Archaeology and Spruce Mountain: A photo essay

Last year in Nevada, I went on a decent number of what I can only describe as side quests.

South of my agricultural collective lay Spruce Mountain. It dominates the landscape across the northern Ruby Valley, as you can see in the image to your left, taken by Snow Water Lake in the spring. It's not the nearest mountain to the collective, but going off the top of my head I believe it is the tallest. It also has turquoise deposits, and like the rest of Nevada, archaeological features of interest.

The whole area of the Great Basin has been settled, abandoned, resettled, and abandoned again, by the looks of the archaeological record. Anywhere that doesn't have a regular source of water is subject to this fate as miners come in, take what they can while there's a market for it, and leave once there isn't. Houses and structures get built, then abandoned to the ravages of time once they're no longer useful. Sometimes people leave behind items in good working order; I got a cooking pot and skillet this way.

Next to a vein of turquoise interspersed with copper in Spruce Mountain was one such abandoned cabin. The timbers are mostly preserved in the dry desert, and a friend of mine from Wells (and his little dog, too) showed me around the area. I want to go back, sooner rather than later, to collect more turquoise. But I'll have to have access to a truck to do so, because the roads going up the mountain are only so passable at the best of times. Turquoise has a market value, and mining it could be lucrative if I could just get up there. For this reason, my next big purchase will probably be a truck, if a comrade with a truck doesn't join the collective first.

This isn't the only such side quest I went on last year, but it's the one I'm most eager to repeat, together with Angel Lake (the subject of an upcoming post). I'm told there's gold to be found on the way up to Angel Lake, and I know there's iron pyrite in the lake itself. Combined with the turquoise here, and this state is a rock hound's dream.

In any case, here are the photos I took on that day: