![]() Ever since, with his wife and daughters along for the fun, Kemp has returned from their home in Oregon City to dig for rocks.īased on Humboldt County records, there are 9 business licenses issued in McDermitt, to include the Kemp’s new rock shop. He managed to dig a 15 foot deep pit with a pick and shovel when he began to discover lapidary quality specimens. When Richard Nixon was president, Reggie Kemp began digging a hole in the caldera by hand in search of purple jasper and other geologic delicacies for the eye. ![]() Hear a sound-rich audio report, the Wild Hare podcast. ![]() Interactions between water and hot rock ultimately concentrated a smorgasbord of minerals in the caldera from extravagantly colorful jaspers to gold, uranium, lithium, gallium, zirconium, and a dizzying number of mercury-bearing minerals. The McDermitt Caldera is the oldest of the many Yellowstone Hotspots, a series of massive volcanoes – both maps – United States Geological Survey The McDermitt caldera is widely thought to be the first and most ancient in a series of Yellowstone hotspots, a chain of eight massive volcanoes that extend across the Snake River Plateau from McDermitt to Yellowstone. The waystation on US Route 95 some 80 miles north of Winnemucca may be quiet today, but 16 million years ago the area was the chaotic eye of a massive volcano that ultimately erupted, collapsed, and after eons of cooling and vigorous hydrothermal activity, left a mineral-laden, oval-shaped caldera that measures roughly 25 miles north to south and 15 miles east to west. There are roughly 1,000 year-around residents in McDermitt and the nearby Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Indian Reservation combined, though that number is hazy. McDermitt, Nevada is an unincorporated settlement in a largely uninhabited quadrangle on the Nevada/Oregon border.
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