[meteorite-list] Lucerne part 2

From: Matson, Robert <ROBERT.D.MATSON_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Jan 6 03:14:32 2005
Message-ID: <AF564D2B9D91D411B9FE00508BF1C86904EE62DD_at_US-Torrance.mail.saic.com>

Lucerne - continued
-------------------

I paid my first visit to Lucerne Valley on September 9, 1999. Since
it was my first meteorite hunting trip, I wasn't expecting to find
anything, and those expectations were certainly fulfilled. ;-)
The playa at Lucerne has very few rocks -- indeed, what rocks it has
are more like pebbles. Fortunately, most of its terrestrial rocks
are either too lightweight to be meteorites, unresponsive to a
magnet, the wrong color, or a combination of these.

Every so often I would find a slightly magnetic light black rock
("LBR") and be forced to file down a corner to check the interior,
but none proved to look promising on the inside. Still, it was nice
to get out in the fresh air and get some exercise. I returned a
week later, no longer a novice ;-), and got better at ignoring the
local rocks. Didn't find anything, but I did have the good fortune
to run into Nick Gessler there. We exchanged phone numbers and he
was kind enough to give me some pointers, in addition to showing me
some of his impressive Primm finds from Roach Dry Lake in Nevada.

Over the next two years I made seven more trips to Lucerne, each
time coming up empty. In the mean time, I was making finds at
plenty of other locations (Silver, Cuddeback, Superior, Roach and
Bluewing Flat), but for whatever reason Lucerne was eluding me.
(Nick is a much more prolific finder than I, but like me he had
always been skunked by Lucerne). If it weren't for the prior 17
finds there, I would have written the place off as having too
poor a surface (too young) to be productive. I considered the
other alternative -- that after 40 years the place was overhunted
and picked clean -- but all the evidence at other locales suggested
that no place of Lucerne's size could have been thoroughly searched.
I just wasn't looking in the right locations.

This might be a good time to point out an unfortunate "feature" of
Lucerne dry lake: it is crisscrossed with hundreds of drainage
fissures. Some of these fissures are hundreds of meters long,
over a meter deep and over two meters wide. (Driving at night on
Lucerne is a dangerous proposition.) The network of channels is
immense, making it virtually impossible to grid search the playa
with a vehicle since you can never travel in a straight line for
more than a quarter mile or so before encountering a ditch that
you'll have to bypass. From above, the lake must look like a
giant jigsaw puzzle!

So while one of the attractions of searching dry lakes is that
you're supposed to be able to do it from a car, Lucerne is one
place where that's completely impractical. You have to search
it on foot.

Given the annoyance of crossing ditches (even while on foot),
there is a natural tendency to do ones best to avoid them while
searching. At some point, a humorous thought occurred to me:
what if for some reason the meteorites are "hiding" near these
ditches? Ron Hartman mentioned rescuing one of his finds
perched precariously near one of the ubiquitous ditches. It
got me to wondering how many of the other finds were also made
near ditches.

Well on Lucerne trip #10, March 15, 2002, I found that my ad
hoc theory was not so farfetched after all. I found three
chondrites that day, two of them very close to ditches! Encouraged
that I was on to something, I returned just five days later. On
this trip I found that odd little partslice I mentioned here a
while back -- no doubt accidentally left behind by another meteorite
hunter. Alas, I didn't turn up anything else that day. But I
returned April 7th and made three more chondrite finds, including
what turned out to be my first LL-chondrite. Once again, two
out of the three finds were made within spitting distance of a
ditch.

I returned three more times in 2002 to bring my total to 15 trips, but
found nothing more that year. Updating the list of classifications:

2002

----
018: H6, S3, W5  Fa 18.8 +/- 0.35, 0.97g, Rob Matson
019: L6, S2, W5  Fa 24.7 +/- 0.02, 3.91g, R. Matson
020: H6, S2, W3  Fa 18.7 +/- 0.1, 18.4g, R. Matson
021: H6, S1, W3  Fa 17.9 +/- 0.7, 3.92g, R. Matson
022: LL4, S3, W2 Fa 27.8 +/- 0.1, 16.49g, R. Matson
     (Probably paired with LV 002)
023: L6, S3, W5  Fa 24.4 +/- 0.1, 7.56g, R. Matson
(More to come another day...)  --Rob

Received on Thu 06 Jan 2005 03:09:59 AM PST