The Black Rock Desert is a 400 square mile area that was a prehistoric lake bed 70 million years ago and which eventually became part of Lake Lahontan about 14,000 years ago. Lake Lahontan covered about 8,600 square miles back in its day. The Black Rock Desert's name comes from a large, prominent dark rock formation located at the north end of the desert, which is good, because the desert floor is mostly white or tan, and for a while the name didn't make any sense to me. In the 1940s and 1950s the area was used as a bombing range by the military and live ammunition can still be found. In 1997 a British racing team set the world land speed record on the playa (a dry lake bed) with a four-ton, jet-powered car named Thrust 2. The largest mammoth ever found in North America was discovered in a channel of the Quinn River, which we kept crossing, in the Black Rock Desert.
Soldier Meadows Ranch is a nearly 500,000 acre cattle ranch. The historic Lassen Applegate Trail brought hundreds of travelers through the Soldier Meadows Basin from the 1840's on. The first buildings at ranch were constructed by the U.S. Calvary and were known in 1865 as Camp McGarry. The Army camp was built to protect the pioneers traveling the trail from those pesky natives that the new kids on the block had stolen the land from. I wonder why they were pesky? A couple of the buildings from the fort still remain. The area around the ranch house has natural meadows, mountain ranges, nearby natural hot springs and wildlife. You can do things like pan for gold, dig for opals and climb rocks. Most of the guests that were there were using the camp as a hunting base.
One of the favorite pastimes of folks in this part of Nevada was stopping every so often to change a flat tire. There was nothing but dirt roads out there which ate tires like crazy. One section of the road just north of the ranch was cut through a hill of obsidian. That's basically natural glass and the road was littered with sharp objects. If you could keep your tires from spinning while going up the steep part you kept them from being shredded to ribbons on the obsidian.
A traffic jam!? Out here!?
We set up shop in...well...the ranch's shop.
I had all of the space, electricity and black widow spiders I needed to get the equipment tested and repackaged for deployment.
The ranch house had a big kitchen, a couple of large bathrooms, a living room and 10 bunk rooms. The food was served on the counter and all of the guests and staff ate together at the large tables.
It's impossible to describe how much good food there was at every meal. It
was just like eatin' on a ranch!
Mario, from Peru, took care of everything in the house from the cooking to
the laundry. He also put together sack lunches for us to take with us on days
where we weren't able to get back for lunch, which was never.
The living room. I suspect that the steer got a little too close to Mario. The refrigerator's freezer was stocked with chocolate chip cookies. Homemade chocolate cookies. There was also a fireplace in the room, that we had no use for, and a big table that I took over for downloading, processing and backing up the data from the recorders.
There weren't any phones around these parts, except for the satellite variety. There was no electricity out in this part of Nevada, either, unless you generated it yourself. Below we were coordinating with Cedarville on an Iridium phone to try and find out what instruments another team didn't get deployed so we could try and get it done for them. Trevor Dumitru of Stanford is on the phone.
The day's catch. I'll see these late night drop-offs later.
As we wrapped up operations at the ranch we ran out of vehicles and room to haul everything away with us, so we got permission to leave some of the leftover shipping containers and spare batteries in one of the sheds.
On my last trip back to Winnemucca from Soldier Meadows I just couldn't resist
having a flat tire of my very own while coming across the southern end of
the Black Rock Desert playa west of the "spot" called Sulfur...if
you know where that is. Everybody else got to have one so I figured I was
entitled. I was able to make it the last thousand or so miles back to Winnemucca
using one of those goofy "donut" spare tires. It doesn't look very
flat here, but it was. It was almost bad enough to have to replace the tire,
but who cares...it was a rental.
2018-02-08