JOURNEY INTO THE VOLCANIC ABYSS!!!

The majestic volcano. Few forces of the geologic realm are as destructive and awe-inspiring as the eruption of a mighty volcano. The reasons to fear the volcano are many. They produce hot toxic ash that can skeletonize a cow in seconds. They also produce burning hot bombs of molten death lava that rain down upon us like unearthly space visitors that totally suck. They produce rivers of steaming lava that can also probably skeletonize a cow pretty fast. Finally, I bet they are very noisy.

I, being the last of a long line of noble explorers (not verified), recently explored a volcano. You read that right dear blog viewer. I have taken it upon myself to risk life and limb and cow in order to find, approach, explore and pontificate (in that order) upon volcanoes so that we may lift the veil of ignorance that shadows so many of us. I will break the thin crust of the unknown, and dip us all in the gooey, boiling sauces of knowledge that lie just underneath! So gird your loins! Don your thickest mittens! Put your cattle in a safe, high-ground location! Let’s explore one of Utah’s most recent volcanoes.

The first step in finding a volcano is by trying to find an area that is likely to contain volcanos. This may seem obvious, but I can tell you stories about famous volcano-stalkers who spent their entire careers hunting for volcanoes in areas where there simply were no volcanoes to be found (I can't actually tell you any such stories). Luck for you, dear reader, I am far more experienced than most in the area of geologic showmanship. Look what I found on my first try!

Volcano country?! Where better to find a volcano than in volcano country! If you are looking for a nun, you go to nun country. If you are looking for a canoe, you go to canoe country. So the fact that I was in volcano country seemed like a good sign that I was in the right area to find a volcano. Plus it gave me a chance to sign up for the local turkey shoot! Apparently I was also in turkey shoot country. Sometimes a country can be several types of countries at once.

The second step in finding a volcano is learning to recognize the trail volcanoes leave behind. Like the wandering antelope or unquiet groundhog, volcanoes leave subtle signs of their recent visit. Now, we aren’t looking for little paw prints or little piles of feces. No, we are looking for something a little more lava-like. Namely, we are looking for lava.

Ah ha! We have found the lava! Piles and piles of it! It’s all over! I knew I was close by the sheer amount of lava that spread out before me like earthy butter on toast. Also someone had put up a sign that said that there was a volcano just a half mile away. But I didn’t need a man-made sign! I knew how to read the signs….OF THE EARTH! But the other sign was helpful too.

That view you are enjoying is of Snow Canyon, a relatively small but impressive canyon cut through the strata of the Navaho Sandstone near St. George Utah. As long as we are here, let’s take a second to look into the Navaho Sandstone. A good 208 million years ago Utah was covered by a vast desert. Or possibly an ocean. One of those two. There’s a debate about that. Anyway, instead of the lush, tropical wonderland that we know as Utah today, things were instead covered by massive sand dunes that spent their time moving about at the discretion of prevailing wind/ocean current directions. You see, those cursed Sierra Nevada Mountains had recently popped up, and have spent the last 208 million years blocking the moisture from the Pacific Ocean from reaching Utah. And so a desert formed. Over time Mother Nature lost interest in the Utah desert, and like a fickle toddler she covered them up and started over with something more interesting. Slowly, these buried sand dunes became petrified and became the massive mounds of what you and I know as the Navajo Sandstone. Sometimes it is red…..

And sometimes it is white…..

And sometimes it is both of those at once.

But regardless of color, it is really fun to climb on. Nowadays you have to pay $5 to get into Snow Canyon, which is kind of a bummer. They say it’s so they can protect the majestic desert tortoise from the traffic in the canyon. Depending on your views concerning the desert tortoise, this may be either a noble or unfortunate policy. I will leave that up to you to decide.

The trails of lava didn’t just end with random boulders strew around in a field. I bravely entered the desolation and found the mighty lava tube. From here the lava spewed forth like a motion-sick subway passenger. These tunnels formed as the lava flowed away from the as of yet undiscovered volcano. The outer layers of the lava flow would cool and form perfect little tunnels for the still warm lava to get to where it was going. Neat!

For fun, here’s a diagram! Everyone loves diagrams.

Take a look back at the volcano country sign. In addition to telling me that I was in the middle of volcano country, you'll note that the sign actually was for a little town named Veyo. Veyo, for those who are interested, is a small little community north of St. George. It is magical place where the pies flow like water, pipes are plentiful, and rusted tractors are the vehicle of choice….

Also my uncle once owned this gas station in Veyo.

Later I learned that he wasn’t really my uncle. I’m still not sure how that worked. Once at a family reunion he taught me how to catch a crawdad and twist its head off. The secret is to twist really hard.

Anyway, I keep getting distracted by family memories. Let’s get to the star of the show. I followed the geologic signs (and street signs) until I turned a corner and there in mist I saw it….

Some of you may recognize this for what it is. That, my friends is a volcano. Stately and silent, the volcano watches over the land like an enormous can of RC Cola. Surrounding it is evidence of the destructive force that the volcano can summon on a moment’s notice. The lava flows, the massive blocks of cinders, the inconveniently vertical hiking trails, these are but small displays of the vengeance that a volcano can reap upon the unsuspecting countryside. Others of you may simply see a mountainous lump of dirt. Oh how I hope you aren’t one of those people! How I weep for your cattle!

Now, finding a volcano is great, but you know what’s better? Finding TWO volcanoes! Both these gentle giants were grazing on the lush vegetation that they had so recently destroyed in a maelstrom of fiery incineration. Without a second thought, I grabbed my gear (raspberry doughnut) and readied myself for the potentially dangerous journey that awaited me. The fear I was feeling was a fear that only those who have sought to domesticate the wild volcano will understand. So in the name of science, off I went.

Obviously one of the main problems facing anyone who wishes to dominate a volcano is in discovering a way to the top. I chose this route…

Halfway up the volcano I began to question my skills as a pathfinder, as this was proving to be possibly the worst trail I have ever embarked upon. Ah well. As is considered good form in the scientific community, I documented my journey to the top with pictures. Here I am near the base of the mighty igneous behemoth.

And this is what it looks like if you look around a little bit.

That’s the other volcano over in the distance. You can climb that one if you want. Climbing volcanoes is hard. Here we are a little higher…

Let’s look at the trail ahead…

By now you are probably thinking that I must look like a glistening machine of muscle and determination. And you are right. I call this “Self Portrait of Man On Volcano”.

Here I am at what I’m calling Summit Camp Alpha. It was so named because it’s a totally cool name and because I fell down here and didn’t get up for a few minutes. It’s important to come up with cool names for different parts of a hike. And when hiking a volcano it’s not hard to come up with cool names (as you’ll see).

Here I am at a part of the mountain that I originally called Sideways-Hurts My Ankles Camp 1. I later called this area Vertical Vortex 2000X because that was waaaaay more awesome.

After several minutes, I found myself approaching the peak of the volcano. The very rocks around me began to change in both color and nature as if to warn me that I was entering a land best left unexplored. But for science, for science I continued. Instead of being nothing more than a pile of loose, sharp volcanic cinders that cut the knees as I had encountered for the first ¾ths of the hike, I was now encountering the very core of the mountain. Here, the cinders were still connected and formed opposing walls of charcoal-gray intimidation. For this reason I call this portion of the hike Incineration Canyon of Endless Intimidation.

So close, and yet so far away….

You may be noticing that the rocks got really red near the top. I don’t know why this is. All I know is that it still totally sucks to climb on them. Finally, I reached the summit. A lot of people don’t know what to expect to see when they gaze upon the most primal of earthly forces, the very heart of the gateway to the center of the angry planet on which we live. Well, here’s a hint….

You will see a hole. That’s what’s at the top of the volcano. As an interesting note, this volcano is not all that old. More of a volcano teenager, or even a volcanic preteen. Dating a volcanic eruption is tricky business, and like most things in geology there can be several millions of years of wiggle room. This particular volcano (as well as the other little guy you can see off in the distance) is a cinder cone that last erupted anywhere from 3 million years ago to little more than 2,000 years ago. This is actually disturbingly recent, and while they are certainly quiet and horribly difficult to climb now, there is no reason they couldn’t become active again. I bet climbing an erupting volcano would probably be pretty hard to do. Anyway, here's to geological timebombs! Cheers!

Anyway, I went through all the trouble of climbing this stupid thing, I’m going to post more pictures from the top.

Having conquered and slain my geological foe, I headed back for the relative safety of the freeway.

Climbing down a volcano requires a whole other set of skills that any good explorologist should have in reserve. Namely, it requires the ability to tolerate getting the worst wedgie that you have ever experienced as you slide down the mountainside on your butt.

DO NOT GO TO A PUBLIC PLACE AFTER HAVING SLID DOWN A VOLCANO! There will likely be holes in your pants, and in most communities it is considered bad taste to walk around with exposed buttocks. Finally I reached my truck and left volcano (and turkey shoot) country. There is yet another volcano a few miles further up the road from these two cinder cones. This guy….

This friendly little guy is slightly different show than the other two. First off, it is quite a bit larger and probably put on one heck of a show when it went off. Second, the lava from this volcano is more ropey and gooey than the blocky cinders that I saw and bravely slid down on during my visit to the first volcanoes. This would imply that the mechanics behind this volcano were somewhat different than the mechanics behind cinder cones, and likely involved more flowing lava and other classic volcano things. But seeing how this is a remedial level blog, let's just call it all magic.

So why are there volcanoes in Utah? This post is already a billion pages long, so I’m going to cover that in a different post. For now it will just have to suffice that there are volcanoes in Utah, and they have erupted within the era of people living here. Which is spooky to me.

Ghost Town Tuesday - The Reclamation of Mercur, Utah

Well, here we are at tuesday again. There was no ghost town last week because I didn't feel like it. This is my blog, and them are the breaks. But now, now I feel like it. So let's look into the shadowy expanses of Western Utah and see who is next. Last time we visited Ophir, a lively little place with a strickly enforced quiet time. Let's move one canyon over and look at the ghost town of Mercur.

As you can see, Mercur is very close to Ophir. This makes it easy to visit both of these towns in one trip. Even if you don't find this blog entertaining, you have to admit I'm efficent.

As was mentioned in the Ophir post, towns in Utah typically had two different backgrounds. Either you were sent to some far off patch of land by the LDS Church and spent your days trying to stay alive, or you ran off to the hills and found something of value and stayed to mine it. If you are having a hard time telling which type of town you are in, look around and count the number of ore carts that you can see. If that number is greater than zero, chances are you living in a mining town. This test may produce some incorrect results if you are visiting a mining museum.

Mercur, like all the other towns we have visited, was a mining town. Things got started off way back in the good old year of 1869. Prospectors were wandering around the area, doing what they do best, and someone discovered that if you rummaged through enough of the rocks in the streambed you could find a little gold. A few people stayed and spent their days searching for gold and probably smelling horrible. When silver, gold, copper and other good things were found at nearby Ophir in 1870, people reasoned (correctly) that there must be worthwhile deposits in the next canyon over. So they packed up their mules and soon the few people from 1869 who had decided to stay found themselves with a lot of company. Everyone lived in a little city named Lewiston (someday to be Mercur)

Within 3 years the canyon was filled with all the classic western things. Mines with names like Sparrow Hawk, Silver Cloud, and Mormon Chief appeared. Saloons profits were way up, yoga profits were way down (I'm guessing), and spitting was the activity of choice. As is true with most mining towns, the entire place was a red-light district. All in all, a good 2000 people called this miserable little canyon home.

Here's what it looked like.....

This picture is actually from the early 1900's. There doesn't seem to be any from early on. So let's imagine what it would have looked like.

Go ahead and ignore that big mill thingy on the hill. That's not there yet. Things only lasted a good 10 years for Mercur (or did then?! Read on!). By 1880 the town was empty and the mines were considered played out. All they left were those who partied a little too hard.

Just as everyone was clearing of the town like drunken frat-brothers, a lone foreign fella named Arie Pinedo thought he would take one last look around. Just to make sure nothing good was left behind. It was a smart move.

That, my friends, is Cinnabar. It sounds like Cinnibun, which are delicious. But unlike Cinnibun (hopefully) Cinnabar is a purdy little mineral that can spit out Mercury like nobody's business. You take one atom of mercury, stick it with one atom of sulfur, and that's what you get.

AZTEC FACT #1

The Aztecs would often use Cinnabar to decorate the burial chambers of their dead rich people! This was great because the mercury is somewhat toxic, but what do dead people care about stuff like that? They don't. They don't care about nothin.

END AZTEC FACT #1.

Anyway, Mr. Pinedo found a thick deposit of Cinnabar and realized that he could very well become the mercury king of Utah. Frankly that's a title I would have been happy to give away, but I'm fortunate enough to know that mercury will make you crazy if you touch it too long. Anyway, anyone want to guess what "Mercury" was called in Mr. Pinedo's native language? It was "Mercur". But that was the name of the very ghost town we are looking at! Coincidence? Perhaps (not at all).

So mercury production kicked up, and for a while the town revived. The prostitues came back like buzzards to a carcass, the spitting returned, cursing production was tripled, and life was good. The town was renamed Lewiston (which is the name of the canyon this is all taking place in) to Mercur (see right below the AZTEC FACT #1). People didn't give up the name Lewiston because they loved Mercur so much. No, they gave it up because in the few short years in which Lewiston-Mercur was abandoned, some other jerk in Cache County had stolen the name for one of thier towns.

That sign is supposed to say "You are here in Lewiston in Cache County", but it doesn't. Imagine it does. In 1962 the Cache County Lewiston was hit by a 5.2 magnitude earthquake and all sorts of stuff broke. See?

Geologically, the event is easily explained by movement along the Wasatch Fault Zone. Crazilyogically, I believe that the earthquake was a punishement, a punishment sent from some mad scientist prospector hybrid living in the battered remains of his lab in Mercur. You are free to decide which one you belive. Simply cast your vote on the following poll by clicking on the appropriate picture.

Anyway, if you love mercury, this would have been the place to be. Then something happened. Something that would baffle the most intelligent prospector scientests for years to come. There was something else INSIDE the Cinnabar.....GOLD!!!!

THERE WAS GOLD INSIDE THE CINNABAR!!!! But nobody could get at it. It was all locked up chemically. So it was like winning a lottery and getting so excited that you fell into a coma. But as we have seen with Gold Hill, if there's gold to be had, people will spend the rest of their lives figuring out how to get it. Luckily for Mercur, they didn't have to wait long. In 1890, someone figured out that if you dump a bunch of cyanide on the cinnabar, the gold would come right out! You would have a mercury-sulfur-cyanide-gold sludge! Only one of those things is not largely deadly, but 25% was good enough for the people of Mercur. In 1898, the largest mill in the United States was built high above the city where it could shower people with its cyanide-rich glory. The Golden Gate Mill.

That's the same picture from above, but now feel free to stop ignoring the big mill on the hill. From here the mill could watch down upon the various insignificant and usually foul deeds of the inhabitants of Mercur. What's more, this mill was the first metallurgical plant in the western hemisphere to use transmitted electricity. So I bet this sucker glowed well into the night, generally pissing off the quiet-loving residents of Ophir.

By 1896, the population of Mercur top-off at 6,000 people. That is a lot of people. Several brick and mortar structures were built, and two newspapers took off (the Lewiston-Mercur, and the Mercur Miner). There were hotels, churches, saloons, the works. If you met a resident of Mercur at the turn of the century, I bet they would seem down-right smug.

Then in 1902 the whole place burnt down. All of it. The hotels, the churches, the saloons, the prostitues, everything.

That picture freaks me out. Well, everything but the mill. The whole thing took only two and a half hours. Here we go.



Nothing takes the steam out of a community like burning to the ground. But, oddly enough, the town of Mercur recovered, and by 1910 the town boasted a population of 12,000 people. How that many people could live in that tiny canyon is baffling. But they made it work despite the knowledge that it could very easily go up in flames again any second.

So things went for a while. Then in 1913, people just couldn't sqeeze anymore gold out of the cinnabar. It only took four years for the place to become deserted. And so, the little town that could (burn to the ground at any time) quietly fell into memory. The people of Ophir couldn't have been happier.

But wait! There's more! The town wasn't dead after all! All the efforts of Ophir were wasted! In 1933 even BETTER ways to get gold out of rocks were invented, and so back to Mercur we went! The old piles of ore were reworked, and yet more gold was their reward. But the town wasn't really ressurected. Most of the people simply commuted in from Stockton or Tooele, and very few permanent buildings were erected. People worked there until they had gone through the ore piles and retreaved what they could. Then they all left again.

By 1983, humanity had enough messing around. Barrack Resources Corporation bought the ore piles, the mines, the town and everything else and simply dug it all away. The town become a huge open pit mine. EVEN BETTER ways of getting gold out of rocks had been invented, so once again the old ore piles were reworked. Also all the other rocks they could find in the area were dug up and processed. By 1997 everything had been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, and Mercur finally gave up the ghost. Here is it today...

You can't go in. They've reclaimed the pit that used to be the town, and now the area is simply private property. Sorry if you were hoping to see pictures of Mercur. On an interesting note, the graveyard is supposed to be haunted. Very haunted. Probably by any number of people who died of mercury poisoning or fire poisoning. I didn't know you could go up there, so I didn't. Here's what it looks like though.

And that's Mercur. Oh, let's look at our poll....

And the mad scientists-wizards whatever have it! Behold democracy in all its glory!