Here's a quick recap of my cross-country journey, for those who are interested in such things.

I left Bozeman on Saturday morning, July 26, and drove east on the Interstate to Billings, then diverged southeast towards Little Bighorn. There, I verified a comment from a Lakota friend at MSU that with my new bushy mustache (see change in icon above), I look a wee big like George Armstrong Custer (Custer & his men were killed by Lakota and/or Cheyenne warriors). After a short picnic there, I kept driving across southeast Montana, and into northeast Wyoming. My goal for the night was Devils Tower, where I have positive memories from my "North by Northwesty" roadtrip two years ago. I got to Devils Tower in mid-afternoon, just in time for a wicked-looking thunderstorm to roll in. Pendulous looking mammatus clouds were hanging down, and the skies turned a darker grey than Lola. Rain and wind came through, and a big dead branch from one of the cottonwoods in the campground came crashing down, but not on anyone's car or tent. When the skies cleared up, I drove up to the visitor's center and took a walk around the tower. It's awesome: massive columns, some of them twenty feet across. The rock is a porphyritic phonolite, and it's quite pretty to look at: big feldspars (5mm) set in a fine-grained grey matrix. Lovely.

The next morning (Sunday), I headed for Red Bird, Wyoming (along Wyoming's eastern border), where Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway suggested there would be oodles of ammonites in concretions in the Pierre Shale, some a foot across. When I visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science earlier this summer, Kirk Johnson reiterated to me that Red Bird was the place to go for ammonites. But once I got to where Red Bird should be (according to my road atlas), there were no highway signs indicating that the town existed. Worse, there were no outcrops, and no sign of public land. (And one thing that an amateur fossil collector does not want to do in Wyoming is trespass on a rancher's land.) So, no Red Bird ammonites for me. Oh well, no worries: I had collected ammonites from a tongue of the Pierre Shale (the Bearpaw Shale) earlier in the summer on BLM land near Glendive, Montana, and scored some good specimens there. I cruised south, stopping at the Sierra Trading Post outlet in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and dropping some cash on some new duds (STP is mainly a catalog business, famous ten years ago for their amazing deals, but the company seems to be shifting to more mainstream business nowadays, including multiple brick-and-mortar locations). Then another hour on the road brought me to Fort Collins, to the house of Larry Wiseman, where I stayed earlier in my trip. He and I got some pizza and 90-Shilling Ale (Odell's) and traded tales about our summers.


The next morning, we had coffee on Larry's front porch and watch the sun rise. I packed up and hit the road, heading for Kansas. In my rear-view mirror, the Rockies shrank and vanished from sight, a melancholy fade. Out into the plains... In mid-afternoon, I rolled into Oakley, Kansas, where I headed for the Fick Museum. The Fick Museum is interesting on multiple levels: it's got some stellar fossils from Kansas's Smoky Hill Chalk (member of the Niobrara Formation), like a Xiphactinus (massive fish) and a Tylosaurus skull (even more massive mosasaur). But it's also got some whacked-out art: the founder, Vi Fick, was into making art with local "art supplies," and so the walls show his portraits of eagles rendered entirely in rattlesnake tails (see image at right, from this online gallery), or his geometric arrangements of thousands of fossil shark teeth. There's even an oil painting Fick did of "God making the Cretaceous seas," which shows a bearded diety surrounded by flames (it kind of reminded me of Hindu art) making pleisiosaurs and pterosaurs. Not the usual way you see fossils displayed, or paleontology depicted!

At the Fick Museum, I met up with Ron Schott, doyen of the geoblogosphere, who graciously agreed to show me some cool Kansas geology. Ron and I headed south from Oakley towards Monument Rocks, an outcrop of the Smoky Hill Chalk. Ron was eager to gigapan the outcrop, and he set up the little device: essentially a robot that directs his camera to take high-resolution photos in a systematic grid. Pretty cool, really -- I guess I hadn't realized what a Gigapan really was before seeing it in action. I got to meet Ron's two little plastic elves that he uses for scale, and personally placed them on a ledge of chalk for the photograph. The grid of pictures eventually gets digitally stitched together by software, and available for sharing online.

