Hidden treasure (Casto Canyon)

Early Autumn foliage at Casto Canyon

It's kind of off the beaten track though really not far off it: less than 3 miles north of the Bryce Canyon turnoff, and then about 3 1/2 miles in on an unpaved but well-graded road. To - just a canyon, in about the middle of nowhere.

A wide stony wash, still wet in places from recent rains. Red-orange sandstone walls, lucent against the sky, subtly echoed in the autumn foliage. The rain has washed off and settled the dust, leaving all the rock richer in colour and the sky a crazy clear deep blue, near-cloudless.

Still plenty of heat in the sun, but a cool breeze.

Speleothems and leaving it better than you found it (art, vandalism, and Lehman Caves)

As part of our visit to the Great Basin National Park, we went to the Lehman Caves. You can only go into the caves as part of a guided tour with a ranger. (This makes sense when you hear about incidents such as this vandalism at Racetrack Playa or the eejit munters described in this article.) Both this logistical fact, and a part of the tour itself, got me thinking about what the difference is between graffiti and vandalism.

The caves are a seemingly endless succession of vistas into baroque formations of limestone - fantastical columns, shields, and spikes. These have a collective name: speleothems (an abnormally ugly word). It's an astounding and beautiful place. I allowed myself 50 'wow's and I'm pretty sure I got through them all as we walked through alien gullets and otherworldly landscapes, past and even under massive shields, cave bacon, cave popcorn, shallow pools.

Hound them rocks (garnets and agates just as they growed)

I've been fascinated by rocks and minerals for a long time. I think it started when I first was given a couple of tumbled stones - agates, memory's eye says - by Amanda Brown in about Standard 1 (that's Year 3 in new money.) I also remember buying tumbled gems for maybe 10¢ apiece at a shop on Waiheke Island in a summer holiday there. Then, of course, I was 'into crystals' as a teenager and even worked for a gem merchant later in my teens. About 25 years ago I acquired an auction lot of unlabelled mineral specimens. I have always enjoyed having them around, the vari-coloured odd rough shapes, weights, textures of them. Now I think they came from the southwest, because I keep seeing familiar colours and shapes in collections hereabouts: petrified wood, fluorite, gypsum. On two recent trips, I've gone a little out of my way to reach rockhounding sites to bring home more piles of rocks: Garnet Hill, near Ely, NV, and a spot on the road between Cedar Breaks and Brian Head. 

Leave no trace except a pit

Garnet Hill is a BLM site where you can - with luck and a hammer - find small dark garnets
embedded in their native cream-coloured rhyolite. It's a well established site, and not everyone follows the 'leave no trace' approach.

Hammering away

Worth a visit, though, even if you don't want to look for gemstones, as the road up from Ely is both short and beautiful, and the hill affords a view over the huge Ruth copper mine, an open pit that stretches around a third of the horizon. We wanted to do both big and small, so when we got to the carpark, we headed uphill rather than down, and enjoyed the views from the top as well as the rockhounding. 

Panorama from Garnet Hill with the logical opposite of leave no trace - Ruth open pit copper mine

That speck is actually a garnet

The garnets themselves are not gem quality, being too dark to see through. They come as big as walnuts - or so it's said. We didn't spend the many hours that might have netted such large specimens, but in the hour or so we were there, we got the technique of breaking the rhyolite open with hammer and chisel, and found a few to bring home ... all big enough to see with the naked eye, and that's about as much as you can say for them (the biggest is maybe 5 mm across). 

A hill made of agate - view towards Cedar Breaks

Cedar Breaks agate is easier to see from a distance. The pale lumps on the hill are the bones of it showing through, and it is made of agate. The range of colour and pattern is amazing. Luckily, the site is well above 10 000 feet, so I couldn't carry away armloads of it (also there's a 25 lb per day limit.)

I had taken a rock hammer, but really I didn't need it, as there were so many beautiful pieces just lying on the ground, from small flakes and shards to chunks as big as your head. I kept mine, but brought away several lovely pieces ... and already can't wait to go back for more.

Drive to a Bristol tea party (down 93 in White Pine and Lincoln Counties)

After adventures in Ely and Great Basin National Park, we drove home via 93. This highway runs from the Mexican border nearly to Canada. So our route was only a scrap of it - but we've now done most of the Nevada section of it. Which is a start.

Any road around the middle to south of the state of Nevada takes you through Basin and Range country, where the valleys run roughly north/south between those thrilling stripy ranges. Millions of years ago, the crust was stretched thin (lots of vulcanism) and twisted sideways (lots of broken and up-tilted macro chunks of crust.) (Whenever I read about these huge geological processes I just imagine what would happen to piecrust or to sand at the beach, seems to help me visualise it. I expect I need professional help of some kind ...) Since then, erosion has shown us a thousand fascinating ways that stone can weather.

This section of 93 is in the true Great Basin desert. No Joshua trees, not much creosote, but rippling seas of grey-green sagebrush, hip-high or taller, and yellow blond grasses. 'Cedar' (juniper, actually), pine, and aspen cloak the lower slopes of the ranges. Our route starts at a higher elevation, and though crossing several ranges, overall trends downhill.