Rock Will Not Be Contained: Problems at the Ferguson Slide near Yosemite

The Ferguson Slide today, April 30, 2016

I thought of an Ian Malcom quote from Jurassic Park (1983) today:  "If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is."

We were driving past the Ferguson Slide on the Merced River near Yosemite Valley, a huge slump that let loose in 2006, covering Highway 140, and forcing engineers to "temporarily" put the highway on the other side of the river. Try replacing the word "evolution" with the word "geology", and the word "life" with the word "rock", and see if this is appropriate: If there is one thing the history of geology has taught us it's that rock will not be contained. Rock breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is.

The Ferguson Slide in November 2016. Source: http://geotripper.blogspot.com/2015/05/work-on-yosemites-ferguson-slide.html

The engineers have been intending to reopen the section of Highway 140 by constructing an avalanche shed. They began work last year by removing a huge amount of rock, and then covering the remaining slide with containment netting. Unfortunately, El Nino made its influence felt, as rainfall this year was more than average. It didn't result in disastrous flooding, but apparently excess water contributed to the failure of the slide in two separate events in November and December. The new slides destroyed half of the containment netting (yes, I'm a bit late with this news, but I haven't been up there a lot until these last few weeks). Engineers are reassessing their options, and work has stopped for the moment.

George Lucas Had It Wrong. A Day of Fierce Pride at MJC

No, I'm not talking about the prequels to Star Wars! It was something much earlier. People could be forgiven for not knowing this, but Star Wars was not George Lucas's first successful film. He was known for another great movie, American Graffiti, a semi-autobiographical film that recalled his days as a young man in Modesto, California. Yes, Lucas is perhaps our most famous native son. He also attended Modesto Junior College for a time.

So what was it that he got wrong? It was a fairly minor plot point, but in the movie, the two friends Curt and Steve were on the same pathways for their lives. They were planning to leave town to attend a "northeastern" college (let's presume an Ivy League school), but after a series of events over the space of one long night, Steve is convinced to stay in Modesto, attending the "junior" college, while Curt heads off to great success, and was eventually a writer living in Canada. Steve ended up selling insurance in Modesto.

What's wrong with this picture? It was the insinuation that attending a community college was somehow a lesser option for achieving success, that it is in some way a second-rate education. As I sat proudly through our graduation ceremony tonight, I would fiercely argue that getting a degree at a community college is a wonderful achievement, and that I would proudly put my students up against any Ivy League student at the two-year mark in their academic career.

It doesn't take long to realize that a lot of (but certainly not all) the students at a Harvard or Yale are children of privilege, people who have never really had to struggle to get ahead in life. They started in private upscale schools, got in on the fast-track to an Ivy League school with the best preparation possible. It's hardly a surprise that they would excel and succeed.

The students I work with come from many different backgrounds, and most of them are poor and disadvantaged. They come from many cultures. Our elementary and secondary schools are underfunded and sometimes dangerous, and alcoholism and drug use are epidemic in our region. The kids in our schools have the decks stacked against them at every turn. They come to us unprepared and unskilled. We have veterans suffering from PTSD, abused spouses, and laid-off laborers. We have huge numbers of people who are the first in their families to ever attend college. We have resources at our school, but sometimes the challenges facing our students are overwhelming. And yet these students persist, and they fight, and they cry, and fail, and then they come back again. And in the end they master the skills required to pass their classes. When you see a group of these students decked out in blue robes, and receiving an AA or AS degree, you are looking at some of the most successful people in the world.

The professor in front isn't checking her email. She was taking pictures like I was.

If you are an employer, and you see a community college on the resume of a potential employee, you are looking at a person with persistence, stamina, and an incredible work ethic. They've been through impossible challenges and they've succeeded.

I couldn't be more proud of my students on this great day.

Damn Fool California Farmers Bringing on a New Dust Bowl

The video is very short, but in eight seconds it shows the stupidity of bad agricultural practices in Central California, practices that have led to disaster in the past, and maybe into our immediate future as well.

Muddy runoff from an almond orchard east of Modesto. That's soil going away, never to return

I want to make it clear that I'm not condemning all farmers. The traditional small farmers were known for caring for the lands. In flat lands where winds can carry away topsoil, these people planted trees to serve as windbreaks, trees that wouldn't be mature until long after they had passed on. They were careful to prevent soil erosion by plowing with the topography, to prevent destructive runoff. They let fields lie fallow in some years to let soil recover. They were looking out for their descendants, but it was also an act of self-preservation. If they lost the land, they could literally starve.

