Ok. I'm awake. I have my teddy bear with me, in case it is a scary story, but I will not hold you to it @Smokin Joe
It's the weeeked! HuurraY! It's raining outside. Love the sound of rain, at night, I feel content listening to it.
You have a good one, Sir. No listening to Art Bell.
@Freya Sorry, I slept in. THis is just a rough draft I hammered out, fwiw. I hope you don't feel robbed for time reading it.
In 1990 or 91 I was called by the consulting firm I was working for to go work a well in the Tikaboo Valley in Nevada. Nevada is kind of a treat for me as a geologist, simply because the geology of the state is not only fairly wild, but so nicely displayed, with relatively little vegetation in the way of looking at the rocks. Think of huge sheets of rock thousands of feet thick that formed in marine environments pushed over one another from the West, some 30 miles of lateral displacement or more, then faulted into basins by huge blocks being alternatively pushed up or dropped down, and then the basins formed filled in by volcanic ash, lava flows, and some stream deposits. It's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get.
This was the furthest Southwest my career has taken me so far, and I made the turn at Rachel, going past the Al-e-inn, complete with it's LGM (Little Green Man) Sign. This led back over the Roberts Range into the valley, which seemed pretty typical for most Nevada Valleys: rocks on the sides, desert in the middle. This was a well for an oil company I had worked for before, only elsewhere, and what is known as a 'rank wildcat', one of very few wells to be drilled in the area, a long shot which would speak to the potential for oil in the valley, or the lack thereof, but the only way to find out if theory persists past theory into the real world.
Outside of established field areas, wildcat wells in Nevada tend to be long shots, with only one in 75 producing oil in economic quantities, but often those wells which do 'hit' are big payouts, making up to 10,000 barrels of oil a day, and the discovery well for a field of similar wells.
Little did I know, that to the North was the town of Groom, Nevada, and to the west, what was carried on the old topographic maps as "Groom Air Strip: Abandoned", now know more commonly as "Area 51". Sometimes my lack of knowledge amazes me, and this was one of those times.
The desert is a hot, dry, but interesting place, something which, because of the heat, most people would see as if not at Hell's threshold as the last turn on the way there.
I have been a lot of different types of places, though, and following the lesson my grandfather taught me in the salt marshes of Maryland, I have learned to look for beauty wherever I go. To stop, be quiet, let the little noises of the local critters and landscape that stopped when I showed up resume and let all that around me get back to its everyday life. Only then can you see what is there, the amazing amount of life around you, watch it act and interact, and view nature rather than just disrupt it.
They guy I worked with shared the duties of the 24 hour day and the 8X32 lab/living trailer onsite by taking the part he wanted because he had seniority, and leaving the other 12 hours to work and the top bunk for me, had chosen to work the daylight shift, and left me to work nights. That, in Nevada, and for my career, would turn out to be my preferred arrangement: The night belongs to Joe.
It is cooler in the desert at night, sometimes getting down as low as subzero temperatures in the dead of winter at altitude (over 7000 ft.), mainly because there is none of the moisture in the air that normally insulates the earth, only about 80 percent of that atmospheric column (which is more dense at the bottom), and there were no bodies of water to hold the heat of the day, or, for that matter the cool of the night against its diurnal alter ego. The rocks and dust of the 'valley fill' shed their heat quickly, so the brutal heat of the day becomes (for me, at least) much more bearable at night.
The plants of the desert have a habit of assuming the same dusty dry sort of drab green as they lie waxy or brittle and dormant, waiting patiently for drops of moisture they can glean from the air, or when the sky has one of its rare outbursts, from the heavens and the soil itself. Still, among them is the intermittent and often abrupt, even furtive movement of life, eating and being eaten, scratching out its existence, often hiding in and among the spiny exteriors of the plants which provide them shelter and provender. In this area, those plants lie clumped and scattered along the desert floor, under the watchful arms of the relatively towering Joshua Trees.
I have only seen Joshua trees above 5000 feet in altitude, and recall the first time I ever saw one, at the extreme edge of my headlights' illumination after 28 hours of driving with only a short nap in the Bonneville Salt Flats on the way to the well from North Dakota.
I had reached that point of fatigue where I would not drive where there was traffic, but it was only me, the road, the night, and the occasional odd shadow that would prompt braking but never manifest itself as a corporeal entity, all rendered nearly in black and white by fatigue.
The drilling rig was looming ahead, lit brightly, a beacon in the otherwise pitch black night, and off in the edge of the feeble cone of light my headlights threw was this plant, that looked like an artist's rendering of scaly branching Q-tips growing out of the desert, something painted while under serious hallucinogenic influences, and something I initially wrote off to fatigue as I approached the drill site and the promise of a nap. Only the nest day did I find the distortions of botany I had observed were fairly accurate.
Here, a picture is worth a thousand words:
These were in the desert about, standing watch over the other flora and fauna.
The fellow I worked with was perhaps the most obnoxious of all the guys I worked with for that firm, with several personal habits which frankly were difficult at best to endure, and the tendency to aggravate those around him with the least apparent effort, so ingrained that was in his personality. Rather than mar this account with a tedious listing of his more miserable habits, suffice it to say that if I was not asleep during my off time, I preferred to be out and about, either shooting the breeze with the rig hands, the company geologist who more than compensated for her lack of stunning physique by being an incredibly pleasant person to chat and work with, or out scrounging around the desert and the nearby hills just seeing what I could see, and looking for the fossils, 'neat' rocks, or mineral specimens that are like finding money in a parking lot to the average field geologist, that turn every walk into a treasure hunt.
It was on one such sojourn I found these pieces of what looked like the corners off a white styrofoam meat tray from a grocery store, just laying in the desert, peeling an outer layer that looked for all the world like cellophane. When I looked up, I saw the Joshua Tree they had peeled from, apparently in some sort of botanical distress, was missing some of the scales that normally make up the branches. The 'foam' was the 'meat' of the leaves, the cellophane like material the skin that helped this towering xerophyte retain its fluids in a harsh environment. Local ants were making short work of a greener flake that had fallen, and I left them to their task.
While hiking over to the nearby ridge, there was something I only ever experienced once in the desert: a cloudburst. It lasted less than 20 minutes, left no trace of moisture on the surface soil past five minutes from the time it stopped, but within the hour, everything, and I do mean everything out there had come to frenzied life. The little cactus were in bloom, an incredible swarm of biota were scrambling to and fro, everything turned green, and for a few hours furtively went through its process of generating the seed for the future, then by the next day the blossoms wilted, petals dropped, and for all obvious intent, the desert returned to its normal and dormant self.
The period after the rain where moisture stayed present in detectable quantities in the air was so short that unlike the mugginess and clinging damp of lower and more humid climates, the air was again dry in short order. I think even the tiniest insects had scrounged every molecule of water from it while there was any to grab.
I continued to the ridge, an abrupt stack of rock rising from the desert, where I had seen a silvery flash the day before, and that was my goal, out of sheer curiosity, to see just what that reflection was. I knew we were somewhere on the east side of Nellis AFB, and wondered if it was some bit of debris from an unfortunate incident or merely glass, a bottle left by some erstwhile prospector. I intended to find out.
I climbed up there to find a six foot long (or so) device made of honeycombed laminate, not unlike a weather vane, apparently like the sort used on some weather balloons I have seen. Content to scrounge a couple bits of hardware as souvenirs, I sat back and took a pull off my canteen, and noticed a pair of F-16s coming down the valley. We were not supposed to have overflights, because there was an active range out there somewhere, and the Gulf War was on, and no one wanted to blow up the only real oil rig in the valley.
They passed down the far side, pretty much wingtip to wingtip, turned over east of me and came back up my side of the valley, roughly level with where I was on the ridge, which I thought was pretty neat. I waved and they waved back--neater yet. Keep in mind that at this point, I was still unaware of the designation of those buildings way off to the west, I just knew they were likely something connected with the Air Force, and really hadn't paid them much mind beyond that.
Back to the rig, and work. After action summary:
The well didn't 'make a well', we found no oil, but got to see some neat geology.
I got to find some neat fossils, especially over on the crest of the Roberts Mountains, which turns out to be very near ground zero for one of the largest known cosmic impacts in North America.
The company geologist and I stayed friends for years, but eventually lost touch.
The guy I was working with faded into obscurity when I left the company to work for another. Many of the other best hands I brought with me, one at a time as the new company I worked for expanded.
Those buildings to the west? Yep, they were Area 51, the main hangars. Little did I know. Likely the F-16s did a loop down the valley to check me out, although I didn't see any sensors.
When we wrapped the job up, I got back in my old van and headed east to Rachel, and then looked at the sign. Las Vegas 90 (iirc). I was tired already, and home was just 1500 miles away, so I turned north and headed for home...