From there, Ron and I headed back up to Oakley, stopping en route so I could collect a couple samples of the aquiferiferous Ogallala Formation, and then headed east, then south again, towards Castle Rock, another chalk outcrop. Here, we tested out my Prius' shocks on the dirt tracks, and checked out the largest cliff in Kansas (nearly getting blown off it by the intense wind), and then prospected for fossils below. I found some fish scales, and a shark tooth! Also inoceramid clam fragments, encrusted with oysters (apparently a common feature of the bottom of the Western Interior Seaway). No mosasaurs, though... Back to the road, and into Hays, Kansas, where Ron put me up in his guest room. We had dinner and a few beers at the Lb. Brewing Company, and thought about recording a PodClast, but then it slipped our minds. We discussed field trips, tenure, publications, and related topics. A good time! Thanks again to Ron for being such an excellent host.

The next two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) were essentially just driving. On Tuesday, I made it to Indianapolis, Indiana, and spent the night in a hotel there. On Wednesday, I turned north, and drove up into Michigan, and crossed into Ontario at Port Huron / Sarnia. Why go to Canada on my way from Montana to DC? Well, I'm teaching my Snowball Earth class this week at NOVA, and some of the rock samples I needed were stuck at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario. Usually they get shipped to educators who want to use them, but because of alleged border complications, I had to go get them myself; a five hundred mile detour! Fortunately, I have good friends who leave in Waterloo, Ontario, so I went and stayed with them. Mike and Natalie Leuty have been friends since 1996, and we had a good evening catching up. They have a sweet house in a suburb full of professorial types who teach at one of the several universities in town.

On Thursday morning, Mike and I had coffee on his front porch while his kids played in the yard, and then I packed up my kit and got rolling. I made it to Brock by 11am, and got the Snowball Suite. Because it's in a giant black case that looks suspiciously like a rifle case, I packed it under a pile of other gear in my car. At any rate, I crossed back into the United States without any static from customs officials, and rolled through Buffalo, New York (twice in one year!) I made my destination for the night Ithaca, New York, where I have a friend who's going to grad school at Cornell. I've never been to Ithaca, but I hear that it's "gorges" from many people. So I called my friend, Kathryn Werntz, and she was indeed around and accepting visitors, so I drove through the finger lakes region (five subparallel glacial troughs now filled with water), and found my way to her bungalow. Kathryn and I took a walk through Cornell's campus (two amazing gorges cutting through it), had some Indian food, and went to get dessert at Purity Ice Cream.

In the morning (Friday), I got up and we went to Gimme! Coffee for some caffeine. Thus fortified, I hit the road for my final day of driving. East to I-81, then south through Pennsylvania. At Harrisburg, I turned onto I-83, which took me to Baltimore, and from there it was a familiar zoom down the B-W Parkway into northeast DC. The dome of the Captiol was visible to my left, and then the comfortable sights of Florida Avenue and U Street. Up the hill, and a left on Harvard Street, and I was back in Adams-Morgan. Home! Finally!

Labels: appalachians, canada, chalk, colorado, field trips, glacial landforms, kansas, montana, national parks, new york, snowball earth, structure, travel, wyoming

A quick note here, just for the sake of completeness, on my final MSSE class of the summer: "Examining Life in Extreme Environments." This was a cool class, but structured in a different way from my other MSSE courses: it was set up more like a conference, with a variety of different speakers on different topics, interspersed with activities. The organizers, Susan Kelly and Monica Brelsford used a grant from NASA to help fund the course, which meant they had the money to fly speakers in from NASA Ames, the University of New Mexico, and the Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island, California. We also had a presentation piped in from Woods Hole. The goal of the class was to look at living organisms that manage to survive in 'extreme' environments, like really salty, really hot, really cold, really acidic, and so forth. Why study these bacteria and archaea? We're hoping they will give us insights into (a) the origins of life on Earth, and (b) the possibility of life on other planets or moons elsewhere in the universe. We had a field trip to Yellowstone National Park to look at microbial mats; we looked at cultures of hyperthermophiles; we listened to excellent talks by Mark Young (viruses as a source of genetic diversity), Ed Adams (new subzero lab tour), and Robert Szilagyi (thermodynamics of the origin of life). As you can see, it was pretty diverse -- all week long, always something new and interesting. I really enjoyed it!

Labels: archean, astronomy, cold, hot springs, montana, msse, wyoming, yellowstone

Got back yesterday from six days out in eastern Montana, at Makoshika State Park. I was there on one of my four MSSE classes this summer, and I learned a lot. As many of you know, I'm trained as a structural geologist, not a sedimentologist. Though I use a lot of sedimentology (and fossils) in my Historical Geology course, there is much I have left to learn. Some of those gaps got filled in this week during "Dino Camp," though. Plus we had a lot of non-geologic fun!