Unfortunately, it's been a long time since "small" farmers provided the economic backbone of our country. Most farming today is performed by giant agribusinesses that are more concerned with the bottom line and short-term profits. There isn't much in the way of forward thinking in a corporate boardroom.

So why is it that I'm ranting on this subject today? We had a freak storm roll through the area this afternoon. In about twenty minutes we accumulated 0.5 inches of rain, and the sky was alive with thunder and lightning. We even had a funnel cloud over our village east of Modesto (video here). The skies cleared and the storm drifted east. I decided to make a slight detour on my way to work, so I headed east on Lake Road towards Turlock Reservoir and came across a shocking scene (for our region anyway): a hail-covered landscape.

A few moments later I encountered an even bigger problem, a flooded roadway. The water was very muddy, and I could immediately see the reason. The soil was washing off the adjacent slopes. It shouldn't be happening this way. The natural landscape in this area should be a short-grass prairie, and the water should have been absorbed into the soil, and the grassroots should have been holding the soil in place. Of course a heavy rain can flood a road, but it shouldn't be bury the road in sediment.

The problem is the high commodity prices for almonds due to intense demand for nuts in Asia. California produces most of the world's almonds, and for the last few years, tens of thousands of acres of grasslands have been ripped up and replaced by tree saplings. The orchards are already controversial because the trees require vast amounts of water, and there is no irrigation infrastructure to provide it in sufficient amounts. The orchards are being watered by newly drilled wells, and the water they are using is largely irreplaceable, as the water use far exceeds natural recharge. The wells are tapping into aquifers that provide water for Modesto and other cities in the Great Valley.

But another serious problem caught my attention this afternoon. The grass is gone, and herbicides are clearly being used to keep the soil barren in the rows between the trees. And the trees are in perfectly straight rows, no matter the shape of the topography.

In other words, these "farmers" (really investment groups) are breaking one of the most important lessons of the Dust Bowl era. To farm in a sustainable manner, one needs to work with the land, not against it. One of the main causes of soil loss in the Dust Bowl days was erosion of furrows that sloped towards the gullies and valleys because of an insistence on plowing in perfectly symmetrical rows no matter the underlying topography.

The soils of the eastern Great Valley and in the Sierra Foothills are much older and less fertile than those on the floor of the valley. They've not been replenished by river floods since the end of the last ice age some 13,000 years ago. As a result, there are fewer nutrients, and thick accumulations of clay prevent groundwater infiltration unless grass or other vegetation slows the water down. So today, with the grass cover stripped away, we are seeing increased soil erosion that seems to intensify with every storm.

The problem was made most clear as I was driving south on Hawkins Road (below). On the right side of the road, you can see the recently planted orchard, and the muddy water that is washing off the slope. In the foreground, the water on the road is clear. That's because the slope to my right was covered with prairie grass, not orchard.

This is what we get when farming gets taken over by corporate interests. One would think that in this modern era we would take steps to prevent soil loss. Soil is life itself, and is irreplaceable in human lifetimes. But...money talks. It yells. It shouts. And the land therefore suffers.

What's Your Favorite Stereotype of a Desert? The 2% Answer? The Dunes at Death Valley

Think of the word "desert". What''s the first picture that pops into your mind? Is it Saguaro Cacti, like an old western? Is it cliffs and spires like other old westerns? Is it a painted desert, like an old Disney movie or a Roadrunner cartoon? Or is it an endless sea of sand? At different times, I've had all those stereotypes established in my head. The California desert is the one I visit most often, and ironically, not one of those stereotypes apply in our state. Except for something less than 5% of the land surface, where sand dunes cover the landscape.

One need only to look at Death Valley itself. From a perch at the head of the Mosaic Canyon fan (above), one can see forty miles or more to the north and little in the way of dunes is visible. It's the same for the southern part of the valley, where salt is the dominant surface material. Or alluvial fans. Or the clay deposits of dry lakes. Dunes occur only where Tucki Mountain sticks out into the valley, interrupting the flow of wind currents that scream down the valley floor from the north.

