in search of geologic time

2009-12-28T09:43:00.001-08:00

2009-12-17T09:12:00.001-08:00

The world's first permanent disposal site for spent nuclear fuel is being built on Finland's western shore.

2009-12-17T09:10:00.000-08:00

2009-11-20T04:53:00.000-08:00

2009-11-20T04:30:00.001-08:00

Subject: [SALT] History of innovation (Van der Leeuw talk)

The development of human mental ability can be tracked through the
progressive crafting of stone tools, Van der Leeuw explained. First
we learned to shape an edge---a line---then the surface, then the
whole volume of the tool, then the sophisticated sequence required to
make a superb spear point. It took 2 million years. But by 300,000
years ago the human brain had developed a sufficiently complex
short-term working memory to keep 7 (plus-or-minus 2) considerations
in mind at once. We could handle problems of multi-dimensionality.

The brain has not progressed since then, nor has needed to. The
skills of innovation moved on from the biological brain to social
constructs and modes of communication and information processing.
That bootstrapping process continues to this day. The cave paintings
show that cognitive agility reached the point of being able to reduce
3 dimensions to a representative 2 dimensions, for instance.

By the neolithic revolution of 10,000 years ago, we developed the
ability to shape voids---the interior of pots, baskets, and houses.
Tools could be made by assembling parts instead of just paring down
blanks of stone or wood. Problem solving in agriculture began to
span time, to be a form of investment.

Towns and then cities became humanity's innovation engine. Symbols
recorded in material form---tokens, accounting, and writing---spanned
time and space. Unruly cities disciplined themselves with laws and
administration. Then empires developed the ability to harvest the
bounty of far-flung communities in the form of treasure, and that led
to overreach. The Roman Empire was the first to degrade its world at
the local climate level, and it collapsed.

Around 1800, in Europe, energy constraints were finally conquered by
the harvesting of fossil fuels. Humans only need 100 watts to
survive, but every human now commands 10,000 watts. With that
leverage we built a global civilization. The innovative power of
urbanity has multiplied yet further with the coming of the internet.

But we have become "disturbance dependent." As our cities and
density of communications grow, they create ever more difficult
problems, for which we have to innovate ever more sophisticated
solutions. Technology is "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all."

As we become ever more adept at solving short-term problems, we shift
the risk to long-term problems---such as climate change---which do
not match the skills we have developed and know how to reward. We
are headed into a trap of our own devising. To get out of it, if we
can, will require a "battle with ourselves" to wholly redefine our
social structures and institutions to master the long term.

--Stewart Brand
--

Stewart Brand -- sb@gbn.org
The Long Now Foundation - http://www.longnow.org
Seminars & downloads: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

2009-11-19T17:19:00.001-08:00

"This growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune, reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis. Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new envirnoment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance."

perspective from above

2009-10-04T17:28:00.000-07:00

the rio grande rift, aka where the earth's crust drops off

smudge projected onto the mighty rio grande

in search of authentic experience

2009-10-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

click to enlarge images:

amidst the extinct volcanoes and lake, deep in the Jornada Del Muerto:

the biggest surprise was the turn out

food to the left

radioactive materials to the right

apparently nuclear tourism is extremely popular with people of all ages

people came by the bus load

hundreds of people gathered

shared stories

scoured the desert floor for Trinitite

found it

stood back and took it all in

a replica of Fat Man was trucked in

almost everyone posed by the obelisk for a photo

some people got creative

others brought their dogs

meanwhile, outside the White Sand Missile Testing Range, the landscape maintains

clarity and breathtaking expanse

many pueblos are scattered throughout the area.

60 hours in NM

2009-09-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

from the CLUI land use database

At the end of our trip in July I couldn't have imagined being back so soon. But, we're picking up the thread again and making a short intentional trip to New Mexico next weekend. The centerpiece of the voyage will be the annual open house for Trinity, the site of the world's first nuclear detonation. This is where on July 16, 1945 at 5:29 a.m. the world entered the "atomic era". A pivot point in global history. What was unleashed that summer morning in/upon/through this particular stretch of New Mexican desert, and in turn the world, continues to shape the reality of 2009.

