Talk:Harney Basin

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    [edit] sparse population claim.

    while one cannot dispute that the Harney basin is sparsely populated, I suggest that it is a population center compared to two adjacent basins to the west, the Summer Lake Basin, and the Silver Lake basin. It is not completely clear to me how they compare in size (the basins). Summer Lake does have an incorporated town of Paisley, Oregon--somewhat smaller than either ?Burns or Hines. Silver Lake basin has the community of Silver lake, and of Christmas Valley and Fort Rock none of which are big enough to rate a blinking light.Rvannatta (talk) 03:16, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

    The claim about relative sparseness is, of course, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. If you check the population densities of the two counties in question (Lake and Harney) in persons per square mile published on their respective pages, they both show densities of 0, zero (or at least they did until recently) -- somewhat less than the Gobi Desert. As a former resident of those counties, and a frequent traveller across the length and breadth of them, I don't see an iota's worth of difference between them as far as population goes. Or perhaps you're pulling our legs. MaxwellPerkins (talk) 06:10, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] Black Rock watershed mistakenly identified?

    Perhaps I am not aware of the geomorphological considerations that put the Black Rock Desert drainage on the southern boundary of the Harney Basin, but it seems to me at least questionable. The southeastern boundary of the basin is formed by the block fault of Steens Mountain, with the gentle western slope drained by the Blitzen River and its tributaries into Malheur Lake, and the steep escarpment on the east dropping into the Alvord Desert, which so far as I ever saw, is a basin with no outlet. Certainly none to the Black Rock Desert, about 70 miles to the south-southwest. According to Google Earth, the Alvord Desert is at 4242 feet elevation; the lowest pass between it and the Black Rock drainage seems to be about 5300 feet. From that pass northwards everything drains into Alvord Lake. MaxwellPerkins (talk) 06:10, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

    That matches my understanding of the region (though I'm certainly no geologist.) Since the original claim is uncited, I'd suggest you just change it for the better. -Pete (talk) 06:53, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
    Note I had a similar question a while back here: Talk:Great Basin#Black Rock Desert extends into Oregon?. Katr67 (talk) 18:21, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] References

    Someone left a comment on the article page about using citation forms correctly. I don't find an example from Google Earth (which certainly will become more common, as it is the premier source bar none for geophysical/geomorphological information, as well as some other characteristics, such as roads and political boundaries, for example). The Google Earth location identifier (.kmz tag) is not exactly a URL/URI/URN. And who, for example, is the publisher of any particular image on Google Earth? The image I referred to lists "Image State of Oregon © Europa Technologies © 2007 Google tm". Who has the hammer? So for the time being, I'm going to leave the reference for the Alvord Desert as is. It serves perfectly well: Launch Google Earth, drop the .kmz ref into the search box, click the magnifying glass, and Bob's your uncle. MaxwellPerkins (talk) 05:38, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

    I'm not sure what you mean by a comment about citation forms. Do you mean this tag/template I updated here? First of all, rather than wonder who did what on a page, you can always check the page history. And actually that tag was only partly related to what you added. See, the article was completely unreferenced, which is a bad thing, and the tag was added in December 2007 to point other editors to that fact. When you added your references, the article was no longer "unreferenced" but still badly needed additional references, so I updated the tag to reflect this. Commentary, if any, on citation style might be addressed with this tag instead: {{citationstyle}}. If that's not what you're referring to, let me know. P.S. As you can see, I nominated the article you started--Malheur Reservation--for a DYK and today it is on the front page. Congrats! Katr67 (talk) 15:43, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
    A comment in standard HTML form: <!--For ease of standardization, use a citation template from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_messages/Sources_of_articles#Citations_of_generic_sources --> (Simulated here with character entities.) You have to look at the edit page to see it, since comments are not rendered in HTML. MaxwellPerkins (talk) 22:01, 9 March 2008 (UTC)