Looking For Detachment

...and—as for 2014, 2013, and 2012—a few more. My rules, as modified from last year:

Because of the vagaries of stat reporting (in this case, by Google Analytics), I'm listing both the top ten posts for the year (in large font, with respective Top Ten number), and the top post for month's without a top-ten posting (non-Ten-rated posts are in a smaller font).

And so, here are the top 10 posts, plus 2 extra, along with a few pretty pictures:

January:

• Cliffs of the Ruby Mountains: Some Pretty Pictures #4

February:

• Things You Find in the Field: Old Sedan #6

March:

• Geo-beers: Volcanic Double IPA

April:

• Dust Storm at the Needles Rocks, Pyramid Lake #3

May:

• Siberian Haze in North-Central Nevada #5

June:

• The Beginning of an El Niño Trip: North-Central and Western Nevada #8

July: No posts in July!

August:

• Too Much Smoke — And Pelicans!

September:

• Way Too Much Smoke: Volcanoes (and Rivers and Ridges) in the Pacific Northwest #1

• Finding a Thesis: Klondyke District #10

October:

• A Hike Up Glass Mountain #7

• Finding a Thesis: Into the Palmetto Mountains #9

November:

• Views from Glass Mountain #2

December:

• Lida Summit Roadcut

I'm doing the year-end meme wherein I compile the first sentence of the first post of every month. Meme rules are as follows, as per DrugMonkey:

Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.

I've also added the photo from the same first post, if there happened to be one. I've removed any captions from the photos, so if you want to find out more about locations, etc, you'll have to click through. The first sentences include some classically long, LFD-style sentences, one short sentence, and many that are in between. Previous takes on this Twelve Month meme at LFD were posted for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014.

Aaand...here's the year 2015 for LFD:
January:
A year ago today, a thin snow highlighted some Lake Lahontan shorelines on basalt-capped hills out in (or near) the Fernley Wildlife Management Area (FWMA):

February:
Yesterday, when out hiking in nearby Water Canyon (before the Super Bowl), MOH and I slowly (at least for me) made our way up a variably steep, grassy to rocky hillside until we came to a large rib of quartzite.

March:
Well, I'm back at the place I was working at about two years ago (see these three posts for more info), spending more time on a back paved road and on dirt roads than I was most recently while on the road to work (I'm still driving on the interstate some, but a lot less than during the last two years).

April:
It was a very windy day as I drove south along what's variably called the Surprise Valley Road or the Sand Pass Road (and to the north, is often called the Smoke Creek Road) into the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe's Reservation.

May:
It is often — more commonly than in the past, IMO — hazy or dusty in north-central Nevada where I routinely work and often travel, here and there across basins and over ranges.

June:
An El Niño has supposedly set in (starting when, exactly, I'm not sure).

July: Nada. Zip. Zero.

August:
This is technically a road song because it mentions streets twice and roads once, and because the video that came out with the song also shows a lot of streets.

September:
There I was minding my own business while flying north from RNO to SEA (that is to say, I was reading a thick book and trying to ignore a seatmate while crammed against the window near the rear of a Q400), when I looked out (to the east) and spotted the peak of an Oregon volcano sticking out through what I first thought was a low, thick cloud cover.

October:
South of the Klondyke District (our previous stop on this journey) and just north of Goldfield, one reaches one of the northernmost populations of Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia)—or the northernmost population, depending on what range map you use.

November:
In later years—in the future of the 1976 "present" of these ongoing thesis-hunt stories—I made my way back into the Palmetto-Magruder area barely a handful of times.

December:
When I pulled up to Lida Summit two years ago—I was on my way to a property examination and had decided to check out the Lida and Palmetto areas—I stopped right in front of...a roadcut!

It was a very windy day as I drove south along what's variably called the Surprise Valley Road or the Sand Pass Road (and to the north, is often called the Smoke Creek Road) into the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe's Reservation.

Various signs at the north entrance to the reservation.

I could see the dust -- and the faded outline of the Lake Range beyond the curve. The signs are located at the north end of Reservation Route 2, according to this map. I wasn't really thinking about the names of the ranges or the numbers of the road while driving, I was really focused mostly on the wind and dust!

Soon, The Needle Rocks came into view.

A modified view, as if I were still into shooting B&W film.

Now we can see the bright turquoise color of Pyramid Lake. And still the dust.

I'd highly recommend not going out the The Needles in such a storm (and besides, it is closed these days) -- a few of the higher shorelines of the lake (of Lake Lahontan) are composed of tiny snail shells (Pyrgulopsis nevadensis, photos here, here, and here) -- and you really don't want those sharp tiny things caught in your eye!

The wind was really whipping up the dust.

Looking back from farther south.

I had a pretty good view of part of the Terraced Hills beyond the dust, and could see part of Wizards Beach and Wizards Cove, but most of the individual rocks at The Needles were well obscured (USGS TNM 2.0 Viewer map). The wind looked to be blowing in from the west or northwest.

A closeup from the same place, with a good view of rock 3935 out in the lake, and an obscured view of the tip of The Needles and tufa mound 4107.

