2 months ago

36.122570, -114.942854
A very adventurous lady spent 2 summer days stuck out here in Rainbow Gardens contemplating what she was going to tell her husband when she gets home and how it's all his fault. This is for Matt's Off Road Recovery crew. There was no key found down the wash, just more adventure.

Matt's Off Road Recovery prolog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN3qAf1CVhU

Thumb Member (sandstones and conglomerates in our gully washes 14 Ma)
Tht Sandstone, siltstone, and conglomerate Mostly
pale-reddish-brown to light-brown limy fine-grained sandstone
and siltstone, in places containing some light-greenish-gray
beds. Sandstone and siltstone of the Thumb Member are
difficult to distinguish from similar rocks in other units in the
quadrangle; in some areas the unit can be distinguished by
the presence of breccia composed of Proterozoic rocks (Ttb).
The sandstone is locally cross-bedded. It also locally contains
minor to abundant gypsum, whereas in other areas it includes
beds of pebble conglomerate with clasts of Paleozoic and
Mesozoic carbonate, chert, and sandstone, with few if any
Proterozoic clasts. Tht locally exhibits soft-sediment
deformation, particularly adjacent to Ttb (see below). Minor
amounts of tuffaceous rock occur in the upper part of the Thumb
Member on the west side of Lava Butte.

Rainbow Gardens Member (Large hogback early Miocene 20 Ma?, not my 14 Ma as I said in video)
Trl Resistant limestone unit. Trl mainly consists of a
lower sequence of interbedded pale-orange to grayish-orangepink
algal limestone and pale-red, abundantly burrowed sandy
limestone along with minor limy siltstone and tuff. The upper
part of the unit is well-bedded, pale-yellowish-orange to grayishorange
and dark-yellowish-orange, thin-bedded, sandy
limestone and limy sandstone as much as 35 m thick. The
yellowish sandy rock is locally capped by grayish-pink algal
limestone about 1 m thick that contains dark-brown-weathering
chert. It is particularly well exposed west of the gypsum mines
east of Rainbow Gardens. This well-bedded limestone
intertongues with the redbed and gypsum sequence at the base
of the Thumb Member. Beard (1996) noted limestone at a
similar stratigraphic level in the South Virgin Mountains in the
Thumb Member and proposed an unconformity between the
Rainbow Gardens and Thumb Members in that area.

Free geologic map of the Frenchman Mtn Quad:
https://pubs.nbmg.unr.edu/CDP-Geologic-Frenchman-Mtn-p/m127z.htm