Back to School

Today was the first day of school. Oh, wait, that was actually last Tuesday; today was the first day for other people. Those of us in the geology department who are starting our heavy classes began with a field trip last week. Today marked the start of normal classwork. This semester I am taking Stratigraphy/Sedimentology.... from my own dad, which should be interesting. I'm also taking Structural Geology and a class on GIS where I get to learn to make maps. To relax a bit, I'm taking a bowling class with a couple other geology buddies, a photography class to satisfy an art G.E. credit, and Bryce Mecham, who taught me Trombone lessons over the summer, has invited me to participate in the master class he teaches to all his Trombone students. That should be a lot of fun.

Meanwhile I already have a whole hell of a lot of work to do: reading for all my classes, reworking my field notebook from the field trip and preparing a map and poster, making another poster and writing an abstract for my senior project, updating my resumé for the upcoming Rocky Mountain Rendezvous (at which I hopefully will have a poster to present!) and proofreading a couple dozen of my classmates' resumés, and hopefully finding time to sit down and use my art skills (haha!) to update my dad's powerpoint diagrams so they're original and legal. Verdammte scheiße!

Okay, enough of that. The field trip was a lot of work, but a lot of fun! We looked at important geology in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, mostly related to building the mountains in the area. I won't go into a lot of detail, since those of you reading were either there and know what the pictures are all about, or don't care about the geology anyway. I'll just share some pictures, with a few comments:

This is the sign that goes to the above travertine terrace at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, which just happened to be on the way to the first field trip stop. With a name like Hymen Terrace, I had to take a picture. I couldn't have made this up if I tried!

This is The Great Unconformity. An unconformity is a surface that represents missing rock, rock that used to be there but isn't now. This one represents two billion years of Earth's history that has ben eroded away and is lost.

A layer of shale in a sandstone unit.

The view from the dam at Buffalo Bill Reservoir.

Brian operating the machinery they used to use to pull the plug on the dam.

This is one of my favorites. The vertical shapes represent bits of rock torn up by a major hurricane and stacked against each other. I'm sure Bush caused this hurricane, too, and made it only flood in prehistoric minority neighborhoods.

We made a non-geology stop to the site of the rescue of the Willie Handcart Company, which was pretty cool.

The view of a lake between two moraines, which are mounds of dirt deposited by glaciers. The ice used to be at least as high as where I stood to take this picture. The ice melted 10,000 years ago, due to the overabundance of SUVs.

Rebekah imitating Dr. Moore, and Steve being a goof.

A very cool outcrop that represents an ancient braided stream. Look closely at the tree on top of the outcrop on the far right; I got a very cool up-close picture of it:

Everyone sliding down the hill.

That should do it!

Emilíana Torrini's album comes out tomorrow, but I probably won't be able to get my hands on it for awhile; I doubt they'll have it at Wal-Mart. On the bright side, I found out that Apocalyptica is performing in Boise on October 22, and I'm finally going to go see them live! I should wait until near that date and write a post about Apocalyptica, but I doubt I can wait that long, so that might come much sooner. I spent a lot of time yesterday watching YouTube videos of them. It's been a long time since I've been this excited about an event....

Okay, now to that reading I've been putting off.