Graveyard Rat

So now that I’m home and have gotten the Paisley Caves under my belt, I’m going to share the rest of my camping trip with you.

We drove through the Modoc National Forest to get to our first destination, the Paisley Caves in Oregon. Driving through Modoc was kind of a treat; it's a place from pop culture that I've always wanted to visit.

Mount Shasta loomed in the distance. There's a famous observatory up there, but that's not where we were going. Our first stop was a tiny town near the forest called Adin. Adin is pretty much what you'd expect a tiny frontier town to be. The general store-slash-restaurant had more trophy heads than products for sale, I think.

Alturas was our next stop. It's right on the Oregon border and is the last place you can pump your own gas before you get into Oregon. In Oregon, it is illegal to pump your own gas. You have to get help from an attendant.

Those are the Werner Mountains you're seeing in the distance. I got pretty good at taking pictures through a truck window.

It took us several hours to get to our campsite because we constantly stopped and looked at stuff. Stuff like roadkill. Some of that actually came home with us to skeletonize. While you try to get that out of your head, have some pictures of happy students around a campfire.

The next day was Paisley; I already told you all about that. After the caves, however, we drove and hiked around and visited other sites. We found most of a cow skeleton in an open field. Naturally, we put it in the truck and took it home with us. We also found some really neat lichens.

The last site we visited that day was the University of Nevada's field school. They had some fantastic finds, but one of the really interesting things they showed us was this backhoe trench taken by one of their geologists. See that thin pale line? That's a line of ash from Mt. Mazama, the volcano that erupted about 7,700 years ago and shot ash two miles into the atmosphere before becoming Crater Lake. This ash blanket went as far east as Utah and as far south as Las Vegas; nobody's sure how far west it goes.

On the last full day, we drove through Nevada to stay at a place called Steven's Camp. It was at the end of a place called High Rock Canyon, and it took us many hours to get there. That whole 'constantly stopping' thing.

This is a plant known as yampa. It's got a variety of other names. It's pretty delicious- kinda nutty, kinda carroty. We pulled them out of the ground and ate them- one of our guest lecturers did his thesis on yampa growth patterns and paleoindian harvesting, so we thought we'd give it a try.

All the white things are yampa flowers.

After the yampa, our next stop was Surprise Valley. Surprise Valley is a paleoindian hunting site and lithic manufacturing site. You can't take two steps without finding an obsidian flake, and there's full points everywere.

Hey look, more woodrat nests!

The real reason we stopped in Surprise Valley was to take a look at some prehistoric hunting blinds. These are horseshoes of stacked stone about a meter in diameter. They are located at a place called Cowhead Slough at the north end of Surprise Valley.

Here's some of my classmates demonstrating how they work.

And here's two of my classmates pretending to be deer.

This is buckwheat. Did you know its flowers were so pretty?

This is a pretty common sight out here. Farmers put dead coyotes up on the fence to either scare away other coyotes or to brag.

In other news, we have a new coyote skeleton in our collection!

I'll write a bit more about Steven's Camp later, but for now enjoy this picture of me cuddling a kangaroo rat, which is pretty much the best animal that exists.