Journeys in the Back of Beyond: Adventures on the Colorado Plateau

 

Devils Garden in Arches National Park

What is an adventure anymore? 

I ask my students to describe the meaning in one of my offbeat assignments in my geology courses and I get all kinds of answers. Many will describe a experience from our local educational camp in the Sierra Foothills, or an excursion they took to a local river or lake. Many of them have almost never left the city limits, and camping in the Sierra to them is terra incognita, far beyond their experience or expectation. 

I've always known I've had a blessed life in many ways, and what has made it especially rich is the privilege of leading my students on true adventures way out there in America's Back of Beyond, the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range country. I've just returned home from one of those journeys.

In Zion National Park

"Back of Beyond" is informally defined by Merriam-Webster as "a place that is very far from other places and people: a remote place". There are literary connections in the writings of Edward Abbey and C.J. Box, and a 1954 documentary from Australia. It is also the name of one of the finest bookstores in Utah. Outside of Alaska, some of the wildest and remote country in the United States is indeed the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin, and to me it is some of the finest scenery in the world, and its geological story is fascinating. And...the land is endangered.

I'd like you to experience this country, if only through narrative and photography. I hope you will join me over these next few weeks as I describe our experience in a series of blog posts, and perhaps understand why we need to take action to protect the heritage of these fragile lands.

Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park

As usual, my ambitions often exceed my time allocation, so forgive me if delays occur in new postings!

What was the Greatest Adventure You Ever Had? Dreams, Hopes, and Memories in Pandemic Times

 

The first moment of the greatest adventure of my life

What's the greatest adventure you've ever had? And as you consider your future, what is the greatest adventure you ever hope to have?

I've been thinking about that this week, as we possibly, hopefully, approach the end of the pandemic that has caused so much tragedy and heartbreak. I'm teaching a "summer" class that actually ends four days before the official first day of summer, and in the new world of remote teaching, I've had my students submit an occasional online response to geology-related questions. Sometimes my questions deviate a bit from geology though, and this week I asked them what "adventure" means to them, and to recount the greatest adventure they've ever had. And realizing that some may not have had any identifiable adventures, I ask what adventure they would like to have someday.

Redwall Cavern, deep in the Grand Canyon. It is said that 5,000 people could fit in here.

I get lots of interesting answers, because a community college class roster is filled with people of many diverse ages and background. Sometimes they describe a hike in the local mountains, or a walk along the coast. Others describe some harrowing and dangerous life experiences related to the Peace Corps or military service. Because it is an online discussion, the give and take makes for fascinating reading.

Much of my motive in asking such questions is to help them realize that geology, in a way unlike many other disciplines, is an adventure in and of itself. The experience of finding a gemstone in the rough, uncovering a dinosaur bone, feeling an earthquake, encountering a flash flood, or witnessing a volcanic eruption are unforgettable adventures, even if there are negative consequences and dangers. That, after all, is part of what makes an experience into a true adventure.

Standing waves at Hermit Creek Rapids

Some people are content to live lives without 'adventure'. They are happy enough to find a career that satisfies, and prefer to spend their free time at home reading and gardening and the like. Who needs the stress and high blood pressure after all? I understand that perfectly well, but it sure didn't feel very good to have that life imposed on us by a global pandemic. It's the season when I would normally be preparing to take my students on some real adventures, across the southwestern states and the Colorado Plateau, or up north to the Cascades, Glacier and Yellowstone. Some years we explore Hawaii or Canada, or Australia. Instead, I am giving zoom presentations and grading online submissions, and dreaming of being outside.

I got a message from a friend that unleashed a flood of memories of the greatest adventure I ever had. It was innocuous enough: she asked if I had a recording of a community lecture I gave a few years ago about rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I didn't actually remember if a recording existed, but I found it online and had a look. In a short moment I was transported back to the time eight years ago when my brother and his family invited me to join them on the 17-day adventure. I was 56 years old at the time, and was at one of those middle-age moments when one begins to wonder if the big adventures are coming to an end. It turned out that the answer was a firm 'no'. 

Scouting Lava Falls, the worst or second-worst rapid on the river depending on the flow. Yes, I capsized and rode it all in the water. Check my blog series below for the You-Tube of the moment.