The Hell Creek Formation is well exposed in Makoshika, as well as the overlying Fort Union Formation. The Hell Creek is latest Cretaceous, while the Fort Union is earliest Paleocene. The boundary formerly known as "K/T" is therefore between the two, and it records the changing of the eras: from Mesozoic to Cenozoic. I say "formerly known as K/T," since Tertiary is an archaic term that has been replaced (sort of) with Paleogene. The Paleocene is the first epoch in the Paleogene period. The sedimentologically-defined boundary between the two formations is the lowermost "significant" coal layer. We found this coal, the so-called "Z Coal," and you'd think that would be the K/Pg boundary, but it ain't that simple. True, there are dinosaurs below and no dinosaurs above, and it's also true that the Z Coal has been shown (rather shoddily, by the description we got) to have an iridium anomaly at its base. But there aren't any dinosaur fossils at all for 3 meters below the Z Coal, so the dinosaurs could have gone extinct well before the Z Coal was deposited (and before the iridium-rich clay layer was deposited). And of course, there's nothing in the deposition of a layer of coal that indicates it should be contemporaneous with a mass extinction -- it's just coal. Furthermore, the coal is lake coal, and the lake wasn't necessarily regionally extensive. It's a funny way of defining a critical geochronologic boundary: by the lowermost layer of lake coal in an area -- a criterion which could vary temporally from one place to another. Tricky business!

Anyhow, we prospected for dinosaur fossils. The course had two instructors, Jim Schmitt and Frankie Jackson. Frankie is a paleontologist, and she had a permit for collecting fossils on behalf of the Museum of the Rockies here in Bozeman. We found a lot of vertebrae, some five or six inches across. Plus, we found a bunch of leg bones, some rib fragments, and one of our team actually found the top of the frill on the back of a Triceratops skull! It was all pretty impressive.

In the evenings, we discussed scientific papers about field technique, the Hell Creek Formation, taphonomy, and the extinction of the dinosaurs. All our meals were cooked for us by Frankie's cool husband Bob, and so it was really ideal: Go out and learn all day, come back to camp to a hot meal, a cold beer, and a discussion of big picture ideas. My fellow teachers and I also played a lot of horseshoes and frisbee. To top it all off, when we got back to Bozeman yesterday, a group of us rented Jurassic Park and watched it over pizza and ale.

Next up: tomorrow I begin my Wildlife Ecology of Yellowstone course. Ought to be a similar high-octane experiential blast! More at the end of the week...

Labels: dinosaurs, fossils, montana, msse, yellowstone

After I got off the river at the Grand Canyon, I drove to Moab, Utah, where I have a friend from my days working outdoor education in southern California. Pete and I went swimming in Mill Creek (water + slickrock = awesome plunge pools) and checked out the sunset from the top of a dome of the Navajo Sandstone north of town. We had dinner at the Moab Brewing Company, which was delicious. The next morning, I checked my e-mail and got an oil change, then went up to Arches National Park to pay homage to Edward Abbey by taking a hike to Delicate Arch. They even have a small exhibit in the visitor center about Cactus Ed -- a nice acknowledgment on the part of the park that his book Desert Solitaire piqued interest in the park for many people.

After my hike, I got back in the car, and headed north to the interstate, then east into Colorado. Past Grand Junction and Delta, to the little town of Montrose, where I got final supplies for a couple of days in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. I pulled in relatively late in the day, so just settled into the campsite. It felt good to be camping at high elevation, with cool temperatures, again. The next day, however, July 4th, I spent in exploring the park. I was surprised to learn that there is no trail down to the bottom of the canyon from the rim, but they do let people descend via "the Gunnison Route," a steep-ass ditch full of loose scree and talus. It was pretty sketchy, and pretty exhausting: not much fun. I kept thinking "there has to be a better way to do this." The reward was at the bottom, where the Gunnison River runs cool and fast. The Gunnison has carved an incredible gorge here: steep, deep, and with a steep river profile. It's a classic case of steam superposition over a buried Laramide uplift. During the recent episode of uplift, the Gunnison cut down through overlying sedimentary strata (including the Entrada Formation's pink sandstone, visible on the north rim) and into the underlying Mazatzal-aged (~1.7 Ga) igneous and metamorphic complex. This resistant rock is what makes up most of the canyon. It looks a lot like the Grand Canyon's inner gorge, with pink ribbons of granite leaping through the amphibolite-grade metamorphics. Anyhow, the river was very refreshing. I rested there for a while, and ate some lunch (tortillas from nearby Olathe, Colorado, wrapped around mozzarella and turkey pepperoni.) The hike back up was a big slog, and about as enjoyable as the hike down ("There has to be a better way of doing this!") Up top, I drove the road along the south rim, admiring the various viewpoints into the chasm and taking small hikes.