A year ago, on the same weekend that we will be at Trinity this year, we were in Reno for the Art + Environment conference. We were about to tour the Nevada Test Site for the first time. It was at the A + E conference that we met Geoff Manaugh. Now, one year later, we are happily included in his Landscapes of Quarantine project in New York. Much has been learned and gathered in this past year.

Next weekend will undoubtedly be a time of reflection about where we have arrived in 365 days. It will offer a context for connecting the myriad of spaces and times that encompass this particular year's experiences and makings. It will be a continuation of a process and practice underway as well as another stepping off point into the next. If visiting Trinity is similar to the other nuclear sites that we have been to thus far the experience of being there will cause everything outside of this place to temporarily fall away. An internal upheaval will return as this place's very particular reality and totality becomes real-ly lived and felt.

A relationship with this landscape has been building over the course of the last three years. Our attendance at the "open house" will only deepen this. We will be crossing through gates typically closed, passing through once again, and slipping momentarily into a space and time inaccessible in daily life.

I'll be making another postcard for Freeman Dyson from the site and we'll be taking photos to be included in our upcoming exhibition in Red Hook. We'll also be gathering last bits of imagery for our newsprint, Worlds To Come: A Field Guide, which will be published en masse in November.

In the days between now and next Saturday I'll be thinking about ways to come to this site in the present tense, despite all that I have read and imagined about it up to this point. Though Robert J. Oppenheimer's much quoted words will be resonating in my mind, I'd like to come to this place as clear as possible. What might this place offer us in the midst work that we are intently making? How will the ceremonial "opening" this site (to the public) get taken up by us?

Regardless of outcomes, it will be magical to connect, once again, with the endlessly mysterious and ever enchanting landscapes of New Mexico.

2009-09-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

2009-07-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

My recent ad suggestions in Gmail

2009-07-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

Recto Vegas

The term recto-verso is used in the worlds of printing, binding, and publishing. It describes a two-sided text or the front and back of a one-sheet artwork. A recto-verso drawing is a sheet with drawings on both sides. While recto means "front side" of a leaf, and verso refers to the reverse or back, usually there is no obvious primary side.

Recto Vegas approaches the casinos of the Las Vegas strip as recto-verso visual texts. Our project questions whether the Casinos of the Las Vegas strip have a primary side.

We photographed the casinos as many visitors do: by shooting from the window of a moving car--an instinctual reaction to the reality that the strip offers more than can ever be taken in from a single vantage point.

We took the night photos during one pass up the strip, from south to north. The daytime photos were taken during two passes from north to south: early morning down the east side of the strip looking west and late afternoon down the west side of the strip looking east.

Whether it's Recto Vegas or Vegas Verso--it's prime "Las Vegas."

(click to enlarge images)

Paris, Las Vegas

Planet Hollywood

Tropicana

MGM

Bally's

Luxor

Mandalay Bay

Disney

New York, New York

Bellagio

Caesar's Palace

Wynn

Circus Circus

2009-07-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

postcards to Freeman Dyson

2009-07-09T19:26:00.001-07:00

take a polaroid journey

2009-07-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

sketch 1

sketch 2

2009-07-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

farewell land of enchantment!
Please enjoy our adopted theme song for what has come to be known as, "the big trip".

2009-07-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's text to Freeman Dyson will not be sent. After consulting the local police regarding weather conditions in Dulce, NM we decided we were ready to try again. We spent another 9 hours on the road yesterday, but smudgers never quit, they move in accord. It now truly feels like the "work" of this journey is complete. From here, we can begin to look back at these past 31 days and assess just how fundamentally changed we are and what to begin to make in response.

