Showing posts with label High Rock Caldera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label High Rock Caldera. Show all posts

Monday, November 3, 2008

High Rock Caldera.....almost

Finally, northwestern Nevada and in the distance is the rim of the approximately 16 million year old High Rock caldera, but that is as far as I would get. The problem traveling in school owned vehicles is that they are always 2wd drive vans. The snow was from the first big storm of the season several weeks back and it was decided that we would not take to take the van into snow country, seeing if we got stuck, we would be stuck for awhile. Plus there was going to be an increase in elevation and the group decided, we had never camped in snow, why start now!

But not being able to get to the caldera was not entirely bad. While stopped to figure out if the road was passable or not, lying on the ground in incredible amounts were dull red rounded rocks, when broken exposed the most beautiful obsidian I have ever seen.
Which then made everyone forget about how cold it was outside and like kids in a candy store, search for the obsidian "eggs". See how excited grad students can get about rocks!

I found my share of good "eggs" and decided to photograph the snow and scenery, in which I quickly got hounded for. I also couldn't resist my urge for sneak snowball attacks and to build a snowman, no matter how big it was, only a ft tall.

So it was on to Plan B........

Friday, October 10, 2008

I will be on the road again this weekend....

but I am going to freeze my behind off! My advanced volcanology class is taking a trip to Lava Beds National Monument-Tule Lake basin area and High Rock Caldera in northwest Nevada. The caldera is suggested to be the oldest volcanic area in the Yellowstone hotspot track, so that basically means it is out in the middle of nowhere and has not been studied very much. I just was checking temperatures, it is going to be a nice warm toasty 50 degrees in the daytime and 20 degrees at night. At least we will have a lot of firewood! The focus of the trip is hydrovolcanism, so I when I get back I hope to post a bunch of interesting photos, that is if we aren't frozen to the Nevadan high desert!