The Mesquite Flat Dunes, or Death Valley Dunes, are perhaps the most famous dune field in the American West (although supporters of the dunes at White Sands in New Mexico or Great Sand Dunes in Colorado might argue the point). If you have seen CP30 and R2D2 wandering across dunes in the original "Star Wars", you've seen the dunes of Death Valley. It doesn't hurt that they are probably the most easily accessible dunes in the California desert.

And what a backdrop! The Grapevine Mountains rise thousands of feet above the sinuous ridges of sand. The dunes are not all that tall, only a hundred feet or so, but the field is several miles across, and are easy to explore.

There is a certain sensuousness about the dunes, a smoothness that belies the harsh ruggedness of other desert landscapes. It's the only place I can think of where I could imagine walking without shoes (as long as the day isn't too hot!), and the only place I could imagine laying down without carefully inspecting the ground first (there are lots of sharp and poisonous things on other parts of desert floor). It's also one of the few places I feel comfortable hiking at night without a flashlight. It's a marvelous experience to walk up and down the dune slopes, feeling the change in the temperature and humidity. In moonlight, it can be downright magical. 

The dune sands are composed of small grains of quartz and feldspar. The grains start as mudflows and flashfloods coming off the mountains that tower over the valley floor. Winds carry away the finer dust particles, and leave behind the larger pebbles and boulders. During windstorms, the sand bounces along the desert floor, a process called saltation. The grains rarely bounce more than three feet off the desert floor, a fact that I can attest to, based on the experience of standing in a violent windstorm wearing shorts. The sand was stinging my legs, but not my arms or face.

It is understandable that people might think that most desert erosion is caused by wind, but water still does most of the work. Wind can't carve deep canyons or remove mountains. But wind can be distinctive force in moving sediments around on the desert floor, and forming one of the most beautiful landscapes possible.

Traversing Dark Canyons Where the Mountains are Upside-down: Titus Canyon Road, Death Valley

This is lonely country. There are no outposts of civilization, no phone service, and a single thin gravel road winds through the complex of canyon narrows. This is the kind of country where canyons and peaks get named for the people who disappeared there, rather than for their discoveries.  It's been 110 years since prospector Morris Titus went missing while searching for supplies for his party. The canyon now bears his name.

The serpentine road that passes through the Grapevine Mountains by way of Titus Canyon was constructed to provide access to the town of Leadfield, but the mining venture never amounted to anything, and the town was abandoned in less than a year. The road was kept open when Death Valley was declared a national monument by President Herbert Hoover, and today it is one of the most popular backcountry roads in the park. But that doesn't make it any less spooky, especially when it is late in the day and the sun is setting low on the horizon.

In places, the canyon has cut 3,000 feet into the heart of the mountain range, and the preponderance of limestone cliffs gives the gorge a ruggedness reminiscent of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The rocks are of similar age, dating from the Paleozoic Era. But Titus Canyon has an attribute that is missing in the Grand Canyon: the rocks here are upside down.

Let's get an explanation...

Death Valley and the Basin and Range Province are largely the result of extensional forces dating from the last 15-20 million years. The crust was stretched and broken up into horsts and grabens, and earthquakes today still mostly reflect the heritage of the intense stretching of the earth's crust. It wasn't always that way. For something like 200 million years, the region was  under the influence of compressional forces, courtesy of the massive subduction zone that once existed off the California coast (it still exists to the north as the Cascadia Subduction Zone). As the ocean crust sank beneath the edge of the North American continent, the rocks that had originally formed the passive continental margin were pushed skyward and intensely folded. In places the folds literally turned the rocks upside down.

That's the case in the western part of the Grapevine Mountains, which are crossed by the road through Titus Canyon. The rocks slope into the ground towards the east, but because they are inverted, driving west takes the traveler through younger and younger rocks. You can even see the fold itself, a recumbent anticline, in a few spots (see the picture below). The rocks in the foreground are upside down, while those on the far summit above are right-side up (although all of the rocks are tilted steeply).

Because the Death Valley graben has been sinking through time, the valley is deeper and more narrow towards the edge of the range, since the river gradient is steeper and erosion faster. The narrows of Titus Canyon are memorable, being barely wide enough to accommodate the vans. Most of the students got out and walked the last mile (in the dark), because the canyon is so scenic in the lower reaches.