The following morning, I packed up camp early, and drove all day. I went west back to Grand Junction, and took a cool little road (Route 139) north over Thompson Pass and through some cool BLM land, replete with pictographs. I got some GREAT gas mileage after Thompson Pass, basically crusing downhill at 100 m.p.g. for over an hour. Awesome! Then through Dinosaur, into Vernal, Utah, and then into Wyoming at Flaming Gorge.

At Rock Springs, Wyoming, I went north on 191, through Pinedale (nearby Fremont Lake is the type location for Pinedale Till, the Rocky Mountain version of the Wisconsin Glaciation), and up to Jackson. Man, Jackson's a tourist trap! Yikes! Not as bad as Vegas, but I definitely didn't linger with the sunburnt hordes there. I had a date with the Gros Ventre landslide. Just northeast of Kelly, Wyoming, this is a classic location in the study of mass wasting events. I camped on the lake created by the 1925 landslide, and spent the next morning photographing the scar and debris pile which dammed the Gros Ventre River. Unlike the Madison River's landslide and resulting "quake lake," no one was killed with the initial earth movement at Gros Ventre, but when the dam failed two years later, the resulting flood drowned six people in Kelly. I first learned about the Gros Ventre slide as an undergraduate, and I teach about it today, so it was a real pleasure to see it firsthand.

Next morning, a ho-hum commute through Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks and up into Bozeman.

Labels: colorado, montana, national parks, travel, utah, wyoming

I left Bozeman on Saturday morning, and drove for about seven hours. I headed south through Ennis, Montana, along the western side of the Madison Range, passing by the Madison Earthquake Site landslide (from the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake), and then south into Idaho. I went through Island Park, Idaho, site of the caldera of one of the three big recent eruptions of the Yellowstone volcanic center. Then into northern Utah, where I got a glimpse of the Great Salt Lake. I headed up into the Wasatch Range to spend the night, just east (and several thousand feet above) Ogden, Utah. I did some birding on the reservoir there, observing the mating rituals of both the woodcock (amazing humming noise produced during flying dives) and the western grebe (neck bobbing following by synchrnonous running across the water).

The next morning, I headed west from there, into the basin, across a range, into another basin, across another range -- you get the idea. I initially intended to go hunt for trilobite fossils in the Wheeler Shale in the House Range, but the 20-mile dirt road rattled me (quite literally) and I turned around after only four miles. I got spooked: what would happen to me if the Prius broke down out here? It's really quite desolate country. I've only ever had that feeling once before, when my Dad and I drove across the Namib Desert. It's a mix of agoraphobia and anxiety over feeling inept at repairing mechanical things, like Prii and other automobiles. I chickened out -- no trilobites for me. But there was a consolation in Great Basin National Park, which was where I headed that afternoon. I did a short hike there in the Snake Range, and toured Lehman Caverns there (my third guided cave tour in two weeks!). I had my best campsite of the trip at Great Basin: montane forest, with a gurgling stream running fifteen feet from my tent. Lovely.

When I woke up, I packed up the car and coasted downhill for eight miles into the town of Baker, Nevada, where I had a great breakfast and coffee at a little cafe there. Then up and over the Snake Range, and down the next valley to the west, south for 93 miles of some of the most empty country I've ever seen in America. In an hour and a half of driving, I saw only 20 vehicles. I crossed back into Utah, and then made my way south to the edge of the Colorado Plateau, and drove up into Zion National Park. Zion is a great canyon cut into a series of sedimentary rocks. The last time I was here, 13 years ago, I walked up the Narrows, and my first order of business was to repeat that hike. There's a new shuttle system in the park now, so after parking at my campsite, I hopped on a shuttle into the park and rode it to the end. I waded into the Virgin River and shuffled upstream. In the Narrows, the Virgin River has cut down through the Navajo Sandstone, but not quite down into the weaker underlying Kayenta Formation, and so the canyon is deep but narrow. (Downstream, when it gets deep enough to tap into the Kayenta, it undermines the sandstone cliffs, and the valley widens.) "Hiking" here is one of the more unique outdoor experiences I've had. Being immersed in the cool river, surrounded by towering rock walls -- it's magical. The further upriver you hike, the less people there are, and it's like a cathedral. I went up and around several entrenched meanders, and marvelled at the alcoves, cross-bedding, and variety of cobbles in the riverbed.

