Wild Horses at Home on the Range in Eastern California

I've been on the road again, this time for a short trip through Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Wi-Fi has been rare, so I'm only just beginning to catch up with things. Our route took us into the wildlands east of the Sierra Nevada, and before we reached the border of Nevada near Benton Hot Springs, we were privileged with the sight of several small herds of wild horses.

Nearly all schoolchildren will remember that the wild horses of North America are not native to the continent, having been introduced by the Spaniards hundreds of years ago. What is less recognized is that horses are native to North America, it's just that they went extinct here at the end of the Ice Age. I've written about them before. What follows is a portion of one of my favorite posts from 2011:

The heritage of the horses is one of the greatest stories of evolution in North America. When the dinosaurs were removed from world ecosystems by events at the end the Cretaceous Period (65 million years ago), various kinds of smaller animals began to evolve to fill available environmental niches. Birds and mammals were highly competitive in terrestrial environments, and within several million years, many new species appeared in the geologic record. 52 million years ago, a small browsing animal called Hyracotherium fed on leaves in the forests. It was the size of a fox, with five toes per foot (though not all were used in locomotion). It was the earliest horse-like ancestor. Over the millenia, dozens of horse-related species evolved, with fewer toes and more highly developed hooves.

In the mid-Cenozoic, the forests were receding and vast grasslands began to develop. Some of the horses adapted to eating the grass, developing constantly growing teeth that could withstand the silica and dust without being worn away. They also grew larger and faster in order to deal with predators on the open plains. At times, a dozen or more different species of horses co-existed.

The horses were creatures of North America. Groups of them migrated into South America around 3-4 million years when the continents were joined at the isthmus of Panama. Another group migrated over the Bering Land Strait into Asia about the same time. But their home, the land of their ancestry, is North America. They thrived until around 12,000 years ago, when they and the 30 or so other species of the North American megafauna went extinct. The horses, camels, short-faced bears, giant beavers, sabertooth cats, American lions, dire wolves, and wooly mammoths all disappeared. The reasons are not known with certainty, but climate change related to the end of Pleistocene Ice Age is one possible culprit. Predation by newly arrived human beings is also suspected.

I grant that others have greater expertise than me on these matters, but the climate change idea seems problematic because there were many ice ages, more than a dozen, so why didn't these animals go extinct at an earlier time? ... Human predation makes the most sense to me, but further research will certainly be needed.

So, when Columbus and other Spanish explorers and invaders arrived in the New World with their horses in tow, they were bringing those horses back to their ancestral homeland. They did well in the wild, and over the centuries have been naturalized into the arid landscape of the Basin and Range province. Their existence is controversial, since they compete with cows and sheep for forage, and until federal legislation brought some level of protection, they were hunted and killed by ranchers. Today, they are "managed" by the Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies, for better or worse.

I guess I'm wading into a huge controversy over the management of the horses, but I find it disturbing that there are many who only appreciate horses when they are doing work for us. Wild horses living free on the open range are to them a nuisance, as are the coyotes, wolves, and other predators that happen to eat the occasional cow or sheep. The lands the horses inhabit belong for the most part to all of us, not just the ranchers who borrow these landscapes. What I also know is that there is something beautiful about seeing these animals in the wild. There are so few creatures of the North American megafauna left, so it is a gift to see these creatures running free.

How Strange Has the Weather Been? This was the Death Valley Region only a week ago

Zabriskie Point in late May. It's usually over 100 degrees and sunny this time of year.

The weather was a bit...off last week as we hit the road to the southwest. We meant to drive over Tioga Pass, and made it to Crane Flat, only to find the pass was closed by snow. We headed back down to the Central Valley and crossed the mountains at Tehachapi. From there we arrived in Death Valley for two nights of camping. It's late May, the temperature is usually well over 100 degrees, but this is what greeted us at Furnace Creek:

We actually needed a light blanket in our tent the first night. We followed Highway 190 east to Death Valley Junction, trying to thread our way between storms. We watched the gully-washer turn Eagle Mountain into shadows.

We passed a small herd of wild horses near Death Valley Junction. They seemed unperturbed by the downpour.

The town of Shoshone is a small outpost of civilization east of Death Valley. It was wet too. There has been odd weather across the country of late. Seeing May snow in the Death Valley high country and rain across the valley floor certainly fit the pattern. I have no conclusions to draw from this, but it's strange to see droughts and record heat in California and the Alaskan rainforest, along with intense flooding in Texas and Oklahoma. Strange and interesting...

From a Land of Riches to the Barrens: The Basin and Range

We set off early today on our journey of exploration on the Colorado Plateau, but to get to the plateau we needed to travel nearly 500 miles from California's Great Valley to Las Vegas, passing through some of the loneliest landscapes to be found in the United States. I couldn't help but notice how we also passed from a land flowing literally with milk and honey (dairy farms and beekeepers among the thousands of farms) to a barren landscape where life must be grasped and fought for. We crossed Tioga Pass, which despite the frighteningly dry year was still mantled with some snowfields, and into the Basin and Range Province east of the Sierra Nevada. The difference was striking.