The rocks we were walking through date back to more than 500 million years ago, to Cambrian time. They are part of the Bonanza King formation, a limestone unit that was deposited in a warm shallow sea along the edge of North America. The animals that lived here included trilobites, a diverse group of arthropods related to Horseshoe Crabs and believe it or not, pill-bugs (roly-poly to some of you). Some trilobites could roll up in the manner of pill-bugs. There were also coral-like archaeocyathids, an ancient animal that was one of the first groups to go extinct. Think of them as a failed experiment in early life (although they were widespread and very common for a time). Brachiopods were another group found as fossils in these rocks. They are bivalved animals like the clams, but their anatomy is more primitive than a clam, if that is possible. They achieved great diversity during the Paleozoic period, but only a few species persist in today's seas (the living species are sometimes called Lampshells). There were a great many other species living in the ancient seas, but few of them had hard shells, and were thus very rarely preserved as fossils.

It can sometimes be difficult to imagine the forces that are required to turn mountains upside-down, and it's even more impressive to realize that the deformation actually took place thousands of feet, even miles deep in the crust. There was once an earlier mountain range in this place that rose to great height as a result of the compression. The mountains eventually eroded to a fairly gentle plain, only to be disrupted by extensional forces in the last 20 million years, resulting the mountains that we see today only a few million years ago. Canyons like the lower end of Titus have formed only the last few hundred thousand years.

We walked the last few yards of Titus Canyon, and emerged at the top of the massive alluvial fan built by debris washing out of the narrows. After being in dark canyons for hours, the expansive views were a shock. Way out in the distance to the left was Tucki Mountain, and at the base was the only outpost of civilization for many miles, at Stovepipe Wells. Poor Morris Titus made it out of the canyon, but it was July, and he had no water. He was doomed. Sometimes we can forget how much technology can shield us from the harsh world. We unconcernedly jumped into the vans, hoping there would still be enough hot water in the showers, and that they still be serving dinner in the restaurant.

Titus Canyon is one of the premier adventures at Death Valley National Park. High clearance cars and SUVs are recommended, and it's always a good idea to travel with others. It may be a delightful exploration of a few hours, but things can go wrong, so it's good to be with friends (my favorite t-shirt in recent years came from Death Valley; it said "Bring a compass! It's always awkward when you have to eat your friends.")!

The River Lives Again...Flows Increased on the Lower Tuolumne

I took a stroll on the Tuolumne River Parkway trail for the first time in several weeks, and something was strange. I heard the river. One needs to understand just how strange that really is. For the last four years, we've been in a grips of a horrific drought (and still are for that matter). The general pattern is that the watermasters at Don Pedro Reservoir upstream have tried to hang onto as much water as possible, since so little was available. As a consequence, downstream flows have been highly restricted, no matter the season.

I think they got a bulk deal on signs. The cliff is maybe 20 feet high.

For most of the time I've been exploring the trails by the Tuolumne River, flows have been on the order of 200-300 cubic feet per second, enough to keep the river flowing, but little more. Such low flows have promoted the growth of invasive River Hyacinth, and warm water has made life very difficult for the few salmon that can make it this far upstream. Predation of the salmon fingerlings has been more prevalent, as the small fish have fewer places to hide at low flows.

So it was a surprise to hear the river. It wasn't quite a roar, but the currents of the river were strong, and the water was flooding into channels that have been dry for years. As soon as I got home, I checked the USGS riverflow website and saw that for weeks, the flow has indeed been at 200 cubic feet per second, about 100 cfs less than average for this time of year. But two days ago, the river discharge was ramped up to nearly 3,000 cubic feet per second.

Source: http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ca/nwis/uv?site_no=11289650

I don't know the reasons for the increased flows, and now, a day later, they've already slowed the discharge to less than 1,000 cfs. The reservoir is currently 64% full, about 88% of what would be normal for this time of year.

Of course it was a Sunday afternoon and the temperatures were unseasonably warm at 85 degrees. Lots of people were hanging out by the river, and some were swimming in the 50 degree water. I've done that in the Colorado River, and 50 degrees is not comfortable. It was truly worrisome to see children playing in the extremely cold river with strong currents just inches from where they were splashing (and of course no life vests). It's not hard to see why drownings happen in Sierra rivers every year.

 It was nice to see the river come alive again, for whatever short time (and reason) it was happening.

PS: I'm told by the folks at the Tuolumne River Trust that it was a pulse flow to clear out hyacinth, and to assist salmon fingerlings to make the journey downstream.

