Uranium Country

Today is the 75^th anniversary of the detonation of the nuclear bomb over Hiroshima.  That event had a major impact on the canyon country of southern Utah, although it was not obvious at the time.  The start of the nuclear age suddenly put uranium in high demand, and this was the place to find it.  The US Atomic Energy Commission supported anyone who wanted to prospect by offering guaranteed minimum prices for ore. The commission built many of the dirt roads now popular with off-roaders and promised $10,000 bonuses for new finds.

By the early 1950s hordes of both amateurs and professionals were combing the landscape with handheld Geiger counters. Most didn't know what they were doing and went broke, but a few got rich, at least temporarily. The prospector who probably had the most influence early on was Charlie Steen, an unemployed geologist who couldn’t afford a Geiger counter but used his knowledge of geology to find the first big strike in 1952.  His Mi Vida mine produced hundreds of millions of dollars of ore, making him a rich man and the most influential person in Moab, Utah.  But frivolous spending sprees and ill-advised investments eventually drove him broke.

As part of the research I’m doing for my book on canyon country, I decided to pay a visit to his Mi Vida mine, long since closed down.  It was many miles down rough dirt roads, and I took wrong turns twice along the way.  But I eventually arrived and was able to explore its remaining relics.  The mine itself has been blocked with tons of dirt to prevent entry, but rusting equipment remains.  I was surprised at how small the site was; I had been expecting something covering many acres.  I subscribe to the premise that if you really want to see something off the beaten path you need to figure out how to get there on your own, so I won’t post directions here, but here are a couple of views from my visit.

Great News for Public Lands

With all the focus on COVID-19 these days, it's great to hear that other things are being accomplished in Washington. Today, the Great American Outdoors Act was signed into law, providing for the care of parks and public lands without additional cost to taxpayers. It is funded by royalties paid by companies who drill for oil and gas on public lands, on the premise that some of the profits earned by depleting non-renewable resources should be used to restore other resources. This bipartisan measure was supported by numerous companies, non-profits, and legislators from both parties. Learn more about the Act and its impact here.

Exploring Paleozoic Sediments in Southern Utah

Just before the pandemic locked everything down, I went on a geology hike near Comb Ridge in southern Utah with Professor Gary Gianniny, Chairman of the Department of Geosciences at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.  I’m working on a book about the canyon country of the Southwest and this was a great opportunity to learn from an expert in its geology.  While the hike primarily focused on geology, you can’t tour this region without seeing fossils.  All our fossil collecting was catch-and-release.  I took photos but did not bring back any physical specimens.  Here’s a quick overview of our hike.

We started from a point on the southeast side of a feature called the Monument Upwarp, about 16 miles west of the town of Bluff, Utah.  Here is an annotated Google Maps satellite view of the area:

Our starting point overlooked an abandoned meander of the San Juan River.  The river long ago took a shortcut by punching through a narrow wall of the meander (out of site behind the near slope), leaving it now abandoned.

From there, we turned east and went down the side of cliffs bordering Comb Wash.  During the first part of the hike on the top of the Monument Upwarp we were in the Honaker Trail Formation, a marine limestone of the Pennsylvanian Period.  Gary has done quite a bit of research on these limestones. He pointed out numerous examples of fossils in this formation.  The first was a brachiopod (I didn’t get the species).  Notice the spring-like squiggly lines along the hinge line at the top.  This is called a spiralia. Gary said it is indicative of it being a brachiopod:

Here is an example of crinoid pieces.  Gary said this limestone is made up of about 90% crinoid fragments:

As we descended, the layers got younger because of the way they were tilted.  When we got to the red layers, Gary explained we were now crossing into the Halgaito Formation, terrestrial sandstones of the Permian Period.  He pointed out fossils of plant roots encrusted in calcium carbonate (the light gray areas).  These are called rhizoliths.  He said you can still see rhizoliths forming today on the roots of modern plants.

