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!