Books

Silver City Shuffle

Silver City, Nevada is home to 200 citizens maybe a few more, depends on the day. You’ll find her about four miles off Highway 50 while you’re heading east out of Carson City. A friend hangs his hat here, calls it home, for the moment, for the last two decades. Whether he stays or not depends on what America chooses to do, he’s not the time or temperament to suffer through a takeover by enemies of democracy.

His has been a privileged life. Street performer, renaissance fair entertainer, standup comedy showman, cruise ship juggling act and even contract work as a bit part actor in Hollywood. Having seen so much of the world the implications of leaving for some more peaceful corner of creation does not stir up fear.

If you like dogs you’ll love Pino. Rescue dogs usually come from the pound with something wrong, some bad habit nobody can break. Pino might too, but Silver City is so agreeable to this dog’s disposition it is hard to know what quirk lurks beneath his fur. Might be a miracle canine healing power of the place has occurred.

Water for Silver City comes off an alpine lake west in the Sierra Nevada. Kind of hard to explain the intricacies of all of this Silver City water. Long gone mine owner secured the rights by putting down a pile of silver and the rights to this water are ironclad, they’ve the best high mountain fresh water of any community near or far. Tourist trap Virginia City should be so lucky to have such fine water.

Mustang range through town. Up by the community hall the park grass is fenced off to discourage equine grazers. Homes are painted, doors and windows work as they should, a proper roof is always a must. Once you adjust your eyesight to small town Nevada everything comes into focus, the good citizens here are taking care of their property. By my eye many look fully improved turn key operations.

Yes, you can find a snowmobile that has been dissolving into a rusting heap alongside the salvaged metal remains of most of one century then all another hundred years and toss these last two can we have a do-over decades plus in for good measure. There is some pavement. The one highway through town is paved. There are no traffic signals.

Looking south you’ll see sky, clouds kick up, hell of a place for happy hour. Every kind of enterprise, industry and labor is performed in Silver City. Nevada’s state capitol Carson City is not far, Tesla’s Gigafactory is not close but if that’s where you find a a job and a living wage— it can be one of life’s cruel possibility’s. The best life is reserved for repairmen, that’s the ticket here. Fix an RV toilet, install a water heater, bannister refurbishing is popular and needed.

Baker, Nevada is 8 hours and 370 miles east of Silver City. Baker is also a town of near 200 Great Basin souls. Silver City is the minor league’s when you think about emptiness and isolation, Baker plays in the to hell and gone league. You got so much nowhere out here that by the time you drive to somewhere you end up barely having gotten anywhere. Ely’s the next nearest somewhere— she too is a fine place and there’s plenty of it, they’ve got grocery stores, gas stations and saloons.

Whispering Elm’s Campground is where I stopped in Baker. A no-nonsense hard boiled egg of a woman checked me in. Took my money, smoked her cigarette, answered the phone and grouched back at whoever and whatever was on the other line. Her ride was an overridden Ford Explorer. No dents, started when you turned the key and the original paint was protected by a thick coat of Great Basin dust. I made small annoying chit-chat. I was here in March 2020 when the pandemic was breaking out— She had nothing to say— I carried on— he persists— pretty much talking to myself, she’d of preferred to hear from anything other than a two-bit likely two-timing no good for nothing nature loving Californian.

This is what passes for true affection in the remote eastern outpost of Baker, Nevada. I needed more seasoning is what a local likely thinks— a few weeks of wearing down would help before conversation with this invasive species would offer any potential benefit. You want to talk to someone that might listen you head right over across the street to the national park headquarters where they’ve got people that are paid to put up with a just arriving Great Basin hack explorer.

I’ve cracked more than a few hard nuts out here in Baker. They’ll come around eventually or by happy hour. There are hard lessons out here to learn. First is how to put two coins together. Younger more ambitious types with some spunk left get on at one of the ranches, work on road repair crews, maybe you’re cooking for a restaurant before it goes belly up then get hired on to cook for the next proprietor that gives hospitality services a try prior to the next collapse. Ghost town status is preternatural.

I’ve met a few lifer’s along the way, but most are here because they can’t take anywhere out there anymore. Rush hour, gridlock and stinking air pollution has converted more than a few to the virtues of a place like Baker. Most of these kindred spirits have a deep detestation for civilization, all of it, the whole kit and bumper to bumper caboodle. Only exception they are willing to make is for the ornery son of a bitches that they share this corner of the world with. Fair enough, everything has its price, I’m good with Baker folk sticking together and leaving me out.