And finally, I looked back across Thunderbolt Bay from near a green area marked Pyramid (USGS TNM 2.0 Viewer map, USGS GNIS locale "Pyramid").

Photos from a road trip taken on March 31, 2015.

While already busy on the Tuscarora Loop series, which I hope won't be posted in too sporadic a fashion, I noticed that I'm practically living on old Highway 8A!! (How did I not notice this before now??)

Nevada state highways 8, 8A, and 8B used to be a semi-contiguous set of routes that ran from Tonopah to Austin (8A, now S.R. 376), Austin to Battle Mountain (8A, now S.R. 305), Winnemucca to McDermitt (8, now U.S. 95), Winnemucca to Paradise in Paradise Valley (8B, now S.R. 290), and all across northwest Nevada: from between Paradise Hill and Orovada to Denio on what is now S.R. 140, part of the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway, and then from Denio or Denio Junction to the California state line near Vya, on what is partly S.R. 140 and mostly an unmarked but possibly still locally signed portion of 8A. This latter portion of 8A, located almost entirely in northern Washoe County, has not been numbered on state roadmaps since 1981.

Highway 8B is shown with varying lengths, sometimes not making it quite to the town of Paradise, sometimes making it to Paradise, and sometimes making it some undefined or variable short distance beyond Paradise.

As far as the maps go, rather than just the highways, a few things are noteworthy: at least one Indian reservation has shrunk over the years, according to these maps, and "DANGER" areas (military bases or withdrawals), which were shown as zero on the 1929 map, have increased over the years, including an increase in the Fallon area on the 2011-2012 map as compared to the the 1982 map.

Oh, and the last time Winnemucca Lake was shown on these highway maps (instead of Winnemucca Dry Lake), was in 1940, though elsewhere it is said to have dried up in the 1930's, more specifically, by 1938. The lake dried up as a result of the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, specifically the building of Derby Dam in 1905, which diverted water from the Truckee River into the drainage of the Carson (to irrigate Fernley and Fallon). Additionally, at some point after the lake dried up, Mud Lake Slough, the spillover to Winnemucca Lake from Pyramid Lake, was blocked, reportedly by Highway 34, now S.R. 447, an assertion confirmed rather obliquely here in Note 29, giving no timeframe for the action.

Links to all Historical Nevada Highway Maps.

Okay, so the update isn't supposed to be from Pyramid Lake, and it's a little late (about three weeks), but we did drive by that turquoise gem on our return trip after going to Middlegate the long way (up Ophir Canyon, through Ophir, to Ophir Summit, and over and beyond) and then going to our place at the lake. [I was going to add something about "I. C. Russell's white line" here, but can't find it being called that anywhere, so maybe later.]

I took zero pictures at the lake, if you can believe it. The leaves on our backyard aspens had only partly turned yellow, we had visitors, it rained all of one day. The rain was great: the sound of it hitting our nearly flat metal roof, the smell of it out in the evergreen trees, the almost Alaskan mistiness of it all. We ate out for dinner every night. One night we ate at two restaurants, and due to faulty order taking at the first one, we ate there for free the second night.
After visitors left, I raked some pine needles, disconnnected the drip system, moved one surviving blue spruce and one itsy-teeny black spruce — grown from a seed taken in Alaska — to a space underneath one of the pines.

All and all, it was a good trip. And on the way back, we went the long back way through Pyramid Lake. The back way turns out to be about one hour longer, and by the time we got to Sutcliffe I was hating it and was quite hungry. Hunger can make me cranky; we stopped in Fernley at Taco Bell.
Prior to arriving at Pyramid Lake, while on the long dirt part of the back way, we stopped at a little oasis in the desert, somewhere generally east of Honey Lake, probably located here, which I wrote about earlier.
As we got out of the truck, a huge predator-type bird flew out of the tall cottonwood tree and dropped the remains of a chukkar at our feet. It all happened too fast for me to get any kind of bird description other than dark with a very long wingspan — likely a turkey vulture, golden eagle, or bald eagle, although I suppose osprey isn't out of the running.

We then saw two amazingly shot-up signs. One was here, near Double Check Well, a major road junction if you happen to be going to Burning Man from California. I'm not saying that Burning Man attendees did it — many signs in Nevada are shot up — but I've never seen one quite like these two, and I do know that desert antics have increased manyfold since Burning Man moved to the Black Rock.

The idea for a Tufa Tuesday came upon me a couple years ago after a few geobloggers posted about tufa (some links below). Needless to say, I have yet to really get around to this - and I'm not planning a series!! - but here's a taste of some of the tufa from the northeast shore of Pyramid Lake (Wikipedia, MSRMaps), just off the main dirt road north of Sutcliffe.

Mono Lake Tufa (Ron Schott's Geology Home Companion Blog)
Tufa is so Weird and Cool (Christie at the Cape)
Death Valley Day 2.5 - The Tufa Pinnacles near Trona, CA (Dynamic Earth)
Geology Picture of the Day – Mono Lake Tufa (The Geology News Blog -Rockbandit)
The Tufa Towers of Trona Pinnacles, California (About.com: Geology - Andrew Alden
Dispatches from the Road: Far Western Section Conference in Bishop, California (Geotripper)