Greetings from southern Oregon where it’s still slowly cooling down, but not enough in my opinion. Growing up here, I remember a lot colder, rainier winters, and times when the local ski area would be open by now, but alas, there’s not even an inch on the mountain. Last year was a very bad drought for southern Oregon as well as northern California and it’s not looking much better. Last year was the lowest snow measured since the Forest Service started measuring snow pack here fifty years ago. All I want to do is hit the slopes, but it looks like I’ll have to travel a little farther for that this year. The local, seasonal outdoor ice rink where I’m a hockey instructor is even struggling due to the above average temperatures. Maybe someday it’ll get cooler.

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of GIS analysis for the RMP here. Kind of slowing down a bit. The highlight as of late is attending the American Exploration and Mining Conference in Reno, Nevada last week. I was able to attend technical sessions, meet folks from industry, as well as from other federal agencies. With that, I’ll leave you some sweet pictures of my days in the woods and some bonus nice looking gold.

Wagner Butte in the distance and some north slope snow

Nevada gold!

View from Hobart Bluff

Mt. Shasta, California

Greetings from Medford. The fall colors are slowly becoming more and more prominent here and the changing weather is something I’ve long been waiting for. My favorite time to go out in the field is probably fall, so I’ve been going every chance I get.

Lately it’s been much of the same; lots of quarry and mining inspections, but I was able to partake in a recent reclamation project for a mining claim. A miner had left a rather large hole on the other side of a creek and our task was to fill it in since he has since abandoned his notice and operations. The problem was that since the hole was made, it had filled with water and a breach of the creek a few years ago allowed the hole to now be home to coho salmon. Before we could fill in the hole, we had to transfer as many fish as we could back into the creek, so we drained the hole down and then shocked many fish. Most were tiny coho, but the big winner of the day was an 18 inch steelhead who had somehow found his way to the hole. We transferred over 100 coho and several rather large Pacific Giant Salamanders. Once the fish were out, the hole was able to be filled in and reclaimed with heavy equipment. This is where I finally did something with a botanist! I was in charge of figuring out seeding the area, so I grabbed another intern here, Mason, and we went and seeded the area to hopefully eventually return to its natural floodplain state.

Fall seems to be the best time for adventures as well. I recently got to visit the Formosa Mine, a rather interesting Superfund site. The area is an abandoned nickel mine that is creating a lot of acid mine drainage. I believe the pH of the soil is around 2.5. Pretty gnarly stuff.

Formosa Mine. Yum.

The Medford District also has around 2,000 abandoned mining features. Some of the adits or shafts often become bat habitat. Since nobody is allowed to go in these mines, Bat Conservation International comes out to survey the mines for us. These guys walk through the ancient portals in order to look for bats. Watching these guys crawl into the shady adits is pretty crazy, especially when they come out in a quarry on the other side! Our survey that day found several bats, which likely means the mine will need a bat gate on it to preserve habitat, rather than closing off the portal entirely. All in all, a good day in the woods.

A portal to an old limestone mine. No bats in this one though.

Fall adventures hunting for chanterelles

View of Mt. McLoughlin

Cheers,

Morgan

BLM Medford

Fall is slowly making its way here in southern Oregon. The leaves are changing and it’s even raining right this second. The field work is still roughly the same for me. I’ve been inspecting quarries on the far reaches of the district and mining operations also. Some quarries are so old, they’ve begun to reclaim themselves and you can barely tell it was even a quarry at one time, while others are still being actively used for road maintenance. Other than inspections, I’ve been working on GIS analysis for the Resource Management Plan for western Oregon. This includes queries of quarry data, ancient and present mining claim data, and many areas of critical environmental concern (ACECs). Oregon does have some interesting mineral potential due to its complex geology. Here are some pictures of my recent field travels.

Whisky Creek overlook above the Wild and Scenic Rogue River

Mt. Bolivar – The highest peak in the Coast Range

A pretty old stamp mill at a mine site

An open adit found during a recent mine inspection

Cheers,

Morgan – BLM Medford

Greetings from hot and dry southern Oregon where it seems as if fire season is finally starting to wind down a little bit. Most of the occasional smoke we have now is only from fires in northern California such as the Happy Camp Complex. Personally I think the smoky skies are kind of beautiful and a change of pace in a way.

Here in Medford I’ve been continuing to inspect quarries and mining claims for compliance. Lots of nice views and lots of nice rocks. Other than that, when I have free time I like to work on the rockhounding guide I’ve been working on. I found quite the jackpot a few days ago that was absolutely filled with banded agates and beautiful green and red jasper.

The larger project I’m working on at the moment has to do with the geology of western Oregon for part of the BLM’s Resource Management Plan. Essentially a guide on how to manage resources for the next several years. The areas I’m working on include the Coast Range, Cascades, Willamette Valley, a small part of the Basin and Range and the magnificent Klamath Mountains. These regions all have pretty different geology. Some have natural gas potential or have produced gas in the past, such as the Mist Gas Field north of Portland, while others have and still are producing placer and lode gold, especially down here in Southern Oregon. Writing about the backgrounds of these areas in allowing me to further expand my knowledge of Oregon as a whole as well as really get into writing and office days.

Cheers from the BLM Medford office,

Morgan

Well fire season has certainly picked up around these parts. The whole valley is filled with smoke from local fires as well as fires from northern California. It makes for some interesting field work for sure. Extraordinarily dry fuels, drought, and lots of lightning don’t help either.

What it looks like outside right now

But other than the fire chaos happening, I’ve been picking up new GIS projects for the minerals department. Mineral deposits are kind of a big deal down here as southern Oregon has plenty of mining history and even some of the towns are basically old gold rush towns. I’ve been digitizing maps of known deposits that correlate to the geology maps we have. We’re doing this to see what valuable areas may be within areas of critical environmental concern. In addition to that, I’ve been writing a lot of reports of the geology of the mining districts down here to help the archaeologists in our Abandoned Mine Lands program. The geology down here is quite interesting and can vary greatly between districts even though the spatial distance between them is small. For instance, one area may be a granite intrusion type area known as a porphyry style deposit, and another may be a volcanic massive sulfide type deposit which is basically a black smoker vent from an ancient sea floor that are now on land.

Studying and learning about the mining history and all the different types of geology around here is becoming quite the interesting project. Hopefully the smoke-filled valleys will die down soon and field work will be a little easier, but that may not happen anytime soon. Anyway, I’m off to Portland to the state office to help out with some GIS projects in minerals this week.

Until next time,

Morgan

BLM Medford