Sam Can Now be Found at Samable!

Hey all Geology Blues fans! 

    The last time I wrote on this blog I was in middle school (I had to double-check it was so long ago). Now I am here once more to shamelessly promote my new personal blog Samable. I made this blog this year to share all my adventures as a college student.

To catch everyone up on where life has taken me: 

    I am a student at Portland State University studying Health and Fitness. I chose this major after one year of being an architecture major. I enjoyed architecture and liked the creativity of designing, but I realized that my true passion was in recreation. Now I am working towards the goal of becoming a recreation program direction. If I achieve my perfect goal, it would be to develop more after school programs for teenagers. For the fall semester of my third year, I am actually taking a break from health classes and studying abroad at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea. The only class I am taking here is Korean. When I return to the United States I will jump right back into my courses and keep considering that I really want to return to South Korea for graduate school.
   Other fun events that have happened include my very interesting summer job in Minnesota on Lake of the Woods. I have spent the last two summers working as a Wilderness Canoe Guide for teenagers. This job has allowed me to combine my love for the outdoors with my passion for afterschool programs for teenagers. It has also left me with many stories and adventures to tell.

    I'm keeping this post short and sweet, but I hope a few of you will look at my new blog and follow my new adventures!

The 10 most incredible places I have stood

In celebration of Earth Day, Geotripper started a series of blogs where he identifies the most [geologically] incredible places he visited. In his opening blog, he encouraged his readers to play along so I started making my list. I found the endeavor harder than it seems because for I lived in Utah, and each and every place in southern Utah that I visited could have been part of this list. In refining my list, I tried to include places that were more than just incredible for their geology, but also hold special meaning to me.

Here is my list (unfortunately I don't have pictures of some because many of the places were experienced in pre-digital camera and pre-geology days so my limited images are often not in  focus or focused on the geology):

10. Black Box Canyon, San Rafael Swell, Utah - There are a number of slot canyons I could have chosen, but in the end it came down to this one because it had all of the slot canyon features (and was one of the most rugged hikes I had ever been on). Although not as narrow or deep as a some of the other canyons of the San Rafael Swell, the rugged nature of this canyon makes this the only slot canyon I have visited in Southern Utah that we saw no other groups (It was also one of the most exhausting day hikes I have ever been on, 12 hours with several sections we had to swim, and early on there is 15-20' drop that makes you commit to the whole canyon.) In addition to the slot features, I was impressed by the snags and logs wedged 20-30' above the canyon bottom from flash floods.

9. Eagle's Rock, Lake of the Woods, Ontario -Eagle's Rock is not much more than a high cliff on one of the islands in Lake of the Woods. But geologically it is part of the Canadian Shield. Recent ice ages have removed all the overlying sediments exposing Archean Aged grandiorite. These rocks represent some of the oldest rocks on the surface.

8. Silver King Mine, Park City, UT. I tried to think of one of the places I had been under ground, the two that were most memorable were an old copper mine near Watersmeet, MI, and the Silver King Mine in Park City UT. Although the copper mine was still actively being mined for pure copper, for this list I choose the Silver King Mine which is until recently was open as a tourist attraction. Parts of the mine are still being dewatered today as part of the water system for the Park City but unfortunately the tours of the mine are no longer available to the public. The highlight of the tour was when the tunnel we were in (on  a railroad cart) goes past a long straight drainage tunnel. This tunnel was completed in the 1920's by miners boring through the hard (mostly granitic) rocks from both directions, but it is so straight that as you go past it you can sere the opening into daylight over 1000 feet away.

7. Lassen Peak, California - I have climbed on two of the Cascade Volcanoes and both  were incredible experiences. I would have chosen Mt. Shasta, but the altitude got me before making the final summit. So Mt. Lassen it is.

6. Yosemite Valley, California - Truly a majestic place and the last two time I have been to Yosemite it has been in the winter or early spring. The snow in the valley keeps the number of people down, but it also muffles the sound running through the valley. In the winter the water falls are sometimes barely a trickle, but the ice cones at the bottom and the frost from the sprays is a beautiful scene.

5. Many Glacier Valley, Glacier National Park, Montana - I spent a summer working as a concessionaire for one of the hotels in Glacier national Park so there are several memorable moments and places within the park, but to me the most incredible place is the Many Glacier Valley. Many Glacier Valley is really the junction of three glacially carved alpine valleys, and up one of them Grinnell Glacier still is (barely) holding on. The valley is full of alpine glacier features such as Aretes (The Garden Wall), Truncated spurs (Grinell Peak), Paternoster Lakes,  hanging valleys, cirques and tarns. The place I chose was the top of Swiftcurrent pass, standing on the narrow arete of the Garden Wall, looking down the Swiftcurrent Valley.

Near Artist's Vista, Makoshika State Park

4. Makoshika State Park, Montana - For four years we lived in Montana, we had Makoshika State Park in the back yard of the Community College I was teaching at. Makoshika is a badlands park with extraordinary sedimentary features with the added feature that the K/T boundary runs right through the park so has you drop down into the many coulees and washes you enter into the Late Cretaceous age and dinosaur fossils are abundant. (Most of the fossils are bone fragments and chips but I did run across some ceratopsin frills and a jaw bone). But for some politicking in the 1930's Makoshika might have become a national park. That it didn't is a mixed blessing because it is much less busy than the nearby (and entirely Cretaceous aged) Teddy Roosevelt National Park, but at the same time many of the paleontological resources are being lost because it does not get the attention (money and personnel) as it would if it were a national site.

Lake Baikal

3. Shore of Lake Baikal, Siberia - As an undergraduate, I was fortunate to spend a summer doing a language program at University of Siberia. At the end of the program the group took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Lake Baikal. Unlike the American Great Lakes, there was almost no development along the shores with near pristine landscapes to the north, barely visible across the lakes were snowcapped mountains just visible through the clouds.

2. Ice Cave in the Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska - While in college, I participated in the Juneau Icefield Research Program. Before heading up onto the icefields, we took a day trip to the toe of the Mendenhall Glacier. Where a stream was exiting the glacier, a large ice cave had been carved, and inside the light was filtered into an eerie glacial blue. 

1. Goblin Valley State Park, UT - The first time I went to Goblin Valley, Halloween was on a weekend and near a new moon, so my friends and I saw the name and figured it would be the perfect place to go celebrate. I was immediately taken in by the strange hoodoos and desolate feel and it has been my favorite place ever since. The story I often tell is that even though I lived in Utah for over 7 years, I never made it to see the Grand Canyon. On 5 separate occasions, I set out planning on going to the Grand Canyon, but I would make it to Goblin Valley the first night, and then never get much further.  A couple of years ago we had the opportunity to go back, and though it is a fair bit more developed it is still my favorite place.

Sapphires

 Last summer we took a long road trip back to the Midwest. On our travels through Montana, we stopped for a day at Gem Mountain outside of Philipsburg, a commercial sapphire mine. Well, not really a mine because the company scoops placer deposits from a quarry and bags the mud and brings it to the facility. Then you can buy 5-gallon pails of gravel and sift through them looking for sapphires.

Sam sifting through her bucket of gravel

We bought a bucket of gravel for each of us, and spent a nice morning looking through the gravel. In the end we found about 100 Carats of rough sapphires. Although the rough sapphires have some color to them, they did not have the vibrant blue color. 

 

Rough Sapphires

In order to bring out the color, the sapphires need to be heat treated by heating them to 500C for several hours. For a small fee, Gem Mountain will send your sapphires away for treatment. We did send some stones away for heat treatment and cutting, and we finally got them back today. Here are the two biggest stones, each ~2/3 carat.

Sapphires, treated and cut.

 

We only sent a couple of stones out for treatment  and cutting, so I still have ~100 smaller stones that I would like to see if I can treat myself. I tried to heat treat some of our sapphires at home, but I couldn't get them hot enough so next I am going to see if putting them in a kiln will work (as soon as I find someone who will let me use their kiln.) 

 

 



Fort Rock

On the way home from Crater Lake, we drove through Southern Oregon. My primary purpose was to stop at Fort Rock State Natural Area.