If you were blindfolded and set down in Baker or Silver City and asked to identify where you are the tone of voice and the quality of joy in the voice of the citizen would give the whole guessing game away. Baker occupies a wee little corner of the Snake Valley. If you go half cocked off in any direction you will find yourself in a place that can kill, maim or make misery on your foolishness in a heartbeat. A breakdown out a dirt road could be your last lousy mistake. The paved roads are safest. Some graded dirt roads aren’t too risky, but then there are these other less seldom used two track trails to nowhere you’ve got to think twice about.

Baker now has a reliable cellphone signal. A few years back all you could do is dial to a number and use your voice to talk to someone, since those days they’ve added data so now you can look at your mail or if you’ve got the stomach for it read the news. This may or may not be progress, jury is out on whether the Pony Express might have been a more reliable service. If you do or don’t come here that’s your choice, you are only missing Great Basin beauty and the ugly truth.

A Nevada art’s organization offers a winter long residency here. If you are a writer they’ll set you up in a shack give you enough money for food and let your stew on whatever it is you have swelling up inside that needs expression. Once full-on winter sets in things go from soft core to hardcore. Instead of maybe a dozen or two dozen vehicles arriving by the day you can expect maybe one or two every couple of days. You build fires in the wood stove, watch the weather reports for snow and ice, and hitch a ride to Ely to resupply when its safe to go.

Last few miles before making it to Baker I surprised a coyote crossing the highway. This animal scattered like buckshot into the sagebrush glancing back once just in case I was going to give chase then the critter kept running for its life trying to reclaim its stealth like presence. I slowed then stopped and studied the animals efforts to get away, there was an economy of effort, fast enough to do the work of fleeing but not so much as to risk running the tank of coyote gas empty before the job was done. Since I’m not often running for my life I mean who am I to judge one coyote or another— fast or slow running for your life is running for your life. Hell we’re all running, out here in the high desert that running is just less complicated or disguised. You either make it or you don’t, no hurry, take your time, once you’ve found cover, taken a sip at the watering hole, had a chance to catch your breath, it’s all good, you’ve made it, you are safe, for the moment, eternity can wait—

Books

thacker pass mine approved

20 Jan 2021 Dana Smith1 Comment

Running the backroads

I diverted from Winnemucca north to Orovada. In town I inventoried one school, one church and one gas station. If you take Hwy 293 west, you’ll end up atop Thacker Pass. I drove out 22 miles parked my rig and took a walk. Clear sky, cool, wind was calm, beautiful up top this discovery. You wouldn’t know by looking that I was standing on the largest known lithium deposit in the United States, there is still room for uncertainty, could be the biggest whopping lithium deposit in the world, for all we know this is the largest recoverable deposit geophysicists have ever discovered or a mining company has laid claim to.

For ten years one mining company after another has been seeking the Department of the Interior’s permission to develop a mine here. Hay growers and ranchers have been scheming like a pack of chicken chasing coyotes trying to stop the project. Then, this last weekend, word came down from on high the Bureau of Land Management sent a formal notice that they had approved the claim and that Lithium America may officially proceed.

Man Cave Misbehavior

First it was the Atomic Test Site and now for all the pickles, burros, and brothels you can find, the fate of the world has once again come to rest in the Silver State’s hands. Lithium batteries will not save humanity singlehandedly but could be that our ability to manufacture electric automobiles plays an outsized role in our quest to snatch our tender behinds from everlasting vanquishment. I swear to God Cliven Bundy slammed his hat into the dirt, cursed one of his steers, the geezer is jumping up and down, and it is not with joy.

The American West is fated with a first come-first dibs sensibility. The lineage of this tradition stretches back at least to when the first pioneers crossed the frontier to open this territory for homesteading. Cowboys believed that their rights came first, last, and in-between. The original people, the indigenous population, the ancient prehistoric citizens that had arrived here 20,000 years ago, the first to have long settled the Great Basin, a civilization of hunters and gatherers, were pushed off their homeland, and replaced by a more aggressive European immigrant. Hypocrisy, dirty dealing, and no-good rotten irony went lost on this crowd of bronco busting fur trappers.

Orovada Store

At first glance Nevada appears empty. Driving on a two-lane highway you may not encounter another soul all day and night. Looking off into the distance there are wide valleys and steep mountains where you will not see one ranch, hayfield or strand of barbwire. Nothing is out here but landscape, wildlife, and the sound of silence. Almost like Cliven Bundy is right. “Hell, nobody is here. Might as well put some cattle on the rangeland and make a little for the family.”