I wrote an extensive blog series about the trip called "Into the Great Unknown" that will give you a sense of what it is like to explore one of the largest remaining wilderness lands left on our continent, and what it is like to face your own mortality and fears (there were indeed a few terrifying moments in an otherwise glorious time). But if you want a short and quick visual exploration, you can see my community lecture at this link: https://share.yosemite.edu/go=1EVB. I recall it was the most fun I've had giving a public lecture.

And just for the fun of it, here is the video of the final musical moments of our 17-day journey. We had to delay our landing at Diamond Creek because other rafters were getting on the river and space was limited.

So, as the pandemic begins to fade (if people don't get stupid when we are so close), what adventures will you seek? What are the places you want to see? What do you want to experience? What's on your bucket list, and what are doing to make it happen? And what was the greatest adventure you ever had? There is lots of room in the comments section to share your memories or dreams for the future.

50th Anniversary of the Landing of Humans on the Moon, and the Human Adventure

The full Moon of July 16, 2019 

Today marks the 50th year since humans walked on the moon for the first time. The landing was an important part of my own life, and whenever I am reminded, I am taken back to my childhood. In 1969, I was at a scout camp high in the southern Sierra Nevada. I'm not sure whose screw-up it was that our troop was in the middle of nowhere at the moment of one of humanity's greatest achievements, but that was the way it was. I can remember walking through the pinyon forest between the dining hall and our campsite (they were pretty far apart). I was alone at the time, and I heard the camp loudspeakers crackle on (which was unusual; we usually only heard "taps" and other bugle calls, or the emergency alarm). I heard a scratchy voice say "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind", and I realized that humanity had just accomplished something big. Something that had never been done before. It had a profound effect on that scrawny kid in the pinyon forest at Circle B Scout Ranch.

I grew up in the early sixties fascinated by astronomy. But it was also frustrating that things were so distant and so unreachable by we earthbound humans. Our own moon seemed impossibly distant, despite the objective laid forth by JFK that we would reach it before 1970.

The other planets in our own Solar System were small disks in our best telescopes, and the moons that circled them mere points of light. At the time I had a postcard from the Palomar Observatory that had pictures of Jupiter and Saturn similar to those below. I spent hours staring at them with a hand lens and later on a microscope, hoping I could make out more detailed features to no avail. The other stars? They were so distant that even in our best telescopes they looked no different, just spots of light. The more I learned about the stars and galaxies of the cosmos, the more impossible it seemed that we could ever reach them. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins changed that. They are heroes of the best kind, courageous men who risked everything to do something that had never before been done.

Of course, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins didn't build the Apollo Spacecraft, or the gigantic Saturn 5 rocket that sent them into space. They didn't navigate to the moon by themselves. There were thousands of engineers and scientists who did the calculations, designed the modules, and shepherded the spacecraft to the moon, and even more importantly, back home again. The vast majority of scientists and engineers were the product of an educational system that was the best the world had ever seen. And they were driven by a communal sense of purpose. They worked together towards a common goal, and their discoveries and innovations radically changed the world we live in.

Of course our cynicism allows us to point out that once we beat the Russians to the moon, the public pretty much lost interest in the space program. NASA started to fade from the public consciousness, but the system was in place that allowed a series of successful projects that have changed the way we view the cosmos and our place in it. We never sent astronauts to Mars, but we sent rovers. We sent the Voyagers to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In a wonderful case of over-engineering, the spacecraft outlived their expected missions by decades. Voyager 1 is in its 42nd year of operation...it is still sending data from 16.4 billion miles away (20 light-hours) with an onboard computer that is probably less powerful than one of those Commodore 64 models that I wrote my thesis on in 1985. It recently made a course correction using thrusters that hadn't been fired since 1980. Voyager 2 is also continuing to operate.

Today we see our Solar System in stunning detail, in a way that would have been unbelievable to that child of the sixties. We know the surface of Mars in more detail than we know the surface of our own planet. We've explored the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, discovering strange worlds with vast oceans hidden beneath icy crusts, volcanoes of molten sulfur, and lakes, rivers and oceans made of liquid methane. We've peered through the clouds of Venus, and just a few years ago, we photographed and analyzed the hidden side of Mercury that we missed on the first mission three decades ago. We saw Pluto up close for the first time only a few years ago, and we've orbited the two largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres.

