We've had a cold week in the mid-Atlantic this week, and increasingly my thoughts turn to warmer conditions and the summer. Last year, this year, and next year, I'm scheduling time in Bozeman, Montana, to take classes at Montana State University. I'm working on a second master's degree in science education. It's a pretty cool program which mixes educational practice and "action research" with science elective courses, including plenty of geology offerings.

Today in the blog, I thought I would begin the process of share some images from my time out west last summer. I'll start with the Bridger Range, north of Bozeman. Here's a meadow where we parked the vans before hiking up into the hills on Dave Lageson's excellent Alpine Field Studies seminar:


Once we had huffed and puffed up about tree line, we started to see some pretty cool geology. Here for instance, you can see tilted, folded, faulted Mississippian-aged strata that have been carved into by a glacier. A few minutes after this photo was taken, the class walked straight down into this cirque and climbed up the other side: there's some serious gravity-fighting going on with a route like that. We had lunch on the other side at the top of that orange-colored chute in the upper left:


In the photo below, my hands bracket a tilted zone of paleo-karst in the Mississippian-aged Madison Limestone. With massive limestone above and below, this orangey zone speaks of a time when the limestone deposits of this area were exposed at the surface. Caves and sinkholes developed, as did an iron-rich paleo-soil. It probably looked a lot like modern-day Florida, without the strip malls and retirees. Later, the sea returned and deposited more limestone on top. The paleo-karst is obvious because it contains big blocks of limestone from cave-roof collapse, and is stained by hematite and limonite:


Fellow DC resident and geology educator Nez Nesbitt follows Dave Lageson (the instructor) south along the crest of the range. The drop to either side was substantial, including the headwall of a cirque to the left (east). The loose scree we were walking over added an additional challenge:

In all that scree on the slope we're walking over, there were some cool fossils, including this awesome crinoid calyx ("head" region) - front and back views:


Atop a peak, we paused for a break, and Dave unfurled his Tibetan prayer flags to flap in the wind. I was struck by how a simple little string of cloth imparted a really cool aesthetic to the mountain-top:


This is the trail leading down Sacagawea Cirque. There's some substantial switchbacking going on here:


Here's me atop the highest peak in the Bridger Range, Sacagawea Peak. The views are pretty good from up there:


The class spent the next day mapping glacial landforms in Sacagawea Cirque: it was fun, but I didn't take as many pictures then. When the mapping was over, I prowled through the lateral moraines for fossiliferous chunks of limestone, and found some awesome rugose corals and other treasures. These samples now reside in the NOVA Historical Geology teaching collection.

Labels: fossils, geology, glacial landforms, montana, msse, structure