Sometimes it feels like the world is made up of nothing but claim jumpers, water grabbers and free grazers. Sometimes it seems Nevada is all nuclear weapons, roulette wheels and whiskey addled men. Feels like the Great Basin is biggest man cave known to civilization- this isn’t like just anywhere, this place is for misfits, this is the where you’ll find that home of the brave-land of the free.

Thacker Pass

Standing atop Thacker Pass there remains much unfinished business. There is the matter of scaling the lithium refinement process. Markets agree the Gigafactory would be a buyer, that China has been the global juggernaut of battery manufacturing, that the United States has some serious catching up to do, four years we’ve been awash in a tempest of conspiracy theories, Putin puppetry and peak swamp draining paralysis.

Still, if you are going to take part in the World Emergency Full Catastrophe Climate Change Comedy Show you need something like the Great Basin Desert, a Jeep full of contradiction, and a good plot threatening existential calamity from beginning to end. It is almost like gridlock, filibuster and procrastination have brought us to the edge of doom, doom and more doom. But we got a new sheriff in town, change is in the air, I’m feeling the tectonic plates shifting. I see progress rolling across the plains. We’re making electricity for spit, and cheap batteries out Thacker Pass dirt. I bend down and grab hold of a piece of rock, it is a piece of tomorrow I’ve got a hold of, and the 10,000 acres that I can see, I’m looking at our future, and I see hope. Today was a good day for an inauguration, Today is a fine clear blue sky, the future holds a promise. Thacker Pass until you behold the place is almost unbelievable, too good to be true, then you come here, see it for yourself, and things inside you shift around, and you see deep into the human condition, and you see possibility, you see the means of building an energy system, a gift for those who have yet come for their turn, here on this earth, the one we must preserve and nurture, our response to the climate emergency isn’t technological, it is a moral duty. I am standing atop the means to our salvation. Don’t let up now, don’t be discouraged, we’re just getting started. I got a piece of hope in my hand up on Thacker Pass.

Books

the nevada man

15 Jan 202130 Jun 2021 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Slightly Used Ready to Go

Forget about that wild card Romeo from Las Vegas. There’s nothing much you are going to learn from a rhinestone cowboy out of Reno. Take a place like Jarbidge, Duckwater or Paradise Valley and you’ll likely find the kind of top shelf Nevadan that will tickle the muse.

Tonopah has a population of 2009, Jackpot 1244, Eureka 462, and my favorite Jiggs off to the westside of the Ruby Mountains counts 2 permanent residents. With the passage of time the men and women that live out on the edge of what is left of our frontier become downright idiosyncratic. It is as if the essence of rural Nevada crawls right into their being and possesses their personage, sort of like when a dog and a dog’s owner somehow begin to resemble one another.

Just Leave it There

Most are self-employed. Another chunk signup to work for the man. There’s plenty to do and hardly a nickel, dime or extra quarter paid for any of it. Barter, trade secondhand stores, swap meets, and want-ads is how most goods and services are acquired.

Toss out the metro dwellers, those big shots from Sparks, Carson City and Henderson are leaning toward the progressive side of the political spectrum. As you travel further away from the population centers another kind of man or woman comes into focus. The Federal government owns most of the Silver State. Railroads own the next chunk. Water is scarce, mustang is plenty. To the satisfaction of not one libertarian leaning misanthropic rural resident the public lands are managed to the annoying benefit and misery of the many. You already know cattle ranchers lease rangeland from BLM- Bureau of Land Management. Pinion pine nut pickers pull permits by auction from the Forest Service. Department of Fish and Game lottery out hunting tags for mule deer, bighorn sheep, elk, mountain goats and pronghorn antelope. Mountain lion tags are readily available. Coyote are target practice and black eared jack rabbit are consternation incarnate. Irascibility is woven into the fabric of Great Basin life.

Ruby Mountain Sunrise

Trout fishing in the high country lakes of the Ruby Mountains will bring a 240 lbs., six-foot-four-inch angler to near speechless Sunday church like reverie. Surveying a pasture Nevadan’s can name dalmatian toadflax, goatsrue, or houndstongue at first glance. They’ll know whether they’ll have to hoe it, spray it, or burn it after they’ve pulled it out by the roots. A great many are voracious beer drinkers. A hay grower understands the forces of nature, how sun, water and healthy soil keep food on his table and roof over his head. Nevada means knowing how to use your hand tools. You don’t get to be stupid for long otherwise you’ll be bit, stung, cold, hot or just plain killed by the harsh conditions.