The Hubble Space Telescope was the other game-changer. It has shown us the rest of the Universe with a clarity that was unimaginable four decades ago. We can see star nurseries and nascent star systems that provide us visual evidence of how our own Solar System formed. The Hubble and other high-tech units have now seen objects that formed a mere half billion years after the origin of the Universe itself 14 billion years ago. And we are only a few years away from the launch of an even more powerful telescope, the Webb Space Telescope.

This is the heritage of a country that undertook an audacious program of exploration under the leadership of JFK, and which succeeded through the exploits of courageous men like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. What do our children dream of today? Is our education system inspiring them to strive for incredible things, or is it teaching them to be unquestioning automatons in a factory or office? Are we teaching them to be curious about the world, or teaching them how to take a multiple-choice assessment test?

I had the privilege today of offering a lecture on "Space Rocks" at the public library in Hemet, California. The audience turned to be mostly young women 6 to 9 years of age, so I changed gears and made it more of a talk about the adventures of scientific research, and how anyone, including them, could be the vanguard of our next journeys into the unknown.

We are in a time of even greater challenges as humans. We are entering a dark age where the US government is retreating into willful ignorance instead of the leading the world in the face of a planetary crisis. We are now living with the consequences of climate change that were predicted thirty years ago, and we are spiraling into even worse consequences in the near future. There are days when I feel absolute despair at the stupidity and greed of those in charge, and profound sadness at the gullibility of those who blindly accept the deceptions and lies of the present administration. I can't accept that our explorations are ending in a morass of corruption and lies.

In the words of the immortal folksinger Lee Hays (and no doubt others), all things, like a kidney stone, will pass. I believe that adventure still awaits us as a people. As I start a new school year next month, I am as excited as I have ever been to have the opportunity to introduce my students to an incredible Universe. And almost every teacher I know feels the same way.

This is a highly abridged and updated version of a post from August 25, 2012 marking the passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong.

49th Anniversary of the Landing of Humans on the Moon: Science, History, and the Doing of Big Things

The Moon tonight, July 20th, 2018

Today marks the 49th year since humans walked on the moon for the first time. The landing was an important part of my own life, and whenever I am reminded, I am taken back to my childhood. In 1969, I was at a scout camp high in the southern Sierra Nevada. I'm not sure whose screw-up it was that our troop was in the middle of nowhere at the moment of one of humanity's greatest achievements, but that was the way it was. I can remember walking through the pinyon forest between the dining hall and our campsite (they were pretty far apart). I was alone at the time, and I heard the camp loudspeakers crackle on (which was unusual; we usually only heard "taps" and other bugle calls, or the emergency alarm). I heard a scratchy voice say "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind", and I realized that humanity had just accomplished something big. Something that had never been done before. It had a profound effect on that scrawny kid in the pinyon forest at Circle B Scout Ranch.

I grew up in the early sixties fascinated by astronomy. But it was also frustrating that things were so distant and so unreachable by we earthbound humans. Our own moon seemed impossibly distant, despite the objective laid forth by JFK that we would reach it before 1970.

The other planets in our own Solar System were small disks in our best telescopes, and the moons that circled them mere points of light. At the time I had a postcard from the Palomar Observatory that had pictures of Jupiter and Saturn similar to those below. I spent hours staring at them with a hand lens and later on a microscope, hoping I could make out more detailed features to no avail. The other stars? They were so distant that even in our best telescopes they looked no different, just spots of light. The more I learned about the stars and galaxies of the cosmos, the more impossible it seemed that we could ever reach them. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins changed that. They are heroes of the best kind, courageous men who risked everything to do something that had never before been done.

Of course, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins didn't build the Apollo Spacecraft, or the gigantic Saturn 5 rocket that sent them into space. They didn't navigate to the moon by themselves. There were thousands of engineers and scientists who did the calculations, designed the modules, and shepherded the spacecraft to the moon, and even more importantly, back home again. The vast majority of scientists and engineers were the product of an educational system that was the best the world had ever seen. And they were driven by a communal sense of purpose. They worked together towards a common goal, and their discoveries and innovations radically changed the world we live in.