Today, I'm staying in the park and heading up to Angel's Landing, a legendary hike in its own right. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'm off to Las Vegas to pick up my Dad and brothers for our Grand Canyon rafting trip. Not sure if I'll be able to post again until after I get out.... late next week.

Labels: birdies, fossils, grand canyon, idaho, montana, national parks, stratigraphy, travel, utah

It's been a busy week for me. I've really enjoyed my first MSSE class of the summer, Dave Lageson's "Northern Rocky Mountain Geology." Dave led us on a series of field trips within driving distance of Bozeman: the Bridger Range, the Paradise Valley, the Spanish Peaks, the Hebgen Lake earthquake scarp and Quake Lake, and today out to Ringing Rocks, the Lahood Conglomerate, and a descent into Lewis and Clark Caverns. It's been a lot of cool geology, as well as a lot of driving! In the evenings, I've been keeping busy with Shakespeare in the Parks, seeing the B Side Players, and socializing with fellow MSSE teachers. All good stuff, but it leaves little time for blogging. Tomorrow morning, I'm off to the south. I'll be on the road for another five days or so, going to Las Vegas to pick up my father and brothers and then we're going rafting down the Grand Canyon starting next Wednesday. Along the way, I hope to visit some sites in Utah, and I hope to post some updates en route. After the Canyon float, I'll head back north, again through Utah and probably western Colorado (Black Canyon of the Gunnison), before returning to Bozeman for another three MSSE classes ("Dinosaur Paleontology of the Hell Creek Formation," "Life in Extreme Environments," and "Wildlife Ecology of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem"). Then back east, hopefully with some Niobrara Chalk and Pierre Shale site visits along the way.

Also, along similar "rock and road" lines, I had an article published in Geotimes this month on the roadtrip I did two years ago from DC up to Alaska and back. You can check it out here.

FYI, I got a new camera for this trip, and haven't been able to download any pictures off it yet (a stupid software issue), so that's the reason for the lack of photos lately. My apologies!

Labels: grand canyon, montana, msse, utah

Sooo.... I've been "delinquent" about posting (if five days off counts as delinquent). But the long and the short of it is that I made it to Bozeman, and started classes, and have settled into life up here. After leaving Denver, I spent a couple days in Fort Collins, Colorado, staying with my undergaduate mentor professor Larry Wiseman. When I was at William and Mary, I forged a strong relationship with Larry, and that persisted even though I defected from biology (he's a developmental biologist, and chair emeritus of the department there) to geology (basically because they had more field trips). Anyhow, he and I would gather once a month or so for coffee and talk about life, the West, Ed Abbey, art, and science.

Now he's retired and pursuing bird rock art and also teaching cell biology at Colorado State University (in Fort Collins). We drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park and toured the various microbreweries and restaurants of Fort Collins (and Lyons). It was, in short, a good time.

Departing there on Saturday morning, I drove north through Wyoming, and camped at the end of the day at Buffalo Bill State Park, on the east flank of Yellowstone. On Sunday morning, I drove through the park, marvelling at six-foot-deep snow on Washburn Pass, and cruising along past tourists and bison galore. I stopped once, to look at the single petrified tree there, and then rocked and rolled on up the Paradise Valley to Livingston, and thence westward on the interstate to Bozeman.

In Bozeman, I'm enrolled in the Master of Science in Science Education program at Montana State University. It's essentially all science educators who are taking graduate coursework to become better science educators. And it's fun! This week, I'm taking Dave Lageson's class on the geology of the northern Rocky Mountains. More on that later, perhaps, but the point for now is that I'm enjoying it, and enjoying interacting with my fellow MSSE educators.

Tonight, I had a bonus, when we had a mini-conference of geobloggers. I guess there's somewhere around 50 geobloggers out there now, but we had four of them sitting at one table in Montana Ale Works, talking rocks and fossils and blogging and whatnot. That's got to be a record for the geoblogosphere. It was a lot of fun. Thanks to Mel, Brian, and Jeannette for making it happen!

