Exploring Central Nevada-Part 1: Hot Springs

 In mid-June I got a hankering to go exploring. I took some time off off work, and we loaded up, the kids, the au pair, the dog, and me. We headed west on U.S. 50, lunched in Ely, and then took a quick stop at Illipah Reservoir, where the wind was fierce.

Just a little bit further on, we stopped on the side of the road to let these huge oversize loads go by. They definitely take up more than one lane! Being in a mining state, this is a fairly frequent sight on the highways.

After a swim in Eureka's pool, we continued on and exited the highway to head to Potts' Hot Springs, also called Monitor Hot Springs. We found the old Potts ranch and stopped to enjoy the view.

It was still nice and green out in the meadows, and the late afternoon sunlight was gorgeous.

The road to Potts' Hot Springs was marked as 'No Public Access,' so we respected that and continued on to Diana's Punch Bowl, which was about 30 minutes away. I had previously visited this spectacular site, and was eager to return. The sun had already set by the time we arrived, so we set up camp at the base and then wandered up to observe the hot spring under the full moon. Diana's Punch Bowl is a 30-foot deep cauldron that's about 50 feet in diameter. It rises off the valley floor, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The evening primrose was blooming right on the edge. The water in it is reportedly very hot, about 170 degrees F, so we didn't want to go in.

Our camp was simple, and I love primitive camping in the middle of nowhere. We heard some coyotes howl in the night, but no sounds of civilization. It was wonderful.

I awoke early and got some sunrise photos of Diana's Punchbowl.

It was just cool enough that steam was rising. And the full moon was setting.

 With one angle, I captured a lot of steam.

Then I wandered down over the other side, and the shooting stars caught my eye.

The hot water in the nearby creek is cool enough to soak in, but it's not very deep. It looks like at one time someone worked to improve it, but now it's in a fairly natural state.

Orange algae dotted one end, and steam rose along the channel.

I went back to camp and everyone got up and ate. Then it was to the top for a group photo.

Our next destination was to the Toquima Campground, which was totally empty. We set off on the quarter-mile trail to Toquima Cave. I admired the buckwheat on the way.

The trail meandered through the pinyon-juniper to some cliffs.

I got distracted again by flowers!

When I caught up to the kids and Charlie, Desert Boy was scaling the huge gate over the entrance. The kids were so happy to climb.

Through the gate we could see some amazing pictographs. Some call these the best pictographs in the Great Basin. It's very unusual to see yellow coloring in pictographs.

We admired them for awhile, speculating on what they mean. Then we headed back to the vehicle and continued over the pass to Big Smoky Valley to Spencer Hot Springs.

After we soaked in the pool for awhile, we wandered around to check out the other hot springs. The trough was too hot for me, but the others could handle it.

After a bit, we had our fill and headed to Austin for a break at the playground. Austin has the best playground I've seen along Highway 50, and as an added bonus, some folks stopped with their dog, and Maggie had the best hour playing.

Next up...on to fossils and ghost towns!

Birds (and other wildlife) in Strawberry Creek after the Fire

I went to Strawberry Creek very early a couple mornings to do some bird surveys. We have data from several years before the 2016 fire, so I wanted to see how the birds were recovering post-fire. (The fire burned over 4,000 acres). Two transects had been set up, one along the riparian area, from the trailhead downstream, and one in the montane shrub, starting across the stream from the trailhead and heading up into Windy Canyon. This post is a combo of them both. The photo above is from up by Windy Canyon looking down canyon, and the trailhead is by the road's end in the middle-lower left of the photo.

So after a fire, what birds do you expect would do well? If you say cavity nesters like woodpeckers, you are right! We heard and saw so many hairy woodpeckers (and also a few other species).

 This juvenile surprised us with a peep as we walked by and stuck his head out of the hole.

American robins were common, and this one had what looked like nesting material.

This MacGillivray's warbler was singing for a mate.

This Western Tanager was very bright (and also far away!).


We heard a couple of mountain chickadees, with their easy-to-remember cheeseburger song.


Some friends from Audubon came to help do the survey, which made it much easier.


We also saw quite a few butterflies, as the wildflowers are coming back well. This butterfly is a common buckeye.

And here's a Great Basin fritillary. I can never identify them right off, so it's nice to have a photo so I can compare to the guidebook.