Of course our cynicism allows us to point out that once we beat the Russians to the moon, the public pretty much lost interest in the space program. NASA started to fade from the public consciousness, but the system was in place that allowed a series of successful projects that have changed the way we view the cosmos and our place in it. We never sent astronauts to Mars, but we sent rovers. We sent the Voyagers to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (in a wonderful case of over-engineering, the spacecraft outlived their expected missions by decades). Not even two weeks ago, Voyager 2 passed its 41th year of operation...it is still sending data from 9 billion miles away with an onboard computer that is probably less powerful than one of those Commodore 64 models that I wrote my thesis on in 1985. Voyager 1 is also continuing to operate.

Today we see our Solar System in stunning detail, in a way that would have been unbelievable to that child of the sixties. We know the surface of Mars in more detail than we know the surface of our own planet. We've explored the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, discovering strange worlds with vast oceans hidden beneath icy crusts, volcanoes of molten sulfur, and lakes, rivers and oceans made of liquid methane. We've peered through the clouds of Venus, and just a few years ago, we photographed and analyzed the hidden side of Mercury that we missed on the first mission three decades ago. We saw Pluto up close for the first time only two years ago, and we've orbited the two largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres.

The Hubble Space Telescope was the other game-changer. It has shown us the rest of the Universe with a clarity that was unimaginable four decades ago. We can see star nurseries and nascent star systems that provide us visual evidence of how our own Solar System formed. The Hubble and other high-tech units have now seen objects that formed a mere half billion years after the origin of the Universe itself 14 billion years ago. And we are only a few years away from the launch of an even more powerful telescope, the Webb Space Telescope.

This is the heritage of a country that undertook an audacious program of exploration under the leadership of JFK, and which succeeded through the exploits of courageous men like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. What do our children dream of today? Is our education system inspiring them to strive for incredible things, or is it teaching them to be unquestioning automatons in a factory or office? Are we teaching them to be curious about the world, or teaching them how to take a multiple-choice assessment test?

Our teachers and professors are working in a toxic environment these days. How else to explain things like a political party in Texas in 2012 that added a plank in their platform that says "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."?  Is that what we have come to?

I refuse to believe that. I believe that adventure still awaits us as a people. As I start a new school year next month, I am as excited as I have ever been to have the opportunity to introduce my students to an incredible Universe. And almost every teacher I know feels the same way.

It is a sense of adventure that Neil Armstrong would have understood...

This is an abridged and updated version of a post from August 25, 2012 marking the passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong.

Looking Back at Ten Years of Geotripping: "They're, uh...They're Not a Very Exciting People, Those Geologists"

I borrowed the quote in the title from a Cracked.com article (referenced below) as a starting point to some musings about the adventures in life that are possible for people who don't happen to be astronauts or Himalayan mountain-climbers. If there is any theme that has run through my ten years as a geoblogger, it is about the adventures that geologists and geo-fans get to have as a result of having that bit of extra geo-knowledge about the regions and landscapes they see and live in. I've been digging up the archives, and this was one of my favorite posts in 2011...

From May 9, 2011:

What does "adventure" mean to you?

This is an adrenaline rush...

I suppose that an adventure is just about anything that breaks up the routine and exposes you to something new. For a lot of people I am guessing that adventure has a lot to do with an adrenaline rush: I think of motorcycling, rock-climbing, bungee-jumping or rides at an amusement park.

Others may think of adventure as exploration to the outer edges of space, beyond the reach of civilization, of the deep sea, the kinds of adventures that we might read about in National Geographic or history books. But how many people actually participate in that kind of adventure?

Other adventures come out of mythology; the quest, the dangerous journey with an uncertain outcome. We don't see so many of those, but I wonder if a mythological narrative will arise from recent events concerning Osama Bin Laden and those who sought to capture or kill him.

We live most of our adventures through the lives of someone else, in books and movies and so on. The vast majority of us just don't have the resources, or time, or health to be out on the cutting edge of human experience. It's for that reason that I want to talk about learning about geology as an adventure, in all of the best ways and something that almost anyone can do in some way. I think I started musing on this topic because of a cute item from Cracked.com. They do some hilarious stuff, but the last line of this post was, eh, whatever...