Rolled into Warm Springs one late afternoon. Two military jets dogfighting screamed by my campsite right down on the deck, low to the ground. United States Air Force was in training. Came and went so fast, I’d have had a heart attack if they’d given me another second or two.

Before dark, a turquoise miner rolled into where I’d parked under a cottonwood tree. The hot spring was where he took his bath. Scruffy beard, dirt smudged to his face, boney as a stick, had me sized up- right off.

“What do you do out here?”

“I work a turquoise mine.”

“You discovered turquoise out here?”

“No, all the turquoise in Nevada’s already been located. I bought the rights from another man, he’d done his time, sick of the work, ready to move on.” Grabbing his towel out of the cab of his truck, “Kill about one rattlesnake a month, we find a lot of two headed snakes, atomic test site seems to have affected reptiles more than us. Don’t kill the two headers, catch and sell them for a good price.”

I’d learned he had a lady friend in Page, Arizona. For fun he drives down now and again. She’s got a ski boat and likes to take LSD. Explained how he goes to a Navajo sweat lodge, knows a medicine man, trades turquoise for Peyote, that it unlocks his animistic vision, that he can see into the nature of things, then he explains for waterskiing acid is better.

Psychedelic small talk out in the middle of the Great Basin was unexpected, but what do I know.

The miner had three or four sun faded dog eared paperbacks on his dashboard. Handing him a book, I’d finished reading Mailer’s, The Armies of the Night. In return I ended up with Zamoyski’s 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow.

Expectations will double cross visitors from out of state exploring the emptiest parts of Nevada. My license plates told the miner everything he needed to know. Californian’s may come off as sophisticated but that doesn’t make us complicated. Awkward, ashamed of the first impression that had come up in my mind, “I’ve seen some lizards.” Trying to regain my footing.

By now I believe he had enough, he was ready for his bath. “About the only thing a lizard is good for is keeping a cat skinny.”

Books

Thacker Pass as salvation

13 Jan 202130 Jun 2021 Dana Smith3 Comments

End of the Line for Texas Tea

Up on Thacker Pass in Humboldt County, Nevada there has been discovered one of the largest lithium deposits in the world. How can I explain how big-the-big, gigantic, enormous lithium ore deposit is in terms that let you wrap your head around the size of this discovery? Back of the envelop—spitballing—figure over the next 4 decades there is enough material deposited at this site to make batteries for about 1 billion electric automobiles. I could be off either way by a billion or two, but you get the idea there’s a lot of potential sitting on this caldera in the wild wonderful Great Basin Desert.

Mining lithium, in this instance an open pit mine, will tear one hell of a hole into the landscape. Cattlemen and women will lose access to 10,000 acres they have been leasing from the Bureau of Land Management, and consequently if they do lose this lease there will be a predictably tense use of pejoratives, expletives and derogatory language filled with spleen, vexations, and disgust. Range fattened heifers and steers add to the bottom line of the cowhand’s ledger, every single head is make or break.

You take a cowboy with a bent nose, toss these brawlers together with two-thousand open pit miners and you’ve got yourself a timeless tale of fistfights and deer poaching. Once the lithium mine is constructed, once both the extraction department and the refinement and packaging side of the operation, plus the steady stream of big rigs running up and down Nevada State Hwy 293, once that’s all up and running, why you have brought change to a corner of a world that hasn’t much changed at all since the European immigrants arrived and pushed out the Western Shoshone and Northern Paiute Indians, the first people to settle here 17,000 years ago.

Now figure that in this one place if it is done right, you’ll use the best pollution control systems. This will be the first lithium mine in the world to process straight from out of the ground. Evaporation ponds have been the only viable method, but geophysicists believe they have come up with an efficient means of pulling the lithium out of the ore without using evaporation ponds. East or west of Thacker Pass there are hay growing operations, and they’re all jumpy as a pack of coyotes about any enterprise that may threaten the water supply. Toss in some sage grouse endangered species concerns and well there you go, the whole conundrum mashes up into one whopping remake of the shootout at the OK Corral.

There’s a new sheriff in town. I’m going to try to paint you a picture of what the world, cowboys and miners might pull off for “each and every last dog gone one of us.” First, the mine compared to oil and gas explorers will have a footprint incalculably smaller than the fossil fuel barons’ operations. No more stinky refinery’s, no more oil drilling rigs, no more offshore platforms, no more tankers running aground, no more oil spills, no more smoke in the sky, pollution in your lungs, and credit cards at the limit because you drove to Disney World in your dang titanic V-8 internal combustion engine powered all-wheel drive pickup truck.