"For those of you accustomed to being taken from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult to follow. Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider's web — with many little threads radiating from the center, crisscrossing one another. As with the web, the structure emerges as it is made, and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made." - Leslie Marmon Silko

project Gasbuggy

"The Gasbuggy Nuclear Test Site is the location of a 1967 underground nuclear explosion, conducted to test the viability of using a nuclear device to aid in natural gas extraction. It was part of the Plowshare Program, the program to develop peaceful uses of nuclear weapons, and was the first use of a nuclear explosion for industrial purposes. The test was overseen by the San Francisco Operations Office of the Atomic Energy Commission, and was conducted by the Lawrence Radiation Lab (later to become the Lawrence Livermore National Lab) in conjunction with the El Paso Natural Gas Company. Called "gas stimulation," the technique has been used employing conventional explosives, and it was hoped that a larger nuclear explosion would be capable of opening up "tight" gas deposits which are not otherwise economically viable. The test called for a 29-kiloton nuclear device to be placed at the bottom of a 4,240-foot deep shaft drilled in a "tight" shale formation known to contain natural gas. To a large degree the experiment went as planned: the underground cavity produced by the explosion, 80 feet wide and 335 feet high, filled with natural gas from the fractured surrounding rock. However the gas was too radioactive to be commercially distributed by the public utilities." -from the CLUI site

This was the road we couldn't find last Friday, F.S. 357. We only saw it as we were leaving. Hidden in plain sight.

After much ado we learned that J-10 (Apache reservation road) is the same as F.S. 357. We were at J-58 last Friday - a mile down the road. Perhaps the rain and lightning were a signal to not proceed.

despite looming clouds and the likely chance of a sudden downpour we proceeded onto J-10

It would have been an interesting 7 mile drive down this road if rain had materialized

the site is marked upon entering the Carson National Forest

Gasbuggy is marked as a "point of interest", indeed it was for us.

through the gate

Into an open meadow. Different plants grow in the area surrounding the site.
Storms gather in the distance.

the much anticipated monument

Gasbuggy yielded twice the kilotons of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima

we closed the journey once we made it safely back to Highway 64 without incident

the scenic route back to Santa Fe

the incredible Cabezon in the distance

though not one drop of rain landed on our car the area had obviously experienced flash floods

red road in Jemez Springs

We ended the day by passing through Los Alamos one more time.
On our way into town our breath was taken away at the enormity of the Valles Caldera.

2009-07-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

On Friday we attempted to visit Gasbuggy. It was the last of the anomalous nuclear sites in New Mexico and Nevada that we had planned to visit on this journey.

The text from the postcard that I will send to Freeman Dyson in response,

Dear Freeman Dyson,
Gasbuggy. Northern New Mexico nested in a Colorado landscape.

The directions fall short, Apache tribal land meets Carson National Forest at indiscernible border. Up and down highway 64 with storms gathering in the sky. Pouring rain and lightning. Tires carve canyons into road. Impassable. Locals call this "monsoon season".

We sat at the entrance, 7 miles from the site and turned away. I did not feel Gasbuggy for myself, but did feel the force of this place.

1967, 29 kilotons at 4,2240 feet. A potential gas extraction project, failed due to unexpected radiation. I project my imagination into a forest clearing to see the monument. Poetic justice for the end of a 32-day journey that has no closure.

The last card of seven, thank you for receiving.

Jamie

2009-07-01T19:04:00.001-07:00

Today we went to the site of Gnome.