"They're, uh ... they're not a very exciting people, those geologists."

I grant you that I am not a very exciting person, in person. But I wouldn't trade my life as a geologist and teacher with anyone. What makes geology such an adventure? I can think of many examples, and here are a few:

Geologic hazards like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have been fodder for movies and novels for decades. Geologists actually get to study these things as a part of their career. What a thrill to work on the flanks of an active volcano, monitoring and predicting future activity. There is certainly an adrenaline rush when standing next to flowing lava! A nice bonus? They sometimes save lives with their research. The story of the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo in the Phillippines is a nice example. The eruption was the second largest event of the 20th century, and killed some 800 people. On the other hand, tens of thousands of lives were saved because of a timely warning to evacuate the region. This is all the more remarkable considering that during the height of the eruption, a typhoon swept into the island (it was actually the cause of the majority of fatalities). Even bad screenwriters and novelists don't even think to throw typhoons on top of volcanic eruptions!

Have you ever wanted to be on an adventure to find buried treasure? Geologists and rockhounders alike know the thrill of uncovering a rare crystal. It's hard to be in the field all the time without finding the occasional opportunity to search for quartz, garnet, topaz, or any other number of beautiful expressions of atomic-level symmetry. It's the rare geologist who doesn't have a small treasure trove of gemstones (or here) on a mantle or bookcase shelf.

What about that childhood dream of finding a dinosaur? There is nothing quite like uncovering the bones of a creature that lived more than 65 million years ago. If you spend enough time in the right regions of the world, and you have enough geological background to know the age and nature of the rocks you are exploring, you can know that thrill (I'm not talking about a college education; there are geo-guides for the layperson that are full of accessible info about every region of the countryside). It's happened to my students (and myself) a fair number of times over the years. And there's no feeling quite like it. I was whooping like a kid (and promptly called the Utah Geological Survey; there's a right way to do these things).
Did you ever imagine owning a time machine, of traveling back in time? An understanding of the basic principles of geology is the tool geologists use to time-travel. It's effective; a bit of knowledge, and you can lay your hand on the surface that reveals incredible moments in the history of the world. In the picture below, I have my hand on the moment that the dinosaurs went extinct (via one of the most likely hypotheses). It is the iridium layer at Gubbio, Italy, where the Alvarez father and son team discovered evidence of a massive asteroid impact.
In the other photo, we are looking at the moment that the Long Valley Caldera erupted at the north end of the Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra around 790,000 years ago. More than 125 cubic miles of hot rhyolite ash filled the atmosphere and blanketed the region many feet deep, killing all living things. Do you need a movie to imagine cataclysmic events? It's a whole new experience to lay your hands on the moment that such events actually happened.
A basic understanding of geology enriches one's life. National Parks are nice places to see scenery. A place like Yellowstone is interesting because you see bison and geysers. It is fascinating when you come to understand the nature of the "supervolcano" caldera eruption that produced the rocks and the active magma chamber that causes the geothermal activity. A visit to Yosemite is always nice, but it takes on a whole new dimension when you realize you are walking about inside an ancient volcanic complex not unlike Yellowstone's. You are exploring the underside of a volcano!

During your travels this summer, stop by the visitor center and pick up a "Geology of..." book and read it. It can enrich your experience, and turn a vacation into a real adventure! Or, if you are in the Modesto region, consider taking a summer field study class in geology or archaeology at MJC (more on this soon!).

The Doing of Big Things...Remembering Neil Armstrong (and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, and a cast of thousands)

My condolences to the family of Neil Armstrong, who died today at the age of 82. Hearing of his passing took me right back to childhood. In 1969, I was at scout camp high in the southern Sierra Nevada. I'm not sure whose screw-up it was that our troop was in the middle of nowhere at the moment of one of humanity's greatest achievements, but that was the way it was. I can remember walking through the pinyon forest between the dining hall and our campsite (they were pretty far apart). I was alone at the time, and I heard the camp loudspeakers crackle on (which was unusual; we usually only heard "taps" and other bugle calls, or the emergency alarm). I heard a scratchy voice say "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind", and I realized that humanity had just accomplished something big. Something that had never been done before. It had a profound effect on that scrawny kid in the pinyon forest at Circle B Scout Ranch.