Fort Rock is a volcanic tuff ring that stands about 200 feet above the surrounding paleolake bed. It is a near circular ring of lapilli tuff that is the result of a Surtseyan eruption 50-100 ka. Most of the larger clasts in the tuff are welded glasses and pumice

But in some places small basalt bombs are included too

Subsequent weathering by wave action created an opening on the south side of the ring, so you can hike inside the ~1 mile wide crater. Where the waves interacted with the structure, along the outside and along the cut, there is a visible bench. At other tuff rings in the area, these benches show evidence of human habitation 9-10 ka

Bench on edge of Opening

After Fort Rock, we cruised through the desert high plains of the Christmas Valley and into Burns, where we turned north to home. We were all ready to be home, so we didn't stop to geologize along the way, just a reason to go back and explore again.

Utah Museum of Natural History

We went to Salt Lake City to visit Sam's grandparents over the Christmas holidays. They informed us that the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah history had moved into a brand new space. We make it a habit to visit natural history museums, and from my time at the UofU, the Utah museum has always been one of my favorite.

The major corporate donor for the new building was Rio Tinto, so the building had a beautiful copper sheeting and a great location up on the "benches" right next to Red Butte Gardens.

It was clear that much of the emphasis in the new facility was highlighting the extensive collection of dinosaurs. The building was designed for museum gowers to enter directly into the hall of dinosaurs, and snake their way through (most of) the rest of the exhibits. (We ended up missing the space science and formation of the planet exhibits because they were on another floor and unconnected. Only when I looked at the map as we were leaving did I realize we had missed it.)

Allosaurus

I really appreciate it when you can get a scale for how big some of these creatures were. This picture of the sauropod was taken from the balcony overlooking the dinosaur area. It was my best attempt at getting the whole of the skeleton in the field of view of the camera.



This picture was a little closer up, and uses Sam as scale for the hind foot of the Sauropod. The perspective is a little off because of the distances, but the total ground to hip distance is a little over 3 meters.

Utah his famous for it Jurassic aged dinosaurs, but I didn't know there were Cretaceous aged fossils too. The museum also had a small room (and map) with some of the Cretaceous dinosaurs found in the state.

There was also a cast of the skull of a T. Rex (I think Big Al). I remember this cast from the museum when it was at the previous location, and it is certainly an impressive piece. My only real critisicm is that it is in a display case of Cretaceous aged fossils found in Utah, and it is suggestive that it is a Utah fossil (to be fair, the tag identifying it says T. Rex skull from Montana, but I still found it misleading).

One of my favorite displays, and one that certainly highlights the advantage of a new bigger space, was a wall with a cladogram showing different ceratopsin skulls.

The remodel also updated many of the informational signs. They were much more colorful and had good interpretive content.

From the hall of dinosaurs, the meandering path went to an area on the ecosystems (past and present) of the Lake Bonneville and the Great Salt Lake. It was a nice display. but it seemed a little out of context. Also, I spent a good amount of time looking for a display, or information about the draining of Lake Bonneville through Red Rock Pass, but I never found it. Maybe because it happened in Idaho...

From the Salt Lake area, it was back into general geology and a discussion of the ecoregions of the Basin and Range Provincne. A nice diagram of the Rock Cycle

A somewhat crude, but interactive display where you got to pull apart a piece of plywood to see the formation of Basins and Ranges

 A seismograph from two (there was room for three) locations tracked by the University of Utah Seismograph station


Yellowstone Seismograph on Left, Little Cottonwood Canyon on Riight

The main hallway ended in the biology area, which certainly much updated and much improved from the 1960s vintage stuffed animal displays that the old museum had. But when I got here, I thought where were the minerals! The old museum had one of the best displays of minerals I had ever seen. You could have taught a whole segment on minerals to a intro geology class at the previous display. It was a spaceous display showing minerals by property (hardness, cleavage, mineral habit, luminesence, etc), by family (silicate, oxide, sulfide) etc, as well as displays minerals common to Utah. I LOVED the old display and figured with the new building it have updated displays.

I was disappointed to say the least. The new Mineral display was one tiny hallway, located out of the way, with only about 1/4 of the minerals on display and not with the same level of detail.
.

Some of the old displays had been moved, like the minerals that exhibit, flourescence

But most of the new displays just showed minerals, with their associated names.