"The Gnome Nuclear Test Site is the location of a 1961 underground nuclear test conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission. This was the first test in the Plowshare Program, a program to develop peaceful uses for nuclear weapons. The Lawrence Radiation Lab (which later became Lawrence Livermore National Lab) designed this test, which was to have many physical experiments associated with it, including the collection of isotopes, and to study the possibility of using nuclear explosions to generate electricity. The test, one of two large-scale underground nuclear tests in New Mexico, was conducted 1,200 feet below the surface in a salt deposit. The nuclear device was placed at the end of an underground corridor over 1,000 feet long. When detonated, the device, with an explosive yield equivalent to 3,100 tons of TNT, created a cavity 164 feet long and 72 feet high. A stream of radioactive smoke and steam flowed out of the shaft and ventilation lines, and formed a radioactive cloud that traveled northwards (and was detected, by some, as far away as Kansas). Even though workers entered the chamber just a few months after the blast, the cavity remains highly radioactive to this day. The surface of the test site is now used to graze cattle, and the same salt formation is now the location of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, eight miles north of the site." from the CLUI site

a white cow in front of the Salt Lake of New Mexico, along the way to Gnome

the Carlsbad area is filled with dispersed industrial sites

petroleum and salt seem like primary resources

the road to Gnome

an enormous concrete pad the covers the entrance to the the chamber (1ooo ft. to ground zero)

the monument marking Gnome

relay to Project Shoal in Nevada

relay to Project Faultless

valve to ground zero

after visiting Gnome we sent in search of WIPP, 8 miles to the north

the WIPP building, the Permian salt chambers and transuranic waste lie beneath, bound for deep time.

2009-07-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

Inside Carlsbad Caverns. The caverns started from a reef formed by the same Permian Sea that resulted in the salt beds used at WIPP and Gnome.

2009-06-30T19:15:00.000-07:00

Today Carlsbad, NM.

We were "WIPPed".

There is something to be said about having seemingly calm, normalized conversations with public relations employees about a topic as completely insane as transuranic nuclear waste. Especially when it is being stored in something as incredible as a 250 million year old salt bed formation. Spans of time such as 10,000 years come up in such conversations, since this is the amount of time they (the DOE) project forward in their planning. But the waste will exist much longer. Whether it will stay "entombed" by the salt is anyone's guess.

salt from the 250 million year old Permian sea (this is what the transuranic waste is stored in)

Images from the WIPP Experience

the routes that waste travels in the United States

a sample storage container used for transporting waste across the country

2009-06-30T06:39:00.001-07:00

May 27, 1957 a hydrogen bomb accidentally fell to the ground just outside of Albuquerque. As was the standard during the Cold War, planes were always armed (with nuclear weapons), in air, and ready to depart at a moment's notice. The unarmed Mk.17 dropped through the closed bomb bay doors and the sudden loss of the bomb's weight caused the B-36 to jump one thousand feet into the air.

Yesterday we ventured out to visit the Broken Arrow site.

"Although the weapon's parachute deployed, it failed to fully retard the weapon's fall because of the low altitude. The conventional HE components detonated on impact, destroying the weapon, dispersing some nuclear material, and creating a crater 12 feet deep and 25 feet across. A cow grazing nearby was killed by the blast...Plutonium was dispersed by the conventional explosive detonation of the device, and the area was contaminated by radiation. The plutonium core had been removed from the bomb (as per normal procedure) so the weapon could not have undergone a nuclear detonation on impact. Though the site was mostly cleaned-up by the military, some bomb fragments remain at the site and are still slightly radioactive." -from the CLUI site in their 1998 article

to get to the site we passed many interesting signs

passed through gates onto dirt roads

past bullet shells

in the distance you can see how the landscaping becomes thinner, and smoother. This is the remediation site of ground zero

CLUI's Broken Arrow marker. A plaque was once here, but has gone missing since installation.

While we were at the site helicopters shuttled overhead and the sound of the rifle range could be heard in the proximity

after leaving the site we were followed for a couple of miles to the highway entrance

2009-06-30T06:36:00.001-07:00

2009-06-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

we now find ourselves in Albuquerque

2009-06-28T09:57:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we took our first CLUI bus excursion via the LAND/ART symposium weekend.

The journey was described as, "The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) will take passengers on a guided bus tour through some of the more compelling and dramatic built landscapes of New Mexico, places at the core of this landscape-centered state. The tour will examine the cultural stratigraphy of the contemporary technological sublime; the veneer of test space; the reach upwards; the security of entombment; and the flare of the nuclear furnace."

