Gearing Up

The past week has been completely consumed by getting ready to spend a month in a very remote place in Utah. This is the part of geology that I love so much, being able to spend time outdoors in the field looking at rocks and being completely bewildered the entire time! Heck, I got into geology because I thought that it would be a great career that would engage my brain and still let me spend time in remote places doing adventures with my wonderfully amazing wife. Little did I know back then that modern geologists typically spend more time in front of computers than in the field. So nonetheless getting out to do field work is a fantastic opportunity to see rocks and have an adventure. Since getting back from the Book Cliffs field trip last week I have been spending obscene amounts of time going through camp gear, field gear, equipment, and repackaging food. My ever amazing wife Sarah even put up with my crap spread across the living room for days on end before it was packaged and ready to load into the vehicle.

 Preparing to dehydrate some beef

 Dehydrating it

Picking up some of the food from our local bulk food store

 Repackaging til all hours of the night

Testing the new sat phone... doesn't work to well inside

Gear wise I have enough camping gear to house a small army of people in any type of weather and be comfortable and eat like kings for weeks. I am pulling out all the stops with food variety, cooking gear, water filtration, housing, and even how to get enough water to support us in the middle of the desert. I actually learned a great bit of desert backpacking looking through the forums of www.backpackinglight.com and analyzing all that I could from a great modern adventurers blog Alastair Humphreys. This video gave me some great ideas on how to deal with getting gear and water out in the field where we need it miles away from vehicles:


A Meaningless Penance? Teaser Clip from Alastair Humphreys on Vimeo.

So I built a cart to haul our gear although it pales in size to the one in the video. It can move 40+ gallons of water with no problem so it will be really interesting to see how it works out for us in the field. I am really excited to get out in the field and get my data for my thesis so I can start processing it and making sense of it. Although this will be a fantastic adventure it will be sad being so far removed from friends and family for a month. We will have PLB's and a satellite phone just in case but a phone is no replacement for sleeping in your own bed with the woman you love.

So here 2 nights before our departure I am excited, sad, stressed, and stoked all at the same time for this adventure that is to come for us. It will be great to get back out into nature and recharge and refocus my energy after over a year of being strapped to a computer for 40 hours a week. Getting outside and redefining who I am and where I am going helps me feel more like me and makes me reflect on who I am without the internet, smartphones, and the overall bullshit that we all have to put up with in modern society. It is a time to rejuvenate the spirit and feel like a kid again climbing hills, looking at the stars, taking in the beauty of the mountains and reading the stories that are etched into the rocks. The stories of landscapes of the past and worlds that we want to comprehend. Life is good and all is well. Utah here I come.

Book Cliffs: Cretaceous of Colorado and Utah

This past week I spent 4 days in the Book Cliffs of Colorado and Utah looking at shallow marine strata of the Corcoran, Cozzette, and Rollins Sandstones. It was a great trip with beautiful weather for all the days we spent in the field. It was so cool getting to look at the Cretaceous stratigraphy with 5 world experts in the subject. Having Mark Kirschbaum there to show us what he has done for the USGS was fantastic. Being able to actually physically put my hands on sequence boundaries and flooding surfaces was so much more satisfying than guessing at rock type on well logs and being within 100 feet on seismic. We saw a ton of amazing rocks and amazing exposures in both the Grand Junction and Green River areas. If you ever get the chance to get out and see this chunk of stratigraphy I recommend you take that opportunity! The longitudinal continuity of the sands and the ability to walk units out for miles is amazing and like nothing else I have ever seen anywhere in the world. The trip was also a great opportunity to field test some new gear and some old gear and see how it would all work out. Turns out everything is going to work perfectly for field work here in a week and I am just about ready to go gear wise for the summer. Anyways check out some great photos of rocks, trace fossils, and people!

