches in diameter, and the pileswere corded and stacked for all theworld like fence posts.

Like the tufa domes, these basalticpostpiles are something of a geologicalmystery; yet, their occurrence is notconfined to any one part of the world.The famous Devil's Wall, in Bohemia;the Devil's Causeway and Fingal'sCave, in the Hebrides; the Devil'sPostpile, now included in a nationalmonument in California, and manyother occurrences less well known, in-cluding this strange cluster in Nevada,are all formed of these strange pentag-onal columns.

"I've always intended to come outand get a truckload of these posts forfencing my yard," said Ed. I remarkedthey'd be tolerably heavy.

"Oh, sure!" he admitted. "But oncethey were in place, think how longthey would last! Why, I doubt if itwould even be necessary to dip 'em increosote . . ."

And I doubt it, too.Retracing our way to the Fallon

cut-off, Ed turned upon it, into thewide barrenness of Humboldt Sink andpast a sign that warned we were em-barking on a dirt road, not patrolledand impassable when wet.

Looking over that parched and bar-ren waste, it scarcely seemed possibleit would ever be wet again; or that ithad known one drop of water sincethat centuries-ago day when Lake La-hontan had slipped into its final reces-sion. Yet I could remember wet years

when this entire flat had shimmeredwith water in which clouds were mir-rored, and killdeers, curlews and avo-cets made merry.

This, of course, had not been anyresidual water from Lake Lahontan,but only a transient accumulationfrom the canyons and overflow fromthe Humboldt River. But even suchwater as this seemed impossibly foreignto the parched and dessicated flat wewere crossing.

This gaunt white waste, with its acridcrusting of alkali and niter, soda andsalt, was the Forty-Mile Desert of Emi-grant Trail days. Forty miles fromwater-to-water; 40 miles of heat anddrought, disaster and death, whereoxen and mules choked in their owndust, plunging and gasping for air,

falling and dying beneath their yokesand in their traces. Forty miles of Hell,where men went mad and womenprayed for deliverance.

This was a land where Western his-tory had been made. The Walker-Bonneville party had passed this wayin 1834. Somewhere on the flat, ourroad had crossed their long-obliteratedhoof prints. We had crossed, too, theinvisible wheel ruts of the Bidwell-Bartleson group of 1841, the first emi-grant train to take a wagon over theformidable Sierra. Through here hadtrudged the Walker-Chiles party of1843, the Stevens-Townsend-Murphyparty of 1844 and the Kern-Walkerportion of Fremont's party of explorersin 1845. The Donncr party of 1846had toiled across this Forty-Mile Des-

Author examines basaltic formations known as The Devil's Postpile, nearLovelock, Nevada.

J U L Y , 1 9 5 5 19

Builders of this ancient lime kiln on the edge of the Forty-Mile Desert,made their lime from fossil gastopods found nearby.

ert on its way to a rendezvous withdeath and immortality at Donner Sum-mit. Beckwourth had traveled thissame route; so had Sam Brannan, Ab-ner Blackburn and marching legionsof the unsung.

"When I first came to Lovelockthere were lots of relics still layingalong the old Emigrant Trail," Ed wassaying. "Wagon wheels and tires, oxshoes, lengths of iron chain, wagonhubs, even iron stew pots. And bones!There were scads of bones—all sortsof bones."

About five miles from the north edgeof the flat, we drew to a halt alongsidea bleached scattering of rubbish andrelics — not relics of Emigrant Traildays, but of a later era when visionarymen had come into the Forty-MileDesert to found the Desert Crystal Saltcompany and the town of White Plains.

White Plains had never been a largeor important town, but it had boasteda station on the Central Pacific Rail-road, a telegraph office, postoffice anda store or two. For awhile it enjoyedeven the prestige of a newpaper—TheChurchill News—which made its initialappearance March 3, 1888, and soonthereafter boasted "the largest sub-scription list of any publication inChurchill County."

In the scattered rubbish that markedthe site of the old salt works, lay heavyplanks, rendered porous and soft bythe harsh chemicals of the flat, but stillcarrying the square-cut spikes that had

fastened them together. Here, too,were pieces of harness leather, blackand dried, and brittle; buggy shafts,singletrees, a whipstock, fragments ofdishes, mule shoes, several ponderoushandmade wheelbarrows, barrel hoops,a pair of wagon wheels half-buried inthe salt and lengths of iron pipe layeredwith great scales of rust. The lowdikes of the old settling ponds werestill traceable on the flat, and two un-covered wells were about two-thirdsfilled with greenish vile-smelling water.

Produced by solar evaporation ofthe brine, the salt from these works issaid to have been among the finest thatever came out of the West, yet only asmall percentage was sold as table salt—most of the yield being freighted todistant silver mills for use in fluxing theore. The deposit, located about 1870,by Walter Smith, was still beingworked when Ed came to Lovelock,but had been idle, he said, for around40 years.

The day's last point of historicaland geological interest lay a mile far-ther along the Fallon road.

"See those rocks over there?" saidour guide, pointing to a conical affairabout 300 yards to the west. "That'sone of the oldest lime kilns in the state.First time I saw it, 50 years ago, itwas already deserted and looked justthe same as it does now!"

It was a strange sort of kiln. Con-structed of flat stones laid in mud mor-tar, it was lined throughout with fire

brick and stood about 25 feet high,tapering from a base diameter of halfthat distance to barely five feet acrossat the top. The heavy iron door thathad closed its fire box, still hung inplace, on its rusty hinges.

"There's one thing I don't under-stand," said Nellie. "Why was thekiln located here? Where is any lime-stone to be quarried?"

Ed grinned. "Being a rockhoundand fossil fan, you'll love this: Theymade their lime out of fossil shells fromold Lake Lahontan."

Leading the way to a cut in a nearbyknoll, he indicated a whole bankfulof fossil gastopods. Snail-like in formand as much as an inch in diameter(although averaging about half aninch), the shells were perfectly pre-served in every detail and packed soclosely together there was scarcelyroom for any matrix between. In onlya few minutes we were able to collectall the specimens we cared to carryaway.

With our return to Lovelock, aboutsupper time, our trip register showedless than 100 miles traveled in thecourse of the day's adventure.

As tangible evidence of our outingwe had a whole series of new speci-mens for our respective cabinets •—opals, jasper, obsidian, tufa, fossilshells, an arrowhead, a handful ofsquare nails, a couple of old fashionedbuttons, a purple bottle.

But, most important of all was ourcollection of history. No one couldsay how many thousands on millionsof years of it we had collected that day—history that extended all the wayback to that Plutonic era when ourobsidian and volcanic glass was beingformed, and the basalt postpile hadbegun cooling and separating into itshoneycombed segments; history thattouched on the last great Ice Age, thebirth and death of a great inland seaand the laying down of calcium carbo-nates to form the strange tufa domesalong its shore.

We had seen how the residue of thatlake—its fossil shells and its salt—hadbeen harvested and utilized by man inhis conquest of desert mountains andwhite wastes; and, in fancy, we hadwalked in the tracks of the beardedemigrants, the men whose feet troda desert waste, but whose eyes werefixed high on a shining dream.

It had been a good day, a great ad-venture. Even if the plebeian speci-mens we had brought back would nevershake the scientific world, no mancould appraise and no scales couldweigh the wealth of intangible treasuremade ours by this day in the deserthills.

20 DESERT MAGAZINE