The Basin and Range Province happened because a high plateau-like region with rivers extending from at least central Nevada to the Pacific was stretched to the breaking point. About 29 million years ago, the subduction zone that had dominated the tectonic history of the Western United States for nearly 180 million years was destroyed by a process that resulted in the formation of the San Andreas fault. The crusted extended and broke into numerous fault block mountains (horsts) and deep fault valleys (grabens). The Sierra Nevada was the largest and highest of these fault blocks and as a consequence, the mountains prevent most of the rain and snow from ever reaching the lands to the east.

The Sierra Nevada is the realm of the cool dark forests and the high glaciated peaks. The Basin and Range is a place where sagebrush reigns, and practically the only trees are dumpy little pinyon pines and juniper. It's a hard dry land. We crossed Montgomery Pass into Nevada and had a close look at Boundary Peak, which at 13,147 feet (4,007 m), is the highest point in Nevada. Ironically it is not the highest peak in the mountain range in which it is situated. Adjacent Montgomery Peak is 13,441 feet (4,097 m) tall, but as the name suggests, the state boundary falls between the two. A bit farther south, White Mountain Peak soars to 14,252 ft (4,344 m), the third highest peak in California.

It's a hard land, but that doesn't mean that life doesn't thrive. We were lucky to see some members of the Montgomery Pass herd of wild horses right next to the highway. Horses came to America with the Spaniards in the 1500s and escapees over the centuries formed naturalized herds across the west. In a sense though, these horses are returnees to a long-lost homeland. The horses evolved in North America, and migrated to Asia over the Bering Land Strait, but about 12,000 years ago they became extinct in the land of their origin.

I took a new road today, the highway through Dyer and Fish Lake Valley. It is a beautiful place, and few hundred ranchers and farmers make a living off the small streams that flow off the White Mountains and from the copious amounts of Pleistocene groundwater that lies hidden beneath the valley floor (a nonrenewable resource though; they're using up the water that arrived there during the Ice Ages).

Others tried to wrest life from the land, but in a different way. When the California Gold Rush petered out in the 1850s, hungry miners scoured the lands to the east for the next great Mother Lode. Their searches were most often futile, but a few rich mines were discovered (such as the Comstock Lode), and other towns were built on dreams of avarice, but not much more. Such was the fate of Palmetto in western Nevada. There are only a few structures remaining, carved out of the rhyolite tuff that covers much of the region. For a time, several hundred miners pitched camp here, looking for plays of valuable minerals in the rocks, but they found little and quickly abandoned the site.

The desert has reclaimed much of the old town, except a few buildings which stand only because...well, I don't know how the wall below is still standing.

The miners could look out a window and see the sometimes snow-capped summit of White Mountain Peak in the distance, dreaming of water and riches, but having neither. A barren land, yes, but rich in other ways. The geology exposed in these barren mountains is fascinating, and volcanoes and earthquakes show that the crust here is still very active.

This is one of my favorite regions on the planet...

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: Crossing the Real "Loneliest" Highway

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel is an informal exploration of the geology of an interesting slice of the American West that I followed in July. We spent the night in Mono Lake, and on this day, we needed to cross a very lonely landscape. A number of years ago, Highway 50 from Fallon to Ely was declared "America's Loneliest Highway". It's notable for having only a handful of settlements about 70-80 miles apart, and while insulted at first, the towns embraced the label (you can get t-shirts that note that "I survived the loneliest highway". After our day on Highway 6 from Benton to Ely, I've decided I would have nominated a different road...

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

From Benton, CA to Ely NV we traveled 250 miles, and saw but a single village, Tonopah (population of around 2,600). Oops, there was also Coaldale, population 50, but I don't think I saw it. The stretch from Tonopah to Ely, 168 miles, had not a single service. Take the wrong car, and you would be out of gas before reaching your destination.

Lonely, but not uninteresting. As I've said before, the back of beyond in Nevada is one of my favorite places to explore. Still, I've not been on Highway 6 very often, and we had a bit of time to explore on this trip. Our first distraction was the semi-ghost town of Benton Hot Springs just before the Highway 6 junction. People live there, and there is even a bed and breakfast, but the town is mostly of a century ago. Several abandoned cabins recall places like Bodie.