One morning I saw a herd of about 25 elk crossing in the burned area outside the park.

There are elk droppings all over the watershed.

By the number of fawns, I think they are doing well.

And how are the birds doing? You've seen some of the more common ones in the photos above. Spotted towhees, which like shrubs, are not as common as before. Brewer's sparrows, which like sagebrush, are nearly absent from the big meadow area, as the sage burned completely there and it will take a few years for it to return. Overall bird numbers were good, but species composition has shifted a bit. We'll keep studying what's going on. Fire can do a lot of good for the landscape, it would just be better to have smaller fires burning in a more mosaic pattern to help stabilize the watershed and provide more recovery areas. With over 100 years of fire suppression, the forests are so dense that they burn fast and hot when they do catch on fire, and that can make recovery more difficult. Be safe out there!

Looking for Evidence of Glaciers in Strawberry Creek

Last summer, the Strawberry Creek fire burned over 4,000 acres in and near Great Basin National Park, including up by the Strawberry Creek trailhead. My first time to visit it this year was to accompany glacial researchers Ben Laabs and Jeff Munroe to map the glacial features in the watershed as part of their project to make a glacial map for the park. We found that the vegetation was coming back nicely near the trailhead.

We headed up towards the Osceola Ditch, wearing hard hats to protect us from snags (well, at least from smaller falling branches, a hard hat wouldn't do much for a big tree!). It was hard finding the trail. Soon we left it and hiked up much higher.

As we walked, they pointed out different clues that the past glaciers had left behind, like glacial striations on rocks (where softer rocks got scraped by the harder rocks embedded in the ice), different kinds of rocks that had been deposited, and shape of rocks. The glaciers in the Strawberry Creek watershed had previously been mapped by Piegat in his 1980 doctoral dissertation, but he was covering a lot of ground and couldn't spend as much time as they were. These glaciers had formed up by Bald Mountain (the snow-covered peak in the photo below). The researchers found that it was much easier to read the land after the fire, as they could see more rocks.

Sometimes we got off on a tangent, like looking at the rock spalling next to this burnt tree. Basically the fire was so hot here that it burned the rock, causing the outer layers of it to fall off. Part of reconstructing the glacial history can include doing cosmogenic beryllium dating of moraine boulders, or taking a small piece of a boulder and dating it. If parts of the boulder are flaking off, the technique doesn't work so well.

I found one of the helispots still flagged from the fire. It's not flagged anymore.

As we hiked up and down the moraine, we spotted this huge ponderosa pine that had been spared. There were plenty of white fir ladder fuels near its base (smaller white fir trees that could extend the fire up into the ponderosa pine), so it got lucky.

We saw evidence of past logging in the watershed and wondered why the big ponderosa had been spared.

We found lots of elk droppings and found these scratches on an aspen.

Here and there was evidence of the forest recovering, like the elderberry below.

But the steep hillsides have not recovered.

Meadow areas look much better, with an array of wildflowers and grasses.

And wet areas are also coming back well.

We reached a section of trees that had speckled bark. I later learned that this is likely due to three-toed woodpecker activity in the area. They'll pull off bark looking for insects.

As we hiked down the moraine, we found small depressions, called kettles. These are from ice melting out. The remarkable thing is that these were on a very old moraine, over 100,000 years old, but are well preserved.

A view of the Osceola Ditch, a ditch made over a hundred years ago to transport water from streams around the mountain to the mining town of Osceola. The ditch didn't last long due to construction problems, water thievery, and the small amount of water available.

We had nice views of the meadow down below, and the scientists wondered if a small rise on the other side might be another moraine.

So we went down to check it out, passing some nice basin wild-rye on the way.

When we got to the rise, they found some good indications that it was a moraine. This extended the reach of the Strawberry Creek glaciers much further than had previously been mapped.

From our vantage point looking east, we could look back to where we had just hiked and see that 100,000+ year-old moraine (marked 'Moraine' in the photo). It slopes down to meet the creek. The wet meadows in the middle of the photo would have been covered with a thin layer of ice and be where this part of the glacier had met its demise.

It was an interesting day to not only see how things were recovering from the fire, but to also learn more about how to discover clues in the landscape that showed what had happened there in the past. The results from this study should be ready in a few months, and I'll be sure to post a link.