ROCK CREEK NV

AIR AND WATER IN DARKNESS
— Juan Ramón Jiménez  

Pure tenuous streams
run in the darkness
— on the blue a mesh of silver—,
bringing me flowers . . .

— Ah, the eternal water
through the black ground;
the infinite breeze
through the cold shadow! —

. . . Bringing me stars;
and I am in the darkness
like a phantom tree
nourished with worlds.

Rock Creek Nevada at one time considered a public access for viewing petroglyphs as a stop on the Barrel Springs Backcountry Loop. Surprise Valley BLM dropped Rock Creek from its promotion a few years back. The Loop connects from Fort Bidwell, east via Mosquito Lake, down Long Valley to Vya, back west to Surprise Valley and Cedarville. Clearly the petroglyphs (here a loose sampling, click to enlarge) stay their own way as they have for some thousands of years.

A rough hike in shallow canyon goes on forever as Rock Creek drains north to Oregon; eventually these Nevada waters flow via the dynamic borderline stream 12-Mile Creek into the terminal Warner Basin, the sunken expanse west of Warner Peak and Hart Mountain, which tilts to the north - Coleman Lake, Crump Lake, Hart Lake and on...

Indeed Captain Warner the namesake for so much in this Tri-Corners country, a US Army surveyor, was killed in 1849 a few miles from here by Paiutes guarding their home country. To compress a complex story. DB above (B&W) and Bob in technicolor, simply following old trails.

Eerie parallelings of Rock Creek. A couple hundred yards to the east: two power corridors. Bonneville Power Authority (BPA) powerline towers conveying Direct Current from the Columbia River's The Dalles Dam to Los Angeles. Crossing at 12 mile Creek as "it" leaves Oregon going south through Nevada then turning toward LA. Side-by-side for these few miles: The Ruby Pipeline conveys compressed gas in buried 8' pipes from Wyoming to Malin Oregon, where it ties in with the north-south trans- Canada pipeline and PG&E then pressures the gas south, powering California.

Let us confine ourselves to the limited circle of each instant, and let us pass from instant to instant, as if from world to world.
— Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spanish, 1881-1958), awarded the Nobel in Literature in 1956.