We crossed the state border a short time later, and stopped to have a look at the highest point in Nevada, Boundary Peak. At 13,147 feet (4,007 m), it is actually the shorter of the two peaks in the picture below. Montgomery Peak, on the right is At 13,441 feet (4,097 m). In the most literal sense, the highest peak in Nevada is a bump on the side of California mountain. Understanding that state lines and the resulting high points are totally artificial concepts, I'm going to talk in the next post about the mountain that should have been Nevada's highest. All the same, Boundary Peak and the rest of the White Mountains are a spectacular mountain group, and would have merited national park status if they occurred anywhere besides in the rain shadow (and the attention shadow) of the Sierra Nevada.

We were entering the heart of the Basin and Range Province, a region where the earth's crust has been stretched and torn apart into a series of fault-block mountains, and deep sediment filled valleys. The tectonic action happened very quickly (in the geological sense), so rivers were disrupted, and most of them drain into the adjacent valleys where they evaporate, or sink into the ground. Water in the Basin and Range will not reach the Pacific Ocean.

Moments later, we encountered the first herd of wild horses (if this kept up, we weren't going to get anywhere!). One was grazing at the side of the road, and posed quite nicely for us. I discussed the wild horses a few weeks ago, and the issues surrounding their very existence (short version: they belong here). A beautiful hawk soared above as we watched the herd (identification welcome!).

An hour later, the town of Tonopah rose out of the mirages on the highway. We decided to stop and have lunch, seeing as how the next town was 168 miles away. More on Tonopah in a different post; our journey would land us back here nearly two weeks later.

photo by Mrs. Geotripper

We started making progress in the afternoon, but one more major distraction presented it self a few miles past Warm Springs (a ghost settlement). It was the Lunar Crater Volcanic Field (which I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago). The region was rocked by violent caldera eruptions around 25 million years ago which produced widespread rhyolite tuff deposits. Starting about 4 million years ago, and most recently only about 20,000 years ago, basalt magmas reached the surface, producing around 95 cinder cones and numerous lava flows.

The most striking volcanic feature in the field is Lunar Crater itself, which is not actually a volcano. It is a maar, a huge pit produced when magma approached the surface and encountered groundwater, which flashed to steam and exploded. The crater is 430 feet deep and 3,800 feet in diameter.

The crater is 7 miles south of Highway 6 on a gravel road (which was very well graded when we were there). It has been designated a National Natural Landmark and a Bureau of Land Management Backcountry Byway. The wind...the wind was practically hurricane force up on the rim (I admit to exaggeration, but not by much).

Another distinctive cone in the volcanic field is Easy Chair Crater, a cinder cone with a very unusual crater. It turns out that the cinder cone erupted first, and a maar explosion followed, producing the off-centered pit.

 This is really lonely country. We did not see a single other visitor while we were there.

The youngest cone in the field is Black Rock Crater, which lies just north of Highway 6. Having erupted only about 20,000 years ago, the lava flow looks exceedingly fresh.

The highway crosses a quarry that exposes some marvelous layers of cinders. Some of them contain large crystals of olivine and other mantle minerals that were carried up through the crust as xenoliths.

I picked the wrong angle to see what kind of coin I used for scale. It's a quarter. The fragments are used in road foundations and railroad beds. They are also used in gardening stone, but I bet few of these have been put to such use, seeing as how the nearest garden is many miles away!

Late in the afternoon, we arrived in Ely, Nevada, a relative metropolis in this empty countryside, with a population of around 4,300. We set up camp in an unexpectedly nice KOA campground with a view of the surrounding mountains (they are not always known for nice tent sites in my experience).

 The nearly full moon rose over the Schell Creek Range. It was a spectacular sight!

Our goal for the next day was to check out the mountain that should have been Nevada's high point, and to finish our journey across the Basin and Range Province. It will be in the next post...

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: Setting out on the Road

The ultimate authority (Wikipedia, of course) defines a vagabond as "...an itinerant person. The word is derived from the Latin adjective vagabundus, “inclined to wander”, from the verb vagor, “wander”..." Vagrant and vagrancy are obvious derivatives with negative connotations, but to be an itinerant wanderer sounds appealing to me.

As any reader of this blog would know, I travel a lot. But, seeing as how most of my traveling involves taking students along, I always follow a carefully planned and conducted itinerary. That makes me pretty much the opposite of a vagabond. I've always longed to explore off our route on these trips, but there are a lot of constraints when one is responsible for a large group of people. So, with an open schedule for a few weeks, I decided to try a bit of vagabonding.

Not entirely, of course. We still had to have someone watch the animals, and we occasionally let people know where we were at. We stayed in an occasional hotel when the weather got really bad. We weren't hitch-hiking (can you picture me and Mrs. Geotripper on the side of the road with our giant tent and our thumbs out?)! But we set out on the road with a few vagabonding goals:

...we allowed an ultimate goal of reaching Rocky Mountain National Park, but we would plan our route no more than a day or two in advance...

...we would try to visit only places we had never been before, or hadn't been since childhood...

...if we did visit familiar sites, we would search out something new about the place...

