It’s all over!

Six weeks of blood, sweat, and tears have brought us to our final day.  Okay, maybe not too much blood and maybe not a lot of tears, but they were definitely there!  We have successfully completed field camp!  The final week was a long chaotic one.  It started with our final mapping project and ended with our final mapping and written exams.

We were given our final mapping partners and spent four days out in the field mapping contacts and interpreting structure.  It was our largest mapping area.  The first day was spent walking around mostly confused trying to get comfortable and familiar with the area, but the second day was business as usual.  It is amazing how all the information we have learned so far is coming together.  We are all mapping robots now.  I think we all felt pretty comfortable after the fourth day and took our maps back to begin our cross sections and our first geologic field report.  I enjoyed writing the report, since we could tie the depositional and tectonic history of the region with what we actually observed in the field.  It felt like all the puzzle pieces were falling in place at just the right time.

Yesterday was our final mapping exam.  We were given only 6 hours in the field to map and then 3 and a half hours in a classroom at Snow College to complete our cross section and lithologic descriptions.  It was the most stressful thing I have done in geology so far and I am glad it is over and behind me.

Today was our final written exam, and I am also glad it is over.  Now all we have to do is pack, clean, and celebrate!  The best way to describe field camp was from previous field campers: “It is the best time that you never want to have again.”  I wasn’t entirely sure I believed them when they told me that, but I can now say that is a pretty accurate way to describe this whole experience.  However, I will miss the beautiful landscapes that we have been so lucky to map, camp, and study in.

We also want to give a special thanks to all of the instructors and teaching assistants that have helped us learn and survive this six week field camp.  Thank you to Dr. Tom Darrah, Dr. Dan Kelly, Dr. Cristina Millan, Dr. Terry Wilson, Will Blocher, Connor Gallagher, Tricia Hall, and Erica Maletic.  We literally could not have done this without you!  And thank you to everyone that cheered us on from at home!  Your faith and support in us kept us all going!  And that concludes OSU 2016 Geology Field Camp!

 

Great Basin and North Cross-Section
This week we had our last field trip of camp to the Nevada-Utah border and the north cross-section. We headed to the west after a weekend of working on our mapping assignment. In this new geologic area we saw one of the best field examples of a Metamorphic Core Complex (MCC). The low angle fault was a part of a shear zone that exhibits brittle deformation on the hanging wall and ductile deformation on the footwall. One of the goals of the field trip was to analyze the principle stresses of the two different types. We used data collected in the field to concluded they were apart of the same extensional forces! Being able to confirm a hypothesis from my own observations made this my favorite assignment so far! We also hiked up to the largest parasitic fold I’ve seen near the detachment fault so of course we had to get a picture.
Our last night camping was an interesting one as we attended a star gazing lecture at the Great Basin National Park Visitors center where rangers gave us a new history on the night sky, and we got to look up in their telescopes! Ranger Justin, who is attending OSU SES in the fall, taught us a lot about the stars and then gave us a tour of Lehman Caves the next day! The caves, at a cool 55 degrees, were a change of pace from the constant desert heat. Seeing all the columns formed after millions of years of growth put it in perspective the one inch a century growth of the stalagmites and stalactites forming from water interacting with the carbonate bedrock.

After an informational trip, we headed off to start another cross-section. This was one of the more challenging assignments and definitely took the longest. We used three landscape pages of graph paper for this cross section! Traveling through the cross section to describe lithologies and identify contacts was something we were familiar with now in week five. It was really satisfying seeing all we have learned come together. This area was very complex but with each assignment we are getting more confident in our skills.

We are in the home stretch and it is bittersweet to almost be finished. Just a few more assignments before we can call ourselves real geologists!

It’s all downhill from here … or in our case all uphill! 

This week consisted of another field trip, another mapping exercise, and a climb to Mt. Nebo’s summit.  What a week it was!  Tuesday morning we had a lecture on petroleum geology and then hit the road for our field trip.  Our first stop was at Thistle to view the 1983 landslide.  The slide has a volume of about 28 million cubic yards and is on average 40 feet thick.  It was amazing to see and learn about these destructive hazards.  We went to Little Cottonwood Canyon where we were able to see the evidence of glaciation, isostatic rebound, Lake Bonneville, and the Wasatch Fault at the Gilbert Geological View Point and we even stopped to see a place where the Wasatch Fault was excavated.  We were able to put our hands on an active fault, which was pretty darn cool!  We camped that night in Little Cottonwood Canyon, which was beautiful.  The second day of our field trip we went up to Alta where we had some fantastic views and learned more about intrusive igneous rocks and contact metamorphism.  Overall the field trip was an amazing experience and we learned a lot.

On Thursday morning we said goodbye to the first half instructors and TAs.  It was Dr. Wilson’s last morning of field camp, and it was very sad to see her go.  She has been an incredible teacher and role model over my past year at OSU and she has made a huge impact on so many others throughout her amazing career.  We will miss her greatly and wish her nothing but the best!  We also began a new mapping exercise.  The first day at the new area was a little overwhelming, but we began to feel better the second day of mapping after we felt more comfortable with the structures we were observing.  I think we all got a lot better at time management since we finished our assignments before the 9:00pm deadline on Saturday night instead of rushing until the last minute.

Today a group of us went up to Mt. Nebo for a climb.  I almost didn’t go because I really wanted to catch up on sleep, but I am glad I went.  It was an unforgettable experience.  Climbing up to 11,929 feet in elevation was not easy!  I really enjoyed the challenge and was so happy when we finally got to the summit!  It is a moment I will never forget!  My body is sore already though and we now need to prepare ourselves for our final field trip tomorrow to Snake Range.  I can’t believe we only have 17 more days left of field camp!  We have all improved exponentially at field geology and are so close to the finish line, I can almost taste it!…oh wait, that’s just sweat.  It’s only uphill from here!