Labels: field trips, montana, msse, travel, wyoming, yellowstone

Cleaning up my hard drive today, before switching over to the laptop for my summer travels. Thought I would share a few annotated photos from my "Geology of Glacier National Park and surrounding areas" class that I took last summer.

Here's Chief Mountain:


On the trail to Firebrand Pass, here's the contact between the Altyn Formation (lowest of the Belt Supergroup exposed at Glacier) and the overlying Appekunny Formation:


The Purcell Sill is a readily recognizable feature high on the glacially-carved walls of Glacier National Park. This shot is from the trail on the way up to Grinnell Glacier:


Here's a shot from Sun River Canyon, showing one of the many imbricate thrust faults there, with some glacial till thrown in as a bonus feature:


Just outside of Sun River Canyon, we saw some nice recumbent drag folds on some thrust faults in the Cretaceous rocks:


This one was from early in the trip, on the road from Helena up north towards Glacier. Specifically, we stopped in Little Prickly Pear Canyon, near Wolf Creek, and saw these chevron folds in the Cretaceous rocks there:


Along those same lines (folded Cretaceous strata), here's a gorgeous fold just outside the park's boundary, on the road leading north from Two Medicine towards Many Glacier:


No annotations on this one, but I wanted to share it anyhow: a blind thrust / drag fold complex, in the Grinnell Formation (exposed on the trail up to Grinnell Glacier):


Lastly, some snow photos. I took this shot on my way up the trail to Grinnell Glacier, because the holes in the snow reminded me of the scary mask face from the Scream movies. But then on the way down, I realized I had the opportunity to document how much snowmelt occurs in six hours of Glacier NP summer weather. Hence, the bottom "after" shot:


That's it for today... Enjoy!

Labels: field trips, montana, msse, plutons, proterozoic, sediment, structure

Today, some shots from my time in Yellowstone National Park last summer. Here's Mammoth Hot Springs:

Close-up of the travertine deposits at Mammoth:

Me advertising my brother's company at Mammoth:

Norris Geyser Basin, slime:

Norris Geyser Basin's loneliest tree:

More slime, this time two colors:

Nasty patch of slime. Looks like snot:

Bison herd:

Columnar jointing in basalt:

Me showing you where the columnar jointing is. (I'm pointing at it...)

Strata exposed in the Tower area:

And here they are again, labelled:

Lastly, heading north out of Yellowstone back to I-90 and Bozeman, here's a weathered-out Eocene dike in the Paradise Valley. The dike is more resistant to weathering than the rock it cuts through, so it stands up as a "wall"-looking feature.

Labels: basalt, field trips, hot springs, limestone, montana, primary structures, stratigraphy, travel, yellowstone

And here's the view hiking back down the canyon to the car:

It's a classic U-shaped valley, the signature of alpine glacial topography. Here's the Google Maps "terrain" view of this valley:

View Larger Map

Labels: glacial landforms, montana, volcano

Ahhhh.... the semester's just about over. Yesterday, I gave my last lecture and delivered two lab practical exams, and now all that's left to do is give the final exams on Tuesday. Not a moment too soon! It's been a very busy time over the past couple of months. What with my regular teaching duties, my Audubon class, my online MSSE class, GSW, various talks (like Wednesday's "Geology along the C&O Canal" at NSF), supervising homeschoolers visiting the NOVA chemistry lab, grant finagling, writing projects, and just life, I'm dog tired. I'm seriously ready for a nice break.

This ought to mean I'll have more time for posting on this blog, and hopefully that the posts will be richer and more thoughtfully composed.

Anyhow, let's share some pictures today. These are photos I took last summer on Dave Lageson's "Geology of Glacier National Park and Surrounding Areas" course at Montana State University - Bozeman. Dave is a great field trip leader, and I'm looking forward to another of his courses this summer: "Northern Rocky Mountain Geology."

For the Glacier course, we loaded up the vans in Bozeman and drove northwest through Helena and up to Sun River Canyon, one of the best areas in the world to look at multiple imbricated thrust sheets. Dave's been taking students here for a long time, and in fact "wrote the book" on it as a field trip location. In the photo below, the prominent cliff is Paleozoic limestone. The gently-sloping hill in the foreground, however, is Cretaceous shale. As is often the case, tectonics trumps superposition. Compressional tectonic forces have shoved the older rocks up on top of the younger rocks. (An analogous situation in the east is the Blue Ridge's Grenvillian rocks thrust up and to the west over Cambrian and Ordovician carbonates of the Shenandoah Valley.)


