Mega road trip - Day 10

Today was a drive from Salt Lake City, UT to Carlin, NV.

First stop was at the famous Bonneville Salt Flats - the evaporated remnants of Lake Bonneville.  Lake Bonneville was a much larger lake during the last ice age when Utah was more moist and the only thing left of this once huge lake is the Great Salt Lake.

Here is a picture of my wife and daughter out on the salt flats.

Here's a closeup of the salt.  I tasted it - it's salty!

Then we drove out a dirt road into the area around the UT/NV border called the Silver Mountains and poked around in the desert for a bit.  We turned around when the road got too rutted for our sad little car without much clearance or 4 wheel drive.

As a geologist, I think I should own a big-ass jeep but my wife thinks we need practical family cars.  Guess what we drive (me too since I inherit the old family car when we buy a new one).

Off into Nevada where we are spending the night in Carlin.

Hate to trash a town people live in, but first impressions are that Carlin's a pit.  It's basically a truck stop with shabby mobile homes nestled between I-80 and the railroad tracks (maybe there's more of a town hiding somewhere, but we didn't see it).  We're spending the night at the dirtiest Comfort Inn I've ever stayed at and I'm on my computer in the lobby area since the signal's too weak to receive in my room.  The first room they put us in had a broken fridge (advertised as having a fridge) and wires hanging from the ceiling where the smoke detecter belonged.  My wife won't let the kids walk on the carpet without their shoes on.  I wouldn't mind as much if the room wasn't $100/night.  If you ever find yourself driving through the area, keep going.

I have heard of Carlin before, however, since it was the home of the famous Native American shaman Rolling Thunder (written about by Doug Boyd in a book of the same name).

Anyway, one surprise I had was the Ruby Mountains outside of Elko (25 miles before Carlin on the Interstate).  I've been in the Las Vegas area, but never up in this part of the state.  There's a canyon 20 miles or so south of Elko called Lamoille Canyon which goes up into the Ruby Mountains.  It's a beautiful area with peaks reaching 11,000+ feet.  The canyon was glacially carved and the area feels like you're up in the mountains of Montana.

A classic U-shaped glacial valley

A hanging valley where a smaller glacier entered the larger glacial valley

Pretty snowmelt waterfall (June 10th)

I wouldn't mind coming back to the area in the future and spending more time poking around these mountains.  It would also be nice to spend more time in the area studying all the gold and silver mining that's gone on (and is still going on) nearby.

Nevada produces over 80% of the gold mined in the U.S. and the Carlin Trend is a 40 mile long (only a couple of miles wide) zone of low-grade gold ore that has produced more gold than any other area in the country.  With 2010 prices, the district has produced some 82 billion dollars worth of gold!

Makes you want to drive out into the desert with a shovel!

Mega road trip - Day 9

Today we drove from Moab, UT to Layton, UT (a few miles north of Salt Lake City).  On the way, we stopped at Temple Square - the heart of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons). 

I was very surprised we weren't approached by the smiling, Bible-carrying (or is it Book of Mormon carrying), well-dressed young people strolling the property with name tags.  I'm one of those curmudgeons that doesn't like overly-friendly people approaching me - I always wonder what they want and about their ulterior motive.

Someday I should write about the Mormon beliefs (there are tie-ins to geology - Hill Cumorah in NY where Joseph Smith supposedly discovered the golden tablets which he translated into the book of Mormon is a glacial depositional landform called a drumlin).  Of course, being highly skeptical of the story will offend some people who, like the young-Earth creationists of evangelical Christianity, believe in things that science has shown to be nonsense.

Anyway, after Salt Lake City, we drove out to Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake.  It's a 15 x 5 mile mountainous island (up to 2,500 feet above lake level) with a core of 2.7 billion-year old gneiss (Farmington Canyon Complex).

They have a herd of bison there as well as some pronghorns...

