Geologic Map Day

As part of Earth Science Week, today is Geologic Map Day!

Long before I became a geologist, I had already developed a love of maps, a love dating back to a cross-country trip I took with my family when I was five. Besides the road maps we traveled with, I had a large wall map of the U.S., on which I kept track of the states I had visited and the roads that had taken me there—these were the major highways of the day, like U.S. Highway 40, now replaced by I-80 in most places. As time went on, I learned more about other types of maps, in part thanks to National Geographic, and eventually, maybe in high school, learned