We'll be blogging about the excursion and the weekend more in depth here soon.

on the way to Los Alamos

a sample "rack" at the Bradbury Museum for drilling holes for underground nuclear testing

The highlight of the journey was the Black Hole of Los Alamos.

2009-06-28T09:55:00.000-07:00

A massive highway is about to bridge Hoover Dam

2009-06-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

Odd times inside Caesars Palace. It's really one giant enclosed shopping mall.

2009-06-28T09:52:00.001-07:00

The weather has been freaky the entire trip. How often does a torrential downpour occur in Las Vegas, NV? The locals were stunned.

2009-06-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

click to enlarge the Meteor Crater experience

It's not everyday you get to stand at the edge of an enormous crater. But we saw this one the very day after standing at the edge of Sedan Crater. The meteor crater is about four times larger.

view in the other direction

2009-06-23T19:43:00.001-07:00

Tonight I write from the lobby of an air-conditioned, smoke-filled, slot-filled Vegas casino, but yesterday we had direct and extended contact with the Mojave Desert. The silence was palpable. I learned today that Mojave covers over 22,ooo square miles. That means, that from where I am writing, I am still residing upon it. Yesterday I felt I was becoming the desert, tonight I am buffered from it.

The Mojave runs from the edge of Los Angeles at the San Gabriel Mountains all the way across California to Las Vegas, including the Nevada Test Site and Death Valley. This linkage through desert extension was an enormous discovery for us -and our current sense of place. Essentially these cities, especially Las Vegas, reside upon the desert. This is serious high desert, one of the most extreme landscapes that I have spent time in. This morning on a walk I could feel my lips drying in the sun. I could feel the water that I drank move down my throat. Out there (here?) it is all dry heat, no warmth. You feel yourself becoming salt, becoming smaller, drier, more of the land within seconds of exposure. It seems obvious that millions of people inhabiting the desert are living on a precarious edge. If systems fail the desert, and its geological forces, will immediately start to take the land back. The earth has history on its side.

Yesterday we saw the remnants of ancient Lake Mojave, another Pleistocene lake. Today, all that is left is the deep humming Kelso Dunes. We also saw the Cima batholith.

Oasis Cafe, Nipton, CA

the gateway to the Mojave Preserve, actually a pretty odd place to spend the night

inside the Preserve

the beautiful red orange roads of the Preserve, goodbye Nipton

The words of Matt Coolidge rang in my ears in the Mojave. Though they were written for the context of Clean Livin' (where we resided at the start of our journey) they rang true for the moment, and the trip at large that we currently find ourselves deeply embedded within.

"Because it is located off the grid on the edge of a landscape void, the project is also about autonomy, isolation, making do with a bare minimum, making something from next to nothing and exploring the basement of one's will...I see the project as about starting over from the ruins of the military, about the birth of the atomic age, and the possibility of global Armageddon. It's about making lemonade from lemons." -Matt Coolidge on Clean Livin'

and what is a day in the Mojave without Baudrillard's America:

"Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval."

"The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance. When you come out of the Mojave, writes Banham, it is difficult to focus less than fifteen miles ahead of you. You eye can no longer rest on objects that are near. It can no longer properly settle on things, and all the human or natural constructions that intercept your gaze seem irksome obstacles which merely corrupt the perfect reach of your vision. When you emerge from the desert, you eyes go on trying to create emptiness all around; in every inhabited area, every landscape they see desert beneath, like a watermark."