Here's a map showing how the Canyon trends east-west across the north-south strike of these mutliple thrust sheets:

Next up: Waterton Lakes Park, Alberta. We slipped over the border and spent an evening drinking beer in the southernmost of the Canadian Rockies. ...Purty.


Here's us looking at the next day's field stops.


Still life with fun stuff:


The next day, crossing back into the U.S., we stopped to get a good look at Chief Mountain, another scene of thrusting older rocks on top of younger rocks. Again, the lower unit is Cretaceous, but this time the upper rocks are older, much older. They're Mesoproterozoic rocks of the Belt Supergroup, thrust eastward along the Lewis Thrust, which underlies the base of this mountain. Chief Mountain is an erosional remnant of the Lewis Thrust sheet: that is to say, erosion has cut into the thrust sheet and left behind this one isolated outpost of what was once a continuous sheet of allochthonous rock. (It's a klippe!) The thrust sheet picks up again in the mountains of Glacier National Park.


Next day: a hike up to Grinnell Glacier, a classic glacier in a park named for classic glaciers. Like all of Glacier's glaciers, however, Grinnell is melting. It's receded quite a lot, as repeat photography shows:


Here's a view looking down the Grinnell Valley at a string of pater noster lakes blue with "glacial flour."


Here's what's left of Grinnell Glacier:


Where the glacier once stood, there's now a new lake. Several of my classmates decided that they would go for a dip. Note: all these guys are from Montana...


As for myself, I stayed out of the water, amusing myself with the amazing sedimentary structures displayed by the Belt rocks. Here's an outcrop of the Grinnell Formation, showing amazing Mesoproterozoic mudcracks. (As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was, same as it ever was...")


Glacier's Belt Supergroup rocks are reknowned for their stromatolites, fossilized cyanobacterial mats. Here, a stromatolitic layer in the Helena Formation was exposed in cross-section by glacial erosion. Penny for scale (atop middle stromatolite).


And here's another view of the same stromatolitic layer, exposed in map-view section (a horizontal slice, as opposed to the vertical outcrop above). Enthusiastic geologist for scale, imagining doing the backstroke through the Proterozoic Belt Sea.


And... that's it for today. I'm off to the Blue Ridge this weekend, so I won't be posting again until Monday or so. But hopefully I'll have some cool new images from Virginia's oldest rocks to share at that time. Be good.

Labels: canada, montana, msse, primary structures, proterozoic, structure

Tuff Cookie is posting danger signs that geologists ignore, so I'll pitch in one of my own from last summer in Montana. This is in Glacier National Park, on the trail up to Grinnell Glacier. The trail was closed due to snowfields which crossed the trail in some spots. It was a little dicey crossing them, but there was no non-litigious reason to close the trail:

Labels: geologists, geology, montana

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

It's funny how one thing leads to another. In promoting our Climate Change Symposium on Friday, I wrote to Cerphe (pronounced "Surf"), probably the best DJ in the world, who's on air in the afternoons on 94.7 The Globe, our DC-area "world-class rock" station that also features a green message. Cerphe wrote back, saying he'd get some mentions on the air this week, and also mentioned that his wife has a small business building green homes. I noticed that the business is headquartered in Bentonville, Virginia, out in the Shenandoah Valley between Massanutten Mountain and the Blue Ridge. And it occurred to me that I've looked at a bentonite layer out there in the Valley (see photo), not too far away from Bentonville. Bentonite is a common clay mineral that in stratigraphic layers is usually interpreted as weathered volcanic ash. (The one pictured above is possibly the "Big Bentonite" that accompanied the onset of the Ordovician Taconian Orogeny in eastern North America.) Could it be that bentonite is named for Bentonville, Virginia? Well, Wikipedia tells me that "The absorbent clay was given the name bentonite by an American geologist sometime after its discovery in about 1890 ...after the Benton Formation in Montana's Rock Creek area." So that took me to the entry on Fort Benton, Montana, which was named for the first 5-term U.S. Senator, Thomas Hart Benton. He was an advocate of westward expansion by the United States, the idea that later was dubbed "Manifest Destiny." So: as near as I can follow, bentonite is a mineral named for a place, which is in turn named for a man. What this has to do with world-class rock and climate change is anybody's guess.

Labels: appalachians, history, montana, volcano