This year's field trip will focus on the late Quaternary faulting and pluvial lake history of the northern Quinn River and Alvord valleys in north-central Nevada and southeastern Oregon. Marith Reheis, USGS, who has done reconnaissance work investigating regional pluvial lake records and has found evidence for a catastrophic flood eastward from the Coyote Basin, likely driven by overflow from pluvial Lake Alvord to the west. We invite authors who would like to present related short papers to be included in the appendix of the guidebook. The theme of the trip is the interface between geology and archaeological sites. Although this idea received a great deal of attention in archaeological research and publications, there was a marked lack of input from the geological community.
Archaeology provides the missing ingredient.
For geological purists, we'll look at landslides, lahar sequences on the Sandy and Lewis rivers, Bretz floods features just about everywhere and Holocene alluvial landforms and sediments on the largest but least-studied river in the world, the Columbia. The trip will roughly be along US Route 52 in Wayne County, along the Big Sandy River. Highlights include bedrock-cored terrace straths, lacustrine deposits, alluvial terraces, geoarcheology. This trip will address natural processes and deposits in formerly glaciated and unglaciated areas as well migration of heavy metals from mineralized zones. It will focus on the Animas River valley in Colorado and New Mexico but may include other areas if time allows.