In all, the new museum had a much nicer biology display, and the focus on dinosaurs was evident. But I was sadly dissapointed that the flow of the museum didn't always transition well from one area to the next. The museum nicely went through the first four floors, but then the space science and mineral displays were off the path and woud be easy to miss. But most of all I mourn the loss of what had been one of the most complete mineral displays (second in my mind only to the Smithsonian).

One final observation, on the day went Sam's Grandmother was in a wheelchair. I think every architect in the country should have to spend a week in a wheel chair before gettting a license. While the building was fully ADA compliant (and I would bet the old one wasn't), it was not very wheel chair friendly. Some of the ramps were out of the way, and many of the displays (specifically books of pressed plants for the Basin and Range ecozones) and placards were at a convient height for a standing adult (or over the head of someone in a wheel chair).

In all, it was still worth the visit, but it no longer is in my "top five"

More Summer Trips

Ok, so its been a while since I have been able to sit down finish posting about our trips last summer. After our trip to Sumpter/John Day, we spent a week at the coast. Most of our time at the coast was spent playing in tide pools and seeing non-geology things, but I did take one picture of some barchan dunes on the beach below the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse.

On the trip back to the east side of the state, we took the scenic detour through the desert high plains. This allowed us a stop at Crater Lake, which Sam had been wanting to go see ever since we moved to Oregon.

Stanton at the Rim near the North Entrance

We got to the park about 1 hour to late to take the boat ride (next time Sam) so we did the obligatory drive around the lake. Sam's favorite stops was at Pinnacles, where the steam from fumaroles welded together the overlying pumice and ash into an erosion resistant hoodoo.

On the way back from Pinnacles, we stopped at the new trail in the park, a 2.5 mile out and back to Plaikni Falls. It was a nice little trail through the woods, and the falls at the end were a nice surprise (ok I knew there was a waterfall, but it was more impressive that I had anticipated). Sam, however was tired, so by the time we got to the falls she had transformed into a bit of a sullen teenager.

Plaikni Falls

I think overall, Sam was a little disappointed in the lake. (I found out later that, being who she is, what she really had wanted to do was go swimming in the Lake. She didn't expect only one access to the lake that was 2-3 miles down a steep trail to a non-existent beach that would have been hypothermia inducing cold at that rate!)

Just Refreshing All Y'all

I've been busy lately school, swimming, and all sorts of extra stuff. Now my dad has been keeping you guys caught up on all our trips but I was going through some of my pictures and thought to myself, hey why don't I do a post on some of our trips. That way you guys can here his geological side to our trips and my fun creative side. :-) Also I will tell you some more fresh stuff.

Now one of our trips he might have only briefly mentioned was in August after summer swimming was done we went to Newport, Oregon. On our way there we stopped at Bonneville Lock and Dam. I have already been there but since we brought along our cousins it was a unique experience for them and I had a good time.

We also stopped at Silver Falls. Which is close to Albany. We went on a hike called 11 waterfall hike. Both my mom and I enjoyed it, mostly for the nature scenes. I do think my dad enjoyed it but he was looking at more geological structures.

On the left is a picture of my favorite waterfall. On the right is a picture of me in a cave with a "well" on the ceiling.

When we got to Newport everyone was anxious to go to the beach. We had rented a little two housed building right across the street from the beach so during our down time it was fun to go play in the sand. Not everyone went swimming since we were in the upper part of Oregon we got ocean currents from the Artic Sea so the water was very chilly.
Well we were in Newport we saw a light house that had 107 steps all the way up. At the top you could get a little button that said "I survived the climb!" my dad got both my brother and I a button.

After we stayed in Newport for awhile we went to Crater Lake. We didn't do much at Crater Lake because it had been a long week and everybody wanted to get home but we did get to see these cool geologic structures. I don't remember the exact name. I do remember however that inside these is just air they are hollow.

All together it was a great trip and I'm looking forward to going back to Crater Lake (like my dad "promised") and hiking up Wizard Island. In tell next time.... peace out! :-)

Mt Baker cont

In previous posts, I wrote about our Rodeo Holliday trip that ended with a day at Heather Meadows on the side of Mt. Baker. The last notable thing about the trip was we had a great conversation about how science is supposed to work. At an earlier stop, I had pointed out the sun cups on top of the snow field, and mentioned that the how and why suncups form is a question that hasn't been completely answered. While exploring a snowbank Sam noted that there were suncup like features under the snowbank as well.