The Rim of Fire and the "Impending" Mega-Earthquakes: Look past the inflammatory headlines

Every few years (or months) there is a flurry of activity, and everyone gets hot and bothered and worried that the world is about to come apart. There's concern, even panic, and then things settle down a bit and the subject gets forgotten for another couple of years (or months).

Oh, you thought I was talking about earthquakes? No, I was talking about media storm ABOUT earthquakes. There have been a couple of bad earthquakes this week, truly tragic events, including the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Ecuador that has killed hundreds of people. There were smaller, but still deadly events in Japan. As a result, stories are making the rounds in the media concerning the Ring of Fire, and the possibility of an impending mega-earthquake...somewhere. Some other place is about to get it, the stories suggest.

Is there something strange going on? Are these earthquakes omens of future events? The answers: no, and probably no. The problem in the media treatment of earthquakes is that writers of these stories have a bit of knowledge, and a bit of knowledge can lead to problems. People have heard of the "Ring of Fire", and figure that it is a single geologic unit to the extent that if something happens somewhere along the Ring of Fire, it will have an immediate cause and effect on some other part of the Ring of Fire. It's a misconception.

Source: A. Hayes

Geologists use the term Ring of Fire as a convenience to describe a variety of different tectonic boundaries around and within the Pacific Ocean region. The trenches and subduction zones do not behave as a single coherent unit, and thus a large earthquake or volcanic eruption along one convergent boundary does not mean the impending destruction of another part of the "ring". The problem is that when a large event does take place, like the Ecuador event, then people suddenly pay attention to all the magnitude 6 earthquakes that take place within a few days or weeks and draw the conclusion that all of the events are related. They are almost assuredly not.

The problem is that magnitude 6 earthquakes are happening all the time, often in isolated regions, so they receive less attention on a day-to-day basis. But throw in a near-magnitude 8 event, and suddenly all the magnitude 6 events seem to be a frightening coincidence, and they feel related, as if one is causing the other.

Can earthquakes be an omen of a future event? Yes, they can. In the same way that a stick crackles and pops before it snaps in two, foreshocks can indeed be a harbinger of an impending quake. The foreshocks are not recognizable as such until the main quake happens (they're no different than run-of-the-mill earthquakes), so they can't be used to predict major quakes. But when they do occur, they are precursors to a larger quake in the same general area, along the same subduction zone.They are not predictors of quakes across oceans.

Mega-earthquakes (magnitude 8 or 9) may also set off earthquakes elsewhere, by triggering movement on faults that are already stressed to the breaking point. This isn't happening right now either. We haven't had a quake that big.

So, the take-away is this: could a gigantic earthquake, worse than the tragedies in Ecuador and Japan, take place, say, tomorrow? Sure. If it happens, is it related to these other events? Probably not. And media writers really need to put aside the temptation to put inflammatory click-bait titles on their reports about future mega-earthquakes. Panic and stress are not good combinations in earthquake country. Accurate information, on the other hand, will save lives.

A Treasure in my Back Yard: Grand Opening Celebration for the Tuolumne River Parkway, May 21st

It's been a long time coming, but it looks like the Tuolumne River Parkway trail in Waterford will be completed soon. There will be a Grand Opening celebration on May 21 at 10 AM at the parking area at the end of S. Reinway Avenue. I hate to say it, but I can't be there, but I hope that many of you will stop by, or give the trail a look soon. I've been writing about the trail for many months now, and I'm looking forward to the completion of the project. The Tuolumne River has been an unrecognized treasure in our little town, a beautiful and serene portion of river right at the boundary between the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Great Valley. There are stretches of rare riparian habitat and some grand old Valley Oak trees. It's been a rich bird watching area for me over the last few months, and there are lots of other recreational opportunities.

There will be interpretive signs set up along the trail (you may even find a shot or two by Geotripper in one of them; I don't know if they used any of mine yet). Hikers will be able to learn about the native animals and plants seen along the trail, the river habitat, and also information about how wastewater is dealt with (the trail detours around and above the city's treatment plant). The trail will be a great educational resource within walking distance of the schools in town.

I've been truly enjoying my exercise jaunts along the river over these last few months. I've seen somewhere around forty species of birds, I've watched the change of seasons, I've seen some other interesting animals, like the fox in the picture below.