And of course we had to take the kids into the Great Salt Lake.  If you've never been there, it smells bad, is a soup of brine shrimp (my kids were scooping them up in their hands), and has loads of biting gnats.  Coming out of the water, you feel a nasty film on your skin from the high salinity (ranging from 5 - 20% depending on lake levels, etc.).  Average ocean salinity, for comparison, is 3.5%.

It is a scenic place, however, with views of mountains across the lake and while we were there a thunderstorm rolled in with a neat lightning show.

Tomorrow we go west into Nevada and enter the Basin & Range Province.

Mega road trip - Day 8

For our final day in Moab, we drove north to I-70, west, and then south on UT-24 to get to the other side of Canyonlands National Park.  This is a remote area called the San Rafael Swell and formed during the Laramide Orogeny (Cretaceous - Tertiary Periods) at the same time much of the Rocky Mountains formed.

Deep, ancient basement rocks were pushed up along faults and folded the sedimentary rocks above them into an upward arching fold - an anticline.  Erosion then sculpted the area into a rugged landscape of canyons.

We first visited Little Wildhorse Canyon - a great hike through a slot canyon.  We didn't do the 8 mile round trip through Little Wild Horse and Bell Canyon (we have two 9-year-olds and it was 95+ F out) but did hike a couple of miles up the canyon and back.

Here are a few of the many pictures I have...

This is not a road, it's a dry stream bed (arroyo)

The narrows begin

Differential erosion & scalloped rocks

That's me ahead in the winding slot canyon

Large rock wedged in the slot canyon

You can imagine how bad it would be to get caught in this canyon during a summer thunderstorm.  Some of the scallops on the rock wall are 20 feet up in the narrow parts of the canyon.  Read an account of careless hikers here (there's no excuse to ignore the weather when you enter slot canyons).

After the slot canyon, we drove the short distance over the Goblin Valley State Park.  Neat hoodoos that you can walk around and explore...

The Goblins

Closer up

This one looks like a Chinese pagoda

It's fun to drive across the landscape out there and be able to recognize the different rock units - Entrada Sandstone, Morrison Formation, Navajo Sandstone, etc.  They really stand out well and are easy to distinguish from one another.

Distinctive rock units in Wild Horse Mesa at Goblin Valley

Mega road trip - Day 7

Another day in Moab.  Today we went to Arches National Park.  We arrived early (7 am) since the forecast was for record high temperatures for early June (it hit 105 F by afternoon).  First hike was out to Delicate Arch, the symbol of Utah and a beautiful 3 mile round trip hike.

One thing that did bother my wife and I were the unbelievably dense parents who were letting little kids run around up there on the edge of 200 foot drops (they were literally running on the edge of the dropoffs). 

Anyway, I especially like the last part of the trail which follows a ledge along a high cliff.  You turn the corner, and the arch is right in front of you.

By the time we were on our way down (around 9:30-10:00 am), there was a constant stream of hikers coming up the slickrock trail (including a busload of Japanese tourists).

By 10 am, and after 3 miles, my wife and kids were done (not big hikers and they hate the heat).  I had them drop me off at the Devil's Garden trailhead while they went back to the Visitor's Center to earn Junior Ranger badges.  I hiked out to the Double O Arch a little over two miles each way.  It involved hiking on some neat stone fins on the way (higher that it looks in the photo)...

Out to the double arch...

It was a fast hike since I only had 1 1/2 hours before they returned to pick me up.  I was dizzy from the heat by the time I returned as temperatures were hitting 100 F by noon (you know it's hot when you drink over 2 liters of water and don't have to go to the bathroom once).

After that, we did the tourist thing and drove around in air-conditioned comfort to overlooks and arch viewpoints.  Later that night, after a dip in the hotel pool and dinner, we returned to Arches for the sunset and to look at the desert night sky stars (with a few lightning flashes from distant thunderstorms).

It's late and I'm tired - I'll write more about the geology tomorrow.