As for all those good paying jobs. Here’s how I would want to cut this pack of labor faced playing cards. I want the mine company to donate to the Nevada Department of Fish and Game. Make it a sizable donation, every year so long as the mine is in operation. Get some funds set aside for Environmental Protection Agency remediation efforts. Support sage grouse habitat expansion across the entire Great Basin Desert. Why not pay a stipend to the ranchers and hay growers, come up with a formula, cut them in on the deal, wouldn’t hurt anyone and might make folks who’ve been scuffing by in Northern Humboldt County appreciate and support the mine and enterprise. I’d suggest money donated to local schools, increase the size of the region’s health care services, and support the county fair south in Winnemucca. I believe it is time to cut the great Western Shoshone and Northern Paiute Indians into the deal.

Give Bugs and Snakes a Chance

Let me explain what in tarnation all this generosity and altruistic community building is about. The last thing the good people of this region need is a corporation muscling in on their way of life and not getting one red cent for the inconvenience. Instead of alienating every single solitary tractor driver within 50 miles of Thacker Pass try sharing some of the profits, try helping that little guy who hasn’t caught a break since unionization dried up and Ralph Nader’s complaining about Corvairs was a topic of current interest.

Transactional win-win is the key to this enterprise. I would keep the mining town’s footprint as small as small can be. Pay your miners a good living wage so that when a man says, “the drinks are on me…” that the worker can actually afford to pickup the tab down at the famous Alluvial Fan Saloon and share some of the fat in his wallet with those hay growers and cattle operators.

I’d offer classes in how to plant your own garden, kill rattlesnakes, squish scorpions and how to properly clean, oil and your long gun. Volunteer to help the hay growers during harvest, make friends with a Basque sheepherder, and eat more mutton. Church is fine, but taking roping lessons, helping move cattle off a mountain for a neighbor or asking the cutest philly you’ve ever seen to the country fair dance might help everyone and everything. Rodeo queens, barrel racers and a rough and tumble rural woman you might convince to go out for a four-wheel drive to watch sunset could make this lithium mine business something to make a life around.

Capitalism mixed with a properly arranged set of social services could go a long way toward making this new energy system a success as we scramble to save our necks from the “Holy Toledo, it is too dang hot out here.” A more enlightened approach might do us all some good. Disability insurance, retirement benefits, free day care, real health insurance, yoga classes, Wednesday night bingo, and paid vacation time will help everyone.

If Thacker Pass is approved, I’ll have more to say about the project. We don’t have just a world to save we’ve got lives to build. Communities willing to help deploy carbon free technologies should benefit for their effort and sacrifice. The era of fouling our own nest with filthy fossil fuels is coming to a close. I’d prefer to see America smarten up, can’t just be about the fat cats and well connected. Time for us to cut the working man back into the deal. Not a better place to begin than up on this mountain right about starting now before we lose our way, our freedom and this experiment is self-governance. Saddle up buckaroos, we’ve got a whole world to save, and a country in need of more love.

Books

the Mcdermitt caldera caper

13 Nov 202030 Jun 2021 Dana Smith1 Comment

Cottontail

High desert cottontail irruption of 1981 stretched from horizon to horizon, east to west, north to south, everywhere you looked all you could see were rabbits. Half the early settlers crossing through Nevada figured cottontail to be a staple in their diet the other half reckoned the animal to be emergency food. I was running south out of Boise on Hwy 95 on my way to a cutoff out to White Horse Ranch when I came across my first fifty-mile-long cottontail Malthusian growth crisis.

White Horse Ranch Est. 1867

White Horse Ranch got its start in 1867 running cattle on 65,000 acres of private land. Grazing high desert is workable for a short time but not sustainable for long. Nitrogen accumulates at a rate much too slow and cattle browse off the grasses much too fast. Antelope, deer and elk, the Great Basin’s indigenous species have browsing habits that harmonize with this terrain. Times changed and White Horse Ranch changed too. The outfit is more of a hay growing operation now. Cattle are still grazed out here, but their numbers now much reduced providing modest flow of revenue to this historic working ranch.

Dustiest part of the expeditionary effort needed to make my way to the White Horse Ranch is navigating one of the roughest dirt roads twenty-five miles out to the main gate. If you go just another bit further, and since you are already out there why wouldn’t you, off to the left is another dirt road out to Willow Creek Hot Spring. This is sagebrush soaking country.