Like most geologists who frequently get out onto the landscape, Gary was in good physical condition.  I however, was another story.  The 600-foot return climb across gullies, boulder fields, and loose scree was about the limit of my sorry physical condition.  But it was a great experience and one I wouldn’t hesitate to do again.

Digging for Fossil Fish in Wyoming

My wife, Nicki, and spent a week driving through Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming last fall.  One of our target destinations was the American Fossil Quarry outside of Kemmerer, Wyoming, to dig for fossil fish from the Green River formation, a world-famous lagerstatte—a region of extraordinary quantities of fossils of exceptional quality.  The fossils here come from the Eocene epoch about 50 million years ago.

I had corresponded with Seth, the owner of the quarry, before we left to work out the details of our visit.  He wasn’t there on the day we visited, but his assistant, Nick, was very helpful in getting us started.  I brought a bag full of tools which, as Seth had warned, were mostly unnecessary.  All you really need is a brick hammer and a thin chisel, both of which the quarry provides.  Since this was the end of the season and their chisels had undoubtedly seen hard use all summer, they had pretty blunt tips.  I had brought my own set of thin spring-steel chisels designed expressly for fossil extraction and was very happy I had them.  Nicki used the chisel they supplied and was quite successful.

It was a productive day, and we both bagged some nice finds.  The floor of the quarry was covered with a fine powder of shale, and by mid-afternoon the wind had picked up and was blowing the powder around so much we decided to call it quits.  Nick loaded our fossils onto a cart and took me over to a line of diamond saws I could use to cut off the excess matrix and trim the specimens down to a reasonable size.  As we had to fit all our finds into our car, this was very helpful.  After a quick tutorial I was happily working on my own trimming down all my specimens.

About 10 years ago we had visited the Warfield quarry across the road.  At that quarry we were right up against the rock wall where we were on our own to pry the shale from the wall (which was a bit of a chore even at my then-younger age).  At American Fossil Quarry, they extract the shale for you with a giant excavator and lay it out in rows of piles for you to access.  Probably a lot safer than being right up against a crumbly rock wall.  You don’t get the chance to record exact location and orientation of the fossils in-situ, but unless you are a professional paleontologist you won’t care.  As Nick said, this is a commercial quarry, not a scientific expedition.  The fun is in finding the fossils, which we found plenty of, even in the space of only a few hours.

The dirt road leading to the quarry is reasonable for a family car right up to the descent at the quarry entrance.   It’s then a bit of an adventure if you don’t have 4WD (which we fortunately did), but at the bottom there were even large travel trailers that had made it down safely.  If you like the idea of digging for fossils I highly encourage you to stop in at this quarry. 

Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, Nevada

Some years ago I loaded my car with camping gear and a week’s worth of provisions and set out on my annual solo trip to explore remote corners of the American southwest.  My objective that year was the slickrock canyon country of southern Utah, where I would spend time exploring and photographing the landscape.  From California, driving to Utah means crossing the entire state of Nevada, so I decided to take a side trip to Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park.  It’s in the middle of the state, far from any civilization.  For years I had seen it marked on maps of Nevada but I didn’t know anything about it.  Since the word Ichthyosaur was prominent in the park’s name, I had to check it out.

To get there from Reno, most people would take US Highway 50 to Nevada Route 361, then south to Nevada Route 844 and east to the park.  This keeps you on paved roads for all but the last few miles to the park. But on these kinds of trips I subscribe to the axiom, “Never take an Interstate Highway when a 2-lane road will get you there, and never take a 2-lane road when a dirt road is an option.”  So I decided to take US Highway 50 to Eastgate, then south on a dirt road to the ghost towns of Ione and Berlin, and then a couple more miles to the ichthyosaurs.  When I reached Eastgate (not a town, just a private ranch off the side of the road), I shifted my SUV into four-wheel-drive mode and headed out.  The dirt portion is about a 30 mile drive down the middle of the Ione Valley.  Don’t expect Google Maps to show you this route, you will need a good AAA paper map to find it.