...we would come home when the time was right (not too road-weary, and not too homesick)...

...and we promised ourselves to stop any time either of us wanted to snap a picture...

It's a miracle that we got anywhere, given that last item. This wasn't a geology trip, but since geology is everywhere you go, this story is geological, too. When we returned home, I looked at a map and realized that we spent almost all our two weeks pretty close to the 39th parallel, thus the title of this coming blog series. We had a wonderful time; please feel free to join us as we journey across the American West!

If the pictures look a bit familiar, you will realize that I sent several blog posts from the road. The top picture is Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, and the second picture is a herd of wild horses in western Nevada.

It Isn't Just Deer and Antelope; Horses at Home on the Range

Here's a recap of yesterday's Quick Quiz Question:

Who was here first in the American West and Central Nevada?
1) Wild horses
2) Ranchers
3) Miners
4) Spanish Explorers
5) Native Americans

A number of people replied with the correct answer, but Silver Fox from Looking For Detachment had the most accurate: "...wild pre-horses...were here, then native Americans, then the Spanish and their horses which became the first wild horses of Recent times, then ranchers & miners NNITO, with many current wild horses now descended from escapee ranch horses with some Spanish-horse wild blood, modified and bred somewhat by native Americans post-Spaniards..."

The heritage of the horses is one of the greatest stories of evolution in North America. When the dinosaurs were removed from world ecosystems by events at the end the Cretaceous Period (65 million years ago), various kinds of smaller animals began to evolve to fill available environmental niches. Birds and mammals were highly competitive in terrestrial environments, and within several million years, many new species appeared in the geologic record. 52 million years ago, a small browsing animal called Hyracotherium fed on leaves in the forests. It was the size of a fox, with five toes per foot (though not all were used in locomotion). It was the earliest horse-like ancestor. Over the millenia, dozens of horse-related species evolved, with fewer toes and more highly developed hooves.

In the mid-Cenozoic, the forests were receding and vast grasslands began to develop. Some of the horses adapted to eating the grass, developing constantly growing teeth that could withstand the silica and dust without being worn away. They also grew larger and faster in order to deal with predators on the open plains. At times, a dozen or more different species of horses co-existed.

The horses were creatures of North America. Groups of them migrated into South America around 3-4 million years when the continents were joined at the isthmus of Panama. Another group migrated over the Bering Land Strait into Asia about the same time. But their home, the land of their ancestry, is North America. They thrived until around 12,000 years ago, when they and the 30 or so other species of the North American megafauna went extinct. The horses, camels, short-faced bears, giant beavers, sabertooth cats, American lions, dire wolves, and wooly mammoths all disappeared. The reasons are not known with certainty, but climate change related to the end of Pleistocene Ice Age is one possible culprit. Predation by newly arrived human beings is also suspected. There is even a controversial hypothesis regarding a possible meteorite impact.

I grant that others have greater expertise than me on these matters, but the climate change idea seems problematic because there were many ice ages, more than a dozen, so why didn't these animals go extinct at an earlier time? The meteorite impact idea is highly controversial, and lacks supporting evidence. Human predation makes the most sense to me, but further research will certainly be needed.

So, when Columbus and other Spanish explorers and invaders arrived in the New World with their horses in tow, they were bringing those horses back to their ancestral homeland. They did well in the wild, and over the centuries have been naturalized into the arid landscape of the Basin and Range province. Their existence is controversial, since they compete with cows and sheep for forage, and until federal legislation brought some level of protection, they were hunted and killed by ranchers. Today, they are "managed" by the Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies, for better or worse.

I guess I'm wading into a huge controversy over the management of the horses, but I find it disturbing that there are many who only appreciate horses when they are doing work for us. Wild horses living free on the open range are to them a nuisance, as are the coyotes, wolves, and other predators that happen to eat the occasional cow or sheep. The lands the horses inhabit belong for the most part to all of us, not just the ranchers who borrow these landscapes. What I also know is that there is something beautiful about seeing these animals in the wild. There are so few creatures of the North American megafauna left, so it is a gift to see these creatures running free.

More Hooved Animals on the Road...and a Quick Quiz Question

"Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses, we'll ride them some day"Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones

It's the last day on the road for us...we'll be home sometime this afternoon. We had our big push across the Nevada desert along another very, very lonely highway, this time on 375 through Rachel. That's the Extraterrestrial Highway to some. It's been one of the finest trips of my life.

After the long drive, we were only 15 minutes from our destination last night, feeling a bit desperate for, um, facilities, but then we passed a herd of wild horses, and had to stop. They were a beautiful sight.

So, here is today's Quick Quiz Question:

Who was here first in the American West and Central Nevada?
1) Wild horses
2) Ranchers
3) Miners
4) Spanish Explorers
5) Native Americans

Hint: The answer is complicated, as is the issue. And, there is some geology involved.