I grew up in the early sixties fascinated by astronomy. But it was also frustrating that things were so distant and so unreachable by we earthbound humans. Our own moon seemed impossibly distant, despite the objective laid forth by JFK that we would reach it by 1970.

The other planets in our own Solar System were small disks in our best telescopes, and the moons that circled them mere points of light. At the time I had a postcard from the Palomar Observatory that had pictures of Jupiter and Saturn similar to those below. I spent hours staring at them with a handlens and later on a microscope, hoping I could make out more detailed features to no avail. The other stars? They were so distant that even in our best telescopes they looked no different, just spots of light. The more I learned about the stars and galaxies of the cosmos, the more impossible it seemed that we could ever reach them. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins changed that. They are heroes of the best kind, courageous men who risked everything to do something that had never before been done.

Of course, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins didn't build the Apollo Spacecraft, or the gigantic Saturn 5 rocket that sent them into space. They didn't navigate to the moon by themselves. There were thousands of engineers and scientists who did the calculations, designed the modules, and shepherded the spacecraft to the moon, and even more importantly, back home again. The vast majority of scientists and engineers were the product of an educational system that was the best the world had ever seen. And they were driven by a communal sense of purpose. They worked together towards a common goal, and their discoveries and innovations radically changed the world we live in.

Of course our cynicism allows us to point out that once we beat the Russians to the moon, the public pretty much lost interest in the space program. NASA started to fade from the public consciousness, but the system was in place that allowed a series of successful projects that have changed the way we view the cosmos and our place in it. We never sent astronauts to Mars, but we sent rovers. We sent the Voyagers to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (in a wonderful case of over-engineering, the spacecraft outlived their expected missions by decades). Not even two weeks ago, Voyager 2 passed its 35th year of operation...it is still sending data from 9 billion miles away with an onboard computer that is probably less powerful than one of those Commodore 64 models that I wrote my thesis on in 1985. Voyager 1 is also continuing to operate.

Today we see our Solar System in stunning detail, in a way that would have been unbelievable to that child of the sixties. We know the surface of Mars in more detail than we know the surface of our own planet. We've explored the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, discovering strange worlds with vast oceans hidden beneath icy crusts, volcanoes of molten sulfur, and lakes, rivers and oceans made of liquid methane. We've peered through the clouds of Venus, and just a few years ago, we photographed and analyzed the hidden side of Mercury that we missed on the first mission three decades ago.

The Hubble Space Telescope was the other game-changer. It has shown us the rest of the Universe with a clarity that was unimaginable four decades ago. We can see star nurseries and nascent star systems that provide us visual evidence of how our own Solar System formed. The Hubble and other high-tech units have now seen objects that formed a mere half billion years after the origin of the Universe itself 14 billion years ago.

This is the heritage of a country that undertook an audacious program of exploration under the leadership of JFK, and which succeeded through the exploits of courageous men like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. What do our children dream of today? Is our education system inspiring them to strive for incredible things, or is it teaching them to be unquestioning automatons in a factory or office? Are we teaching them to be curious about the world, or teaching them how to take a multiple-choice assessment test?

Our teachers and professors are working in a toxic environment these days. How else to explain things like a political party in Texas that added a plank in their platform that says "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."?  Is that what we have come to?

I refuse to believe that. I believe that adventure still awaits us as a people. As I start a new school year at an institution that is operating on 70% of the funding it had four years ago, I am as excited as I have ever been to have the opportunity to introduce my students to an incredible Universe. And almost every teacher I know feels the same way.

It is a sense of adventure that Neil Armstrong would have understood...

Living an Adventurous Life: Geologists...Really?

What does "adventure" mean to you?

This is an adrenaline rush...

I suppose that an adventure is just about anything that breaks up the routine and exposes you to something new. For a lot of people I am guessing that adventure has a lot to do with an adrenaline rush: I think of motorcycling, rock-climbing, bungee-jumping or rides at an amusement park.