"And yet, in another sense, there is nothing to match night falling in its shroud of silence on Death Valley, seen from broken-down, worn-out motel chairs on the veranda, looking out over the dunes. The heat does not fall off here. Only night falls, its darkness pierced by a few car headlights. And the silence is something extraordinary, as though it were itself all ears. It is not the silence of cold, nor of barrenness, nor of an absence of life. It is the silence of the whole of this heat over the mineral expanses that stretch out before us for hundreds of miles, the silence of the gentle wind upon the salt mud of Badwater, caressing the ore deposits of Telegraph Peak. A silence internal to the Valley itself, the silence of underwater erosion, below the very waterline of time, as it is below the level of the sea. No animal movement. Nothing dreams here, nothing talks in its sleep. Each night the earth plunges into perfectly calm darkness, into the blackness of it alkaline gestation, into the happy depression of its birth."

2009-06-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

a giant Christian Church along the highway entering Las Vegas

2009-06-23T19:36:00.001-07:00

Less than a week ago the temperatures around Mono Lake dipped into the 40s. Today we encountered the heat factor of Las Vegas.

My personal heat record.

Giant thermometer in Baker, CA. The maximum temperature recorded is 125 degrees.

2009-06-23T19:26:00.001-07:00

Surely Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham learned their techniques from the Joshua Tree.

and maybe the Hopi

We passed through the world's most densely populated Joshua Tree forest in the Mojave Preserve.

2009-06-23T19:23:00.000-07:00

Leaving Los Angeles

2009-06-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

Our time in LA is complete. We're heading back into the Mojave at dawn. It has been an interesting time... We weren't exactly inspired by Los Angeles, but learned a lot.

view from the hotel to the west

palm tree road kill

another view from the hotel, towards LAX

the hall of evolution at the Le Brea Tar pits

a friendly sloth head at the Le Brea Museum

bubbling tar at Le Brea, we found geologic time right in the middle of LA!

medicinal cannabis is popular here

our typical view from the last couple of days

more from the Mojave!

Los Angeles is the Tar Pits

2009-06-21T15:48:00.000-07:00

According to the Page Museum:

A large petroleum reservoir called the Salt Lake Oil Field is located below the surface a short distance to the north of Hancock Park. The oil was formed from marine plankton deposited in an ocean basin during the Miocene Epoch (5-25 million years ago). Time and pressure converted the organisms into oil. For about 40, 000 years, this petroleum has been migrating to the surface, either along a faulted sedimentary zone or along steeply dipping, porous sedimentary rock layers.

Although large quantities of asphalt comes up in the former excavation pits, visitors can also observe asphalt seeping onto the surface of the ground outside the fenced areas. In fact, asphalt seepage is not restricted to Hancock Park. For several blocks in all directions, asphalt has been found seeping onto surface streets, into sewers and under buildings.

The bubbles seen in the Lake Pit and at other pit sites are composed of methane, commonly called as natural gas, escaping into the atmosphere. Methane gas, which is colorless and odorless, is the same substance used in gas-burning home appliances (the gas company adds an odor for safety reasons). Methane is a by-product created when plant and animal remains decompose with the formation of crude oil. The "rotten egg" odor is hydrogen sulfide, another by-product of decomposition.

2009-06-20T09:08:00.000-07:00

local sign near our hotel

Venice Beach Canal at sunset

2009-06-18T22:45:00.000-07:00

Culver City and CLUI

2009-06-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

395 to Los Angeles

2009-06-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine and second deepest lake in North America, with a depth of 1,645 ft.

It was formed about 2 million years ago and is a part of the Lake Tahoe Basin with the modern lake being shaped during the Ice Ages.

2009-06-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Lee Vining, CA. Today we are basking in the ancient glow of Mono Lake. A lake known to have held water for the last 760,000 years and exist in a basin around 3 million years old. It is a saline lake and doesn't support much life other than brine shrimp and flies, but this makes it an essential migratory bird haven. I was wrong yesterday when I wrote that we were leaving the Basin and Range. Mono Lake sits at the foot of the grand Sierra Nevadas, the final basin before the steep climb to the west. During the Pleistocene (around 20,000 years ago) it was named Russell Lake. Russell Lake was a contemporary of lakes Lahonton, Bonneville and Winnemucca in Nevada and Utah.

enormous tufa formed when the lake was much larger and deeper. In the early 1940s the tributary water to Mono was diverted to support L.A. water needs. Mono is part of the Great Basin, which means it has no outlet. If no water comes in, the levels drop dramatically and increase in salinity. Today, the water is being restored and there is hope that by 2014 these tufa will be back under water.

