Sutter's Mill Meteorite Hunt

 

The Sutter's Mill meteorite fell April 22, 2012 in the vicinity of Lotus and Coloma CA. Fortunately, Doppler radar painted the falling debris and fragments were quickly recovered. These were found to be of a rare type: CM carbonaceous chondrite. The last one that fell to earth was Murchison in 1969. There have been many pieces of Sutter's Mill recovered and assuredly many more unrecovered as this fall happened over some very rugged terrain. I have been there twice thus far and have found nothing, but there are meteorites out there. This picture was taken from The Cronan Ranch Area: somewhere in the field of view is a meteorite waiting to be found.

The topo map below has the Doppler radar overlaid on it. The blue rectangles represent meteorites falling through the atmosphere. The radar painted a cloud of smaller fragments essentially falling vertical and drifting with the winds aloft from SW to NE. The red dots are meteorite find locations. Smaller pieces will be to the east and larger ones to the west. Not having much time to hunt, I focused on the Dave Moore Nature Center and the Cronan Ranch Area.Access to private land is a time consuming endevour, finding owners, getting permission, and such. That is why I focused on these two public areas as well as both being in good spots. The terrain at the Cronan Ranch Areas has rolling hills, tall grass, and rocks. The walking can be difficult off the trails and on the sides of the hills .As this picture shows, some of them are steep. Even though I hunted by myself, it is probably not a good idea to do so. However, the cell phone coverage was good everywhere in the area. Cronan Ranch ought to have larger meteorites somewhere on it, under the radar returns. But, the density, as in meteorites per sq area, will be lower making the probabilty of finding one lower than back to the east. Also, there is a lot of rattle snakes. I tried to let them know I was coming by bumping my stick on the ground with every step to make as much vibration as possible. Here is one I took a picture of at the Dave Moore Nature Center. At least, this one rattled. Another one never made a sound. Instead, he just laid there under a ledge and let me walk up very close. When I finally did see him I was well within his striking distance, but I guess he thought he was well hidden, because he didn’t offer to strike. I decided to just assume that the shade of every tree or rock had a rattle snake laying in it. If you click on the picture you will see he is coiled and ready to strike. You can even see his tongue. The sound of that rattle really gets your attention. The map below shows the approximate location of the Dave Moore Nature Center within in the red dotted line. There have been pieces found around the area as can be seen from the red dots. As before, the blue rectangles are radar returns. If you look closely you will see that the short ends of the rectangles align from the SW to NE, this is the wind direction aloft. Also notice that meteorite find locations can be connected along this same direction. I used this during my hunt. I would connect find locations along the wind direction, then use this as a bearing off of a find waypoint on my GPS. This line was then searched anywhere I could get to it. This plan of attack yielded absolutely nothing for three days, but someone else seemed to be doing the same thing as everywhere I went the grass was thoroughly beaten down with footprints. The grass was pretty high and the trees and poison oak abundant, making a meteorite miss easily possible. The Dave Moore Nature Center has a trail running around it and once you get off it the poison oak is everywhere. I had never seen so much of it. It got all over my boots and gear. I had to be careful packing up my stuff to return home because it would get on my hands and everything I touched. There were a few semi-open areas but they seemed to have been heavily hunted. Even the most difficult to reach, poison oak infested, areas had footprints all over them.

There are meteorites out there, just difficult to find in the terrain. I met several hunters who had been there for weeks and had found nothing. But, if you don’t go look you certainly won't find one, just watch out for the rattle snakes and the poison oak.  A Murchison from the Oscar monnig exhibit at TCU in Fort Worth.