Colorado's Eastern Book Cliffs

The Bosses

Escape Trace Fossil

Mr. Moody on Outcrop

Nice Ripples

Mud Drapes

The group at a great overview in the eastern Book Cliffs

Tredolities

Western Book Cliffs

Great Climbing Ripples

Miniature Dinosaur Trackway!

Looking at Coal Across the Canyon

Beds of Trace Fossils

More Desolate Scenery

Desert Bighorns

THE Place to eat in Green River, UT

Debris Flow Fans and Tertiary Gravels

We took a trip last weekend with the Geological Engineering students out to western Colorado to look at debris flow fans from the Plio/Pleistocene time period. We also looked at some river gravels from the Gunnison and North Fork of the Gunnison Rivers from 10,000 to 100,000 years ago! It was a great trip getting so see so many alluvial fans and debris flows intermixed with river gravels. My mind was totally blown by the fact that not so long ago the landscape looked very similar to what it looks like today but things were just a bit different. Overall the trip was great talking to the other side of our geology department and having great discussions with some of the worlds leading experts on alluvial fans and debris flows. We spent quite a bit of time at the outcrops speculating about what we were looking at and how it related to glacial and interglacial processes. The photos speak for themselves of how powerful these processes are that deposit boulder size clasts and I am even throwing in a video of modern debris flows to help everyone understand how crazy these systems really are! Big thanks to Paul Santi, David Noe, Terry Blair, David Pyles, and Piret for putting on a great trip!

Completely Structure less Bed

View up into Gunni Gorge note the plume where the North Fork (river to left) enters the main Gunnison River

Landslide head scarp that exposes some fantastic debris flows 

Looking up at the outcrop above

Same outcrop with a loose block

Now some cross strata in the off axis traction flow areas!

Another great debris flow fan outcrop, note how big the clasts are relative to the people standing at the base!

Tertiary North Fork River Gravels intermixed with debris flow deposits. Check out the well developed soil at the top above Paul's head

Contact between river gravels of Plio/Pleistocene age in direct contact with the Cretaceous age Mancos Shale.  

A great debris flow movie from clear creek a while back

This is probably what the Gunnison and North Fork looked like 20,000 years ago during the glacial melt

Spain: Fantastic rocks

Last week I went to Ainsa, Spain for a field trip with school. We looked at the Cretaceous through late Eocene carbonate, deepwater, shallow marine, and fluvial systems. It was a great trip and I learned a ton, I could go on and on about the trip but pictures say more than I could ever type! Enjoy!

Old monastery

 Looking at carbonates in the Boltana Anticline

Even carbonates have interesting things to look at!

There are old abandoned churches everywhere

 Even with a bunch of rain, we got some sunshine in the afternoons and occasionally some mornings

We even went hiking at the national park and checked out modern karsting and some sweet waterfalls

 Looking back out of the cave, there was a lot of water coming through the cave when we were there

 The Arcusa Anticline up north of the basin

There are amazing views everywhere you look in Ainsa

 And old ruins hidden behind every corner

 Oh and the geology is phenomenal! Here is a nice turbidite bed

 And some mudstone sheets

Angular discordance in the mudstone sheets recording growth of the Boltana anticline

 Do we have to cross the river again?

 I guess the helical flute casts were worth the wet feet...

Some goats we met while crossing the river

 A clear day looking at the Pyrenees

Hanging out on the edges of cliffs discussing shelf edge trajectories

The almond and olive trees were blooming and leafing out while we were there

 A beautiful Moorish church

 Little towns are spaced a couple of kilometers apart and each is unique

The CoRE fluvial team looking from Eripol at the Escanilla Formation

 Eripol

 A successful trip, with a great group of people!

We did spend an evening in Barcelona, but I only have a few photos from my phone during our time in the big city. It is always such a culture shock going from these remote little villages in the rural countryside of Europe back to the big city. It is then even more of a culture shock flying home and seeing the differences between the USA and Europe. Overall though it was a great trip and I learned a ton!