As we walked down the trail we made theories about how the suncup features would form on the bottom of a snowbank, and if the theories were testable. My theory was that it was based on the crystal structure of ice, but when pressed by Sam how I would test it, I did not have much of an answer. Her theory was the rocks under the snowbank (in the streams) initially forced the meltwater up over the rock creating the curved shape. Her test was to se if there was a correlation between cup location and size and an underlying rock.

At the next snowbank she ducked under to test her hypothesis

and sure enough there was a rough correlation between boulder location/size and suncup size. She repeated her observations at the next (last) snowfield we encountered and her subjective test held true. In the end she felt pretty proud she had come up with a theory that made more sense (to her) than her dad's and she was able to prove to him that she was right!

Mt Baker

In my previous post, I mentioned that on a Rodeo Holiday we went up to Heather Meadows on the Mt. Baker Highway. While we were there, we ran into a High School Geology class and the instructor pointed out to me that even though we couldn't see any mountains, there was some notable geology under foot.

Basically the canyon that forms drains Bagley Lake is a fault. On the west side of the lake is the Chilliwack River Terrane an accreted island arc, and on the east side are Mt. Baker Andesites. The Bagley Lakes trail parallels this drainage and crosses over a small dam, where you can see the difference in rocks from one side to the other.


Sam Looking at Mt. Baker Andesites



Sam Looking at Chilliwack Terrrane

  According to the USGS website on the Chilliwack Terrain, it is mostly phyllites and Greenstones that are thrust over the younger Nooksack Terrane.


From: Terranes of the North Cascades: Chilliwack River Terrane

We saw a couple of nice metamorphic rocks on our hike. Admittedly the weather wasn't conducive to finding the best examples (and I am not great at identifying metamorphic rocks), but there were three areas that had distinctly different outcrops



Greenstone with quarts veins

 

Metaconglomerate

 

Not sure with this one, originally thought it was a different metaconglomerate, but then thought about a fault Breccia, didn't know if that made sense. Help?

Though I certainly saw the difference between the rocks, I was in "Look at the Mountain and Glacial Features mode" so I'm not sure if I would have put together the drainage was a contact between terranes. So thank you to the unnamed HS teacher I met. It certainly made more sense to look at rocks than mountains on that foggy day.

Return of Fall

I am taking my Physical Geology students on a field trip today so I turned on the weather channel to see what the weather was going to be like. A screenshot from their website shows the weather forecast for our area.

A bit of good news for me! As we are headed for that little gap in the rain shown by the arrow!

 But another section of the map caught my eye, that light blue swatch of snow along the Washington/Canada border. This is the area around Mt. Baker Ski area, and when Sam, Stanton, and I took a trip up there during our Rodeo Holiday in mid-September spring had just arrived.

It had been a gorgeous warm fall, and on the beginning of the Rodeo Holiday trip we had taken advantage of weather and went to the San Juan Islands.

 Because the weather was nice, and we were about as close as we would ever be, I thought we'd extend our trip a day and go up the Mt. Baker Highway. Mt. Shuksan is one of those oft photographed Mountains, and I wanted to see it for myself. However, by the time we got to Heather Meadows Visitor Center, this was the view that greeted us.

We had actually intended to go all the way to Artist point, but the road to Artist Point did not open this year because the snow never melted. There were record snowfalls (over 900 inches) and when they went to plow the road in July there was still over 50 feet of snow over portions of the road. With all that snow, summer never really arrived. We saw one willow bush that was still in bud.

Because of the snow we went on two short hikes near the visitor center. One, The Fire and Ice trail, which has placards which presumably highlight geologic features of glaciers and volcanoes, only the placards had not been put in yet for the season. We did see lots of neat basalt columns.

  

The columns were tilted in many places 

  

so you could see the tops too. 

and a nice cirque/tarn at the end far of the trail.

Despite the lack of view and winter like weather, I had a good time looking at the rocks. In fact a HS geology class was up there at the same time we were, and the instructor told me about some geology to look for which I'll summarize in a future post.