Others may think of adventure as exploration to the outer edges of space, beyond the reach of civilization, of the deep sea, the kinds of adventures that we might read about in National Geographic or history books. But how many people actually participate in that kind of adventure?

Other adventures come out of mythology; the quest, the dangerous journey with an uncertain outcome. We don't see so many of those, but I wonder if a mythological narrative will arise from recent events concerning Osama Bin Laden and those who sought to capture or kill him.

We live most of our adventures through the lives of someone else, in books and movies and so on. The vast majority of us just don't have the resources, or time, or health to be out on the cutting edge of human experience. It's for that reason that I want to talk about learning about geology as an adventure, in all of the best ways and something that almost anyone can do in some way. I think I started musing on this topic because of a cute item from Cracked.com. They do some hilarious stuff, but the last line of this post was, eh, whatever...

"They're, uh ... they're not a very exciting people, those geologists."

I grant you that I am not a very exciting person, in person. But I wouldn't trade my life as a geologist and teacher with anyone. What makes geology such an adventure? I can think of many examples, and here are a few:

Geologic hazards like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have been fodder for movies and novels for decades. Geologists actually get to study these things as a part of their career. What a thrill to work on the flanks of an active volcano, monitoring and predicting future activity. There is certainly an adrenaline rush when standing next to flowing lava! A nice bonus? They sometimes save lives with their research. The story of the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo in the Phillippines is a nice example. The eruption was the second largest event of the 20th century, and killed some 800 people. On the other hand, tens of thousands of lives were saved because of a timely warning to evacuate the region. This is all the more remarkable considering that during the height of the eruption, a typhoon swept into the island (it was actually the cause of the majority of fatalities). Even bad screenwriters and novelists don't even think to throw typhoons on top of volcanic eruptions!

Have you ever wanted to be on an adventure to find buried treasure? Geologists and rockhounders alike know the thrill of uncovering a rare crystal. It's hard to be in the field all the time without finding the occasional opportunity to search for quartz, garnet, topaz, or any other number of beautiful expressions of atomic-level symmetry. It's the rare geologist who doesn't have a small treasure trove of gemstones (or here) on a mantle or bookcase shelf.

What about that childhood dream of finding a dinosaur? There is nothing quite like uncovering the bones of a creature that lived more than 65 million years ago. If you spend enough time in the right regions of the world, and you have enough geological background to know the age and nature of the rocks you are exploring, you can know that thrill (I'm not talking about a college education; there are geo-guides for the layperson that are full of accessible info about every region of the countryside). It's happened to my students (and myself) a fair number of times over the years. And there's no feeling quite like it. I was whooping like a kid (and promptly called the Utah Geological Survey; there's a right way to do these things).
Did you ever imagine owning a time machine, of traveling back in time? An understanding of the basic principles of geology is the tool geologists use to time-travel. It's effective; a bit of knowledge, and you can lay your hand on the surface that reveals incredible moments in the history of the world. In the picture below, I have my hand on the moment that the dinosaurs went extinct (via one of the most likely hypotheses). It is the iridium layer at Gubbio, Italy, where the Alvarez father and son team discovered evidence of a massive asteroid impact.
In the other photo, we are looking at the moment that the Long Valley Caldera erupted at the north end of the Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra around 790,000 years ago. More than 125 cubic miles of hot rhyolite ash filled the atmosphere and blanketed the region many feet deep, killing all living things. Do you need a movie to imagine cataclysmic events? It's a whole new experience to lay your hands on the moment that such events actually happened.
A basic understanding of geology enriches one's life. National Parks are nice places to see scenery. A place like Yellowstone is interesting because you see bison and geysers. It is fascinating when you come to understand the nature of the "supervolcano" caldera eruption that produced the rocks and the active magma chamber that causes the geothermal activity. A visit to Yosemite is always nice, but it takes on a whole new dimension when you realize you are walking about inside an ancient volcanic complex not unlike Yellowstone's. You are exploring the underside of a volcano!

During your travels this summer, stop by the visitor center and pick up a "Geology of..." book and read it. It can enrich your experience, and turn a vacation into a real adventure! Or, if you are in the Modesto region, consider taking a summer field study class in geology or archaeology at MJC (more on this soon!).