It was a bright summer day and I was the only one on the dirt road.  The sagebrush was barely knee high, with clear views for 10 miles in all directions, framed by the Paradise Mountains to the west and the Shoshone Mountains to the east.  It was the classic basin-and-range topography that sprawls across most of Nevada.  Besides jackrabbits and coyotes, on occasion I would see the rare American pronghorn, often incorrectly called an antelope but really the last surviving member of an otherwise extinct artiodactyl family.

Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park is home to Nevada’s state fossil, the ichthyosaur.  To get there you drive past the ghost town of Berlin, a remnant of the gold mining days of the late 1800s.  The ichthyosaurs are in a quarry on the ground, protected by a building reminiscent of the larger building at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.  When I arrived, I was the only visitor, and no one else arrived while I was there.  I spent some time talking to the single ranger on site, a younger guy who had been there just a few months.  He was promoted and transferred here to get experience in interpretation rather than the law enforcement of his previous assignment at a state recreation area.  With only a few visitors a day (and some days in winter where there are none), he doesn’t get a lot of opportunity.

 

 
 

The ichthyosaurs are a late Triassic species called Shonisaurus, named after the nearby mountains.  They are apparently the largest known species, with lengths up to 60 feet. A life-size sculpture on a wall near the building makes them look like giant Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons.  There are several specimens in the quarry and numerous fragments.  It’s a rather small quarry with no excavations currently underway, and you can see it all within an hour.  After touring the site I spent the night at the nearby campground, again the only one there.  It was a dark night with an incredible view of the stars, accompanied by an occasional coyote serenade.    

If you go, do it for the total experience of the trip, not just the ichthyosaurs.  Take time to explore the Berlin ghost town and spend a night camping out.  Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park is a great place to get away from the rush of civilization and discover a bit of history and prehistory in a remote location.

Triangulating Your Position

I recently picked up a book on map and compass navigation at a local library book sale.  In reading though it, I was particularly interested in a topic they called “Resection.”  If you’re in the medical profession, you’re familiar with that term, as it means to surgically remove part of an organ.  In navigation, though, it has a different meaning.  According to the US military, it is defined as “the method of locating one's position on a map by determining the grid azimuth to at least two well-defined locations that can be pinpointed on the map.” 

In my book, Outdoor Navigation with GPS, I used the somewhat more familiar term, triangulation.  Basically, it is a way to find your position on a map by measuring the bearing to at least two known objects—things like mountain peaks, radio towers, or any other objects you can reliably identify on the map.  You measure the bearings to the objects with your compass, then draw lines through each of the objects on the map at the bearings you measured.  Your position is where all the lines intersect.

With the exception of Outdoor Navigation with GPS, every book I have ever read on the subject stops there.  It’s as if you can find your position to pinpoint accuracy just by following those simple instructions.  But there’s more to it than that. Would you know the answers to these questions?

• How accurately do you need to measure the bearings to each object?
• Will your measurements be more accurate if the objects you measure are far away or nearby?
• Will your measurements be more accurate if the objects are close to each other or far away from each other?
• Under what conditions would your triangulated position be in error by more than a mile, even if you have accurately measured and plotted your bearings?

Here are some quick answers.  For more details, refer to Outdoor Navigation with GPS:

• Try to measure bearings as accurately as possible.  With care, you should be able to measure a bearing to an accuracy of about 2 degrees.
• The accuracy to which you can find your position will be better if the objects are nearby.  If the object is a mile away and you measure its bearing to an accuracy of 2 degrees, the uncertainty in your location is less than 200 feet.  If the object is 10 miles away, your uncertainty grows to nearly 2000 feet.
• Try to measure objects that are at right angles to you.  Avoid objects that are in line or 180 degrees apart.
• The error in your position can be more than a mile if the objects you are measuring are far away (more than 10 miles), the accuracy of your measurement is no better than 5 degrees, and the objects are not at right angles to you.

Here’s a diagram from my book that illustrates the concepts.  Notice how your position accuracy is better at Position 1, where the objects are nearby, than at Position 2, where they are farther away: