Caskets From Costco?

This almost made me pee my pants a little.
A Costco funeral line....now we can be cheap all the way to the end. They should allow you a discount to buy in bulk.

Why Am I So Excited About Staring at the Ground in the Desert?

It is all sorted, and I will be returning to Washington the 30th of May in preparation for the migration.

Just in case anyone is interested in reading a little about the Great Basin, I have a wikipedia page for you.

From what I gathered from my boss, we will be surveying mines and some housing developments.

You want to know why we do these surveys? Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act states (very basically, Sorry Darby) that federal agencies have to acknowledge that historic places exist and are a non-renewable resource (or a cultural resource). Therefore, survey needs to be carried out so an Environmental Impact Statement can be submitted and SHPO (State and Tribal Historic Preservations Officers) can have their way with it...Darby knows all about this...to decide if the place needs to be preserved.

BLM of Nevada

Stuff we look for:

Historical artifacts
We record all kinds of material, as long as it is 50 years or older. I don't know what they are going to do when we get to the mass manufacturing age. It is kinda stupid to record a pop can from the late 1970's onward, plus they are everywhere.

Glass bottles, tins, clothing, leather, nails and buildings are all fair game to be recorded and mapped. The most common historical artifacts we find are garbage pits full of tin cans. Bottles are my personal favorite.
An interesting piece of information to know while staring at the ground in Gold Mining Country, is to look for tobacco tins nailed to wooden posts. These tins were used to mark mining claims. Where you find these posts, you are likely to find small tailings, the piles of gravel left over from the test pits dug to see if the site was worth mining.

Old tins

Prehistorical artifacts
We find tons of obsidian lithic scatters that, every once and a while, yield a nice projectile point. These scatters tell us a lot about the area. For instance, if the site has a high concentration of flakes and is scattered over a large area, it can be assumed that this area was a long term camp and that it was a primary area of tool production. In these areas, we find primary, secondary and tertiary flakes. If there are large stones and pinyon trees around, we may find metates and manos that were used for grinding pine nuts. If you see many bedrock metates...you have yourself a milling camp. WOO HOO!!

Projectile points

Bedrock metate


Now, who made these artifacts? There are a couple of tribes to consider. The Paiute, the Shoshone, and the Ute. I suggest a quick read over this website:
Great Basin Indians

I will now let all of this information settle in your brains and hope that you can see why I am so excited about staring at the ground in the desert this summer.

Testing RSS

Just seeing if the RSS is working.

There is an RSS feed to this page, so you can see when I, or someone else, has added to the page. Scroll down to the bottom where it says "subscribe to this page," and click. Now, I don't know how this works for any web page but google.com. When you click it will let you know. I recommend that people get a google home page which is discribed in the RSS link I gave above.

Enjoy a short video of 8 mile flat, a video I took 3 years ago while working in Nevada.

Hello

Starting is the hardest part.

So I am going to be heading to Nevada in a couple of weeks to begin a 4 month field season with my old boss. I am very excited.

The schedule is interesting with 8 days on (10 hr. days) and 6 days off, I will hopefully have time to explore and relax in the Sierras. I haven't really made any plans at the moment, but you will hear about them here on my new blog spot.

Richard and Miki are going to be staying the the UK while I am gone :(...but I am sure they (and I ) will be fine.