The trail is about two miles long, with a park and exercise loop at the west end (and a lung-busting stairwell that climbs around for or five stories from the river). The other end also has a nice park that is being expanded. For a trail on a flat valley floor, it has some steep ups and downs to provide some aerobic conditioning. It climbs to avoid the wastewater facility, but also climbs around some elderberry habitat that provides a home for an endangered beetle.

It's a bit of a surprise, being a "valley" trail, but the upper parts of the route offers some nice far-ranging views on clear days. The bluffs are high enough to offer a peek at the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west.

I wish I could be at the Grand Opening (I'll be in another state), but I'm glad we'll have this beautiful resource in our town. I've been guilty at times of calling our valley boring when compared to spectacular places like Yosemite or the coast, but over the years I've found that some treasures might not be as shiny, but they are just as valuable. And it's only a fifteen minute walk from my front door.

The Richest Mineral Resources in Death Valley: Isolation and Gullibility

A great many dreams lie broken in the rock and gravel expanses of Death Valley National Park. The California Gold Rush had brought hundreds of thousands of people to the state in the 1850s, and though few of them ever actually became rich, there was always the hope of the next big mother lode was somewhere out there in the wastelands that lay east of the Sierra Nevada. Hungry miners fanned out from the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode in a sometimes desperate search for riches in the desert.

Sometimes there was success, most notably at Bodie and Cerro Gordo, and at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada. But most of the time the miners came up empty. And sometimes worse. Morris Titus was a prospector in 1906 who lost his life somewhere in the depths of the canyon that now bears his name. It's also the canyon we are exploring today in this blog post.

There will always be people with more money than they know what to do with, and they will always want more of it. And there will always be other people devising ways to separate such people from their money. Why put your life and health at risk in a hard country when you can just as easily succeed by convincing others to do the work and take the risks for you?

Such was the story of Leadfield in Titus Canyon. Off to the east, the town of Rhyolite had a mildly successful run as a gold mining town, lasting from 1905 to 1911, so the idea of a new discovery of ore was not unexpected. Some ores of lead may have actually existed in the area. But transporting those ores would be a problem. They needed to be taken to Beatty, Nevada, 20 miles as the crow flies, but crows don't live in Death Valley. They needed to take the ores through the narrows of Titus Canyon (often closed by flash floods) down into Death Valley, over Daylight Pass, and then to Beatty, a distance of 70 miles. And the ores really weren't all that valuable. If anyone was going to get rich from mining at Leadfield, they needed a different approach. Enter the entrepreneur Charles Julian (entrepreneur in this instance translates to "con-man").

The most valuable resource of Leadfield was isolation (of the town) and gullibility (of the investors). Rich investors tend to live in cities, and know little of geology. They are the kind of people who could be convinced that the ores at Leadfield would be transported down the canyon to paddlewheel steamers on the floor of fricking Death Valley, the driest place in North America (sorry for the near-profanity). This was an actual insinuation made by the promotional materials for the "boom" town.

The promoters of the town hacked out a road directly from Beatty to Leadfield (It's now Titus Canyon Road, the one we followed on our tour), and in March of 1926, more than 300 potential investors and hundreds of local miners crowded the site of the new town, and Leadfield was born. A post office was established in August of 1926, and it closed for good five months later. The town, which for several months boasted a population of 300, was deserted in less than a year. And Julian had disappeared with a lot of money (he died by his own hand only a few years later in Shanghai at the age of 40). Lots of gold and silver had been produced (from the pockets of the investors). Not an ounce of actual ore was ever shipped.

I wonder sometimes what life was like in a town founded on fraud and hopeful dreams. What did people do? They opened stores, hotels, and blacksmith shops, and I guess people sort of milled around wondering where to dig. At what point did people start to realize they had been conned? Those were my thoughts as we explored the handful of structures that still remain. Someone had dug a fairly extensive shaft, but I found not a trace of galena or any other lead-bearing minerals in the tailings.

It's nice to know that we live in a day and age when nobody could ever be swayed into investing in shady mining operations on the basis of slickly produced promotional materials. Surely such things don't happen today...if you agree, well, have I got a proposal for you...

Why yes, this 13 pound gold nugget came from my mine. How could you doubt me???

For an account of Leadfield's history, check out the 1957 article by the late great California travel writer Russ Leadabrand: http://www.dezertmagazine.com/mine/1957DM01/index.html.