Denio, Nevada

Crawling along after a long soak I negotiated the 61 hard miles of dirt road that ended in Denio, Nevada. I rested there for a day getting my hand tools out so I could tighten up all the fasteners that had come loose on my truck. Back in 1981 there was a General Store. The proprietor operated the gas station, had a United States Post Office kiosk on its premises and a functional community hall set up in the basement. You could buy groceries at the store, basics anyway, deliveries came in from Winnemucca. Against another wall they’d set up a bar with stools and two slot machines. This is where most of the drinking, gambling and conversation took place.

Modern day Denio has now got pavement, moved the Post Office into a building all to its own, and miracle of miracles continues to operate the most important institution on the northern frontier of Humboldt County, the venerable Diamond Inn Bar. It is the same building as the General Store, time has passed, names and enterprise has been reconfigured, but the mission is same as ever, there must be some gathering spot where the fever of solitude can be broken. The population of Denio has swelled to 47, by my count none are tongue-tied.

Plenty of Dirt Road

Further south out of Denio on Highway 140 you’ll turn east on Nine Mile Road and travel by pavement to Kings River Valley. Here is located the biggest hay growing region in the state of Nevada. Cold winters, annual measurable precipitation totaling eight inches, with a valley bottom elevation sitting right at 4000 feet, here is pure Great Basin Desert in its most abundant grass growing form. If Denio is too busy for you and if you want to get away from it all, this is your place, there is plenty of opportunity to fix your position completely into what I would describe as self-imposed solitary confinement.

Caldera System Runs From Nevada to Yellowstone National Park

East of Kings River Valley in Nevada’s Montana Mountains you can travel by Highway 192 back over to Orovada at the junction of Hwy 95. Halfway between, up in the high country there is a two-lane road that tracks across a one-of-a-kind geological feature, the McDermitt Caldera. It is on this piece of road that is located the world’s largest unburied lithium deposit. Geologists surveyed the caldera and calculate on over 11,000 acres of lithium ore is just sitting there on the surface ripe and ready to be harvested. Boring test holes geologists calculate the lithium deposit measures 500 feet in depth. Mining the ore would be by open pit method. Draglines, electric rope shovels, and huge wheel loaders are used to move the ore for refining. The battery making metal would be processed on site and then hauled away by truck destined for both domestic and international battery manufacturers.

In September of this year Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of Lithium Americas notified various agencies of its intention to begin operations. Years of work has gone into preparing an Environmental Impact Statement with the Federal governments Bureau of Land Management’s office in Winnemucca. Issuance of the permit allowing for mining to start is expected to be decided early next year.

Thacker Pass Lithium Mine

Locals in opposition can’t be ignored. There are hay growers, cattle outfits, and Paiute concerned about the environmental impact this mine will have on the land, air and water. Sage grouse range nearby and our endangered. Eagle habitat is here too. Deciding one way or another about approving the operation is not an open and shut case. Open pit mining corporations are prone to filing bankruptcy once they cease operations leaving the taxpayers to foot the cleanup bill. Too often after a mine has closed things ends up in a tangled disputatious legal mess. Citizens opposition is substantial.

Arguments in favor of bringing this lithium ore to market is first and foremost to do with the climate emergency the world now faces. Geologists estimate of all the known marketable lithium ore in the world McDermitt Caldera contains 25% of that total. Tesla’s Gigafactory is 200 miles west in Reno. The Gigafactory manufactured 10 GWh of battery power in 2019 (that’s like 12 million wild horses of power) aiming for 1300 GWh by 2030 (an astronomically huge galloping herd in size and magnitude).

Processed Lithium Ready for Market

Whether or not the civilization collapsing climate catastrophe can be averted turns out to be tangled up with the McDermitt Caldera. The whole seething lot of us is up against the clock, time is not on mankind’s side. This is a consequential decision, figure Kings River Valley hay growers probably wish this whole thing would just go the hell away, leave their beloved Montana Mountains and the McDermitt Caldera right where it is.

Northern Humboldt County, Nevada is a five-hundred-mile drive from San Francisco. Remote, isolated, this is the American West, you had best bring everything you’ll need because there are practically no suppliers or services out here. The Great Basin Desert of Nevada has to be the most improbable place to have been thrust into the biggest most consequential fight man has ever had to wage in the struggle to walk civilization back from the brink. Fateful mashups of such towering consequence possess sturdy bones, circumstances are so serious a sane person would have to laugh, it’s a comedy. I don’t have plot yet, but I can see one, there is near sure to be a story worth telling, I see all kinds of trials and tribulations.