These cinder cones are young and exist alongside the ancient lake.

we climbed Panum Crater, only 600 years old!

inside the volcano plug the ground is littered with obsidian

and pumice

2009-06-15T09:25:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was our last full day in the Basin and Range. We stitched together the distance between Walker Lake, Pyramid Lake, Winnemucca (dry lake) and the Black Rock Desert. All remnants of ancient Lake Lahontan.

pyramid lake

pyramid lake

black rock desert extending to pyramid lake

Chris Drury's Winnemucca Whirlwind on the surface of Winnemucca Dry Lake, it was installed last August and has weathered beautifully over the past year

Tufa on the dry shores of Winnemucca Lake

mud and salt

Walker Lake extending to Black Rock Desert (Old Razorback Mountain in the background)

Black Rock Desert Playa

Shoreline of Lake Lahontan at the edge of Pyramid Lake

2009-06-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

We've been in the Altered Landscape archive at the Nevada Museum of Art the last couple of days and today we ventured back out into the field. We're still a bit frazzled from the experience of visiting Shoal this morning, the second of six nuclear sites that we will be visiting on this trip. As expected, seeking out and finding anomalous nuclear test sites isn't exactly an easy or calming experience.

Discoveries along the way include unexpectedly coming across a hidden geocache box. And we made it out before the flash flood arrived...and we are beginning to be able to read the terrain of unmarked nuclear landscapes.

Some ideas and impressions are starting to gel in response to experiences thus far. After nine days of direct, raw exposure to all kinds of forces, we are starting to realize that the real action and story of note is unfolding under us- literally. And has been for awhile. The geologic meets the nuclear out of sight and lies below the ground. It feels like major breakthrough for the imagination, the work and process of finding ways to respond. More soon on this as it takes shape further.

My first postcard to Freeman Dyson in response to these sites went out yesterday. So, the project moves forward.

the road to Shoal

road into GZ Canyon (Ground Zero Canyon)

a newly installed granite marker, marks the spot

the weapon was placed in a bed of granite 1200 ft below the ground, so a spray of fragmented granite litters the ground around the site

a testing well to the south of ground zero

broken bar and pipes litter the ground

hidden geocache box in a creosote bush (smells amazing)

the cards we left in the geocache box (the concrete slab in the background is the cap for horizontal access to ground zero, 1200 feet down and 1000 ft east )

another test well on the way out of the canyon

left over cement on the buckled berm of land around the site

"One of two major underground nuclear tests in Nevada that were performed off the Nevada Test Site. Conducted in 1963, Shoal was an experiment to study earthquake effects. A 12 kiloton bomb was detonated 1,200 feet below the surface. The site now is unmarked and unfenced, though radioactivity remains in the soil below the surface. There are visible remnants of the test at the site, including cement pads, and a shaft portal. Further remediation work was conducted on the site in the late 1990's." from the CLUI site

Faultless Test Site

2009-06-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

2009-06-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

Faultess was found 14 miles past Lunar Crater Natural National Landmark. We arrived by a maintained dirt road, it exists on BLM land.

"Faultless was a large (approx. one megaton) underground nuclear experiment conducted in 1968 to test the possibility of developing the area as a second nuclear testing location. The Central Nevada Test Site would have hosted several high-yield nuclear tests associated with antiballistic missile systems; however, faulting and slumping of the ground during this first test proved that the area was geologically unsuitable, and the group of tests were conducted in Alaska. Visible remnants include an eight-foot thick, steel lined column which has an Atomic Energy Commission plaque on it, and a dry waste water pond. Base camp for the Central Nevada Test Site, with several buildings and an active, lighted landing strip on Highway 6, is now used by the Air Force for activities around the northeast edge of the Nellis Range, including at Halligan Mesa." -from the CLUI site

2009-06-11T09:14:00.001-07:00

Walker Lake (remains of Lake Lahontan)

Lake Lahontan water line

2009-06-11T09:12:00.001-07:00

Lunar Crater National Landmark

2009-06-09T20:54:00.001-07:00

cards extended in Baker, NV

2009-06-09T20:53:00.000-07:00

traffic at Liberty Pit near Ruth, NV

2009-06-09T20:51:00.001-07:00

The Great Salt Lake meets the Salt Flats via tracing ancient Lake Bonneville (120 miles apart)

2009-06-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

another look at Lake Bonneville's water line from I-80 (click to enlarge)

2009-06-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

2009-06-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

Great Basin National Park

a very young Bristlecone Pine

and the peak 6,000 ft higher

2009-06-09T20:13:00.001-07:00

Our new neighbors in Wendover

parting thoughts

2009-06-08T09:19:00.001-07:00

touring the enola gay

there is a welling.
doors sliding open. engines starting up.
take offs, flights across oceans.

in time the mind catches up to the present, but there is a certain threshold crossed upon entry.
It started here.
the metaphor of light echos in my mind, resonating newly, as I move through the cavernous empty space.

2009-06-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

all systems are a go at the beloved Clean Livin'.
A new deck and garden (with plants!) greet us.

Bonneville Lake shoreline in the distance

2009-06-07T13:56:00.000-07:00

Our second attempt at viewing the pit was more successful.

everything is quieter, the hum lower.
we can't see the bottom this time. Road, heights and depths have expanded and views are obscured. the viewing platform seemingly smaller, but the experience larger. Sun and clouds, play of light. From the outside it is a quiet landscape, no trace of human movement, a world after. But in the inside, the work is continuous.

click to enlarge images.

2009-06-06T07:41:00.000-07:00

arrival in UT

copper pit nested into surroundings

exterior view

We weren't able to visit the Bingham Copper Pit yesterday. The site was closed due to high winds. We navigated our way there through a sprawling and extremely tidy suburban landscape extending outside Salt Lake City.

We arrived at the Salt Lake to experience an intensification of the storm, which we were told by a park ranger to be a convergence of two storms creating hurricane force winds.

before the high winds arrived, Liz takes some photos. The Great Salt Lake State park with a copper smelter in the background.

opposite the Lake

the mythic Saltair

the lake was very low yesterday, seems to be becoming playa

still other wordly, a trace of the ancient Lake Bonneville that used to span 20,000 square miles. The current Great Salt Lake spans only 1,700 miles

then the storm

materializing the moment

2009-06-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

click to enlarge

We'll perform relational aesthetics again on our upcoming journey. We have a variety of cards that we will extend to those who help us slow down time. In particularly amazing moments of connection with a place, people and/or experience we'll offer a card in response. The quotes on the cards include words by Robert Smithson, Elizabeth Grosz, John McPhee, Gilles Deleuze and various geologists. Each card includes the phrase, "you have extended our capacity to sense and live in relation to geologic time."

click to enlarge

2009-05-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

"People look upon the natural world as if all motions of the past had set the stage for us and were now frozen. They look out on a scene like this and think, It was all made for us- even if the San Andreas Fault is at their feet. To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need. Leonardo Seeber, of Lamont-Doherty, referred to it as the principle of least astonishment. As we have seen this fall, the time we're in is just as active as the past. The time between events is long only with respect to a human lifetime." - Elridge Moores in John McPhee's Assembling California

"In many respects we only have a two-dimensional snapshot view of the geologic processes, Moreover, the interpretation of geologic data was probably influenced by the psychological need to view the earth as a stable environment. Manifestations of current tectonism were often perceived as the last gasps of a geologically active past. Thus, subjected to the principle of least astonishment, geological science has always tended to adopt the most static interpretation allowed by the data" -Leonardo Seeber