Nevada Backroaders
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Titus Canyon
http://nevadabackroaders.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3552
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Author:  John and Chris [ Mon Sep 07, 2015 6:19 pm ]
Post subject:  Titus Canyon

For the November club run, Chris and I will be running Titus Canyon. It will be on Saturday, 11/28/15. I know this is Thanksgining weekend, but if you're not going to Grandma's house, why not come on out and have some fun with us.:D We will meet in the lot across the street from The Stage Coach motel & Casino in Beatty, NV. Meet at 9:00 and roll at 9:30.

This is one of our favorite runs and everyone always has a good time. We will be staying for the weekend and camping at one of the local RV parks. You can camp or stay at one of the motels, or you can drive up for the day, then drive home. Beatty is about a two hour drive North from Las Vegas on Hwy 95. I hope to see you there.

John 8)

Author:  Hawk2000WJ [ Wed Sep 09, 2015 11:50 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

Count me in!

PS can you PM where you guys are staying? I may come up a day early and go back on Sunday. Long drives are getting harder on me.

Author:  Dawn Nelson [ Sun Sep 13, 2015 12:56 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

I hope to be on this run!

Author:  WDCroley [ Mon Nov 02, 2015 11:48 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

We plan on being there. Will probably do a one-day trip.

Hope everyone had a fun Halloween.

:D :lol: :mrgreen:

Author:  Mudshark [ Sun Nov 15, 2015 8:39 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

We really enjoyed the drive last year but unfortunately we can't make it this time. Have fun and be safe.

Author:  quip000 [ Mon Nov 16, 2015 12:16 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

Interested... are folks staying in motels up there? Which ones?

and we have a pet, small, non-shedding dog, so we must consider that in our decision.

Author:  WDCroley [ Tue Nov 17, 2015 10:42 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

The Death Valley resort, I think it is called, is pet friendly, stayed there last year. Not 5-star, but neither is Beatty. Comfortable.

:D :lol: :mrgreen:

Author:  ed beaumont [ Wed Nov 18, 2015 10:23 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

I will be heading up on Wednesday the 25th should be there early afternoon. See everyone as you get there

ed

Author:  Roy [ Sun Nov 22, 2015 9:15 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

My son and I will be there....cya soon

Author:  Dawn Nelson [ Tue Nov 24, 2015 11:41 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

I just made reservations at the Death Valley Inn in Beatty for Friday and Saturday night. Reasonable rates, and they accept pets, with a small extra fee.

David, the 'resident Backroader's geologist', may be coming along with me.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Author:  Pete Plattner [ Tue Nov 24, 2015 8:37 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

I love Death Valley but I will be working Friday and Saturday. Have a great time and HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO EVERYONE.

Author:  brad/duuuude [ Wed Nov 25, 2015 4:02 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

I love Titus Canyon. You guys have fun. I'm jealous.

Author:  GeoPassenger David [ Wed Nov 25, 2015 4:49 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

I should be there. I'm currently doing my geology homework for the run. :-)

Author:  GeoPassenger David [ Thu Nov 26, 2015 2:06 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

Just a little geology background for the upcoming Titus Canyon run. Most of the geology in and around southern Nevada can be explained by four major events.

1) For a very long time, from 1,800 million years ago until 240 million years ago, what is now southern Nevada was a shallow sea; Utah and Arizona were the west coast of North America. The vast majority of the rocks around here were deposited on the seafloor then: limestones, shales, and other types. The rocks at the end of the run, on the western part of Titus Canyon, are ocean sediments from this time period. These include some of the oldest rocks with fossilized hard body parts, and such familiar names from southern Nevada as the Nopah and Bonanza King formations.

2) After this, the ocean floor to the west began to be subducted under the western edge of the continent, causing the land here to be uplifted; southern Nevada has been up out of the sea since this time. Some interesting rocks got made, but we won’t see then on the Titus Canyon run. One of the largest mountain ranges in the country 240 million years ago was the Ouachita Mountains in Oklahoma. A huge river, easily the equal of today’s Mississippi River, ran westward through the Texas Panhandle and central New Mexico before turning northward in NE Arizona to flow north through western Utah and out to sea in central Nevada. Our area was drained by tributaries that ran northward from other mountains to our south, into this river. Many hundreds of feet of sandstone, shale, and gravely conglomerate were deposited at this time on the floodplain. Exposure to oxygen rusted the iron in the soil, giving it a characteristic red color; this is the Chinle Formation of southern Nevada and Arizona. Next the area became a desert, the sand dunes of which are fossilized as the Aztec sandstone of Red Rock and the Navaho Sandstone of Zion. (Those two are really the same formation.) Farther west, Death Valley was still offshore at this time, and rocks were still being formed in the shallow seas, but none of them lie along the route of our Jeep run.

3) During the Cretaceous, from 145 to 65 million years ago, as the ocean floor to our west continued to be subducted under North America, the rocks of the ocean floor were young, warm, and buoyant, and didn’t want to sink. Instead of heading downward at a 45-degree angle as most bits of subducted ocean floor do, these stayed immediately under the rocks of North America, pushing up the rocks into mountains, and compressing them, causing some slabs of rock to slide up over others. (Geologists call this thrust-faulting.) Southern Nevada’s Spring Mountains were formed then, as were the southern Sierra Nevada. Death Valley was affected - the granite near Skidoo cooled underground at this time - but we won’t see rocks from this time along the run.

Along the middle of the run, from Red Pass north to Leadfield, we’ll have a mountain to our right made of rocks of the Titus Canyon Formation. At the time these were laid down roughly 35 million years ago, the area around the Grapevine Mountains (through which Titus Canyon is cut) was once again a flat floodplain, lush with vegetation and crossed by wandering rivers, much like Louisiana and Mississippi today. The area abounded in large grazing animals related to today’s horses and deer, and creatures that looked like rhinos (including the titanothere whose fossil skull gave Titanothere Canyon its name). Rodents scurried through the underbrush, and turtles and pupfish swam in the rivers.

4) As the subducted plate scraped eastward along the underside of North America, it stretched the plate above it, allowing widespread volcanism to spread eastward. The first part of our run, the eastern part, will cross a number of these young volcanic formations. A volcano on the Tonopah Test Range erupted 27 million years ago and buried the Grapevine Mountains area under a layer of hot ash 1,200 feet deep. We’ll drive past a ridge of 14-million-year old ash that was hot enough to weld itself together when it fell – a tuff. The first rocks we’ll reach after we climb the alluvial fan into the Grapevines are the basaltic lavas of a volcano 5 to 7 million years old, a volcano later split in half by the fault the lave followed to the surface, much like the Cleopatra/Hamblin volcano along Northshore Road at Lake Mead..

As the stretching of the crust continued, the landscape between Lake Mead and the Sierra Nevada was extended by over 150 miles from east to west. The extension proceeded at about an inch a year, causing north/south faults hundreds of miles long that cracked the land into N/S strips. Some of the strips tilted sideways, some sunk, other rose, the result was the many parallel N/S mountain ranges of the Basin and Range Province. By 2 to 3 million years ago, this extension reached Death Valley, the Grapevine Mountains rose, the floor of Death Valley sank, and the land took on its current shape. It’s hard for us today to appreciate how dramatic the landscape of Nevada really is, since the valleys are about half-filled with sediment washed off the mountains. Picture standing at Badwater today, looking west across Death Valley to the Panamint Range. The sediment that fills the valley is 11,000 feet deep – roughly as deep as from the valley floor to the top of the Panamints. Go get a giant DustBuster, clean all that out, and from the mountain tops to the valley floor would be about 22,000 feet!

See you all on the run!

(Edited to fix the typo in the second paragraph.)

Author:  quip000 [ Sat Nov 28, 2015 10:58 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Titus Canyon

Great ride today, thanks to those that lead us, thanks to those that joined us, and a big thanks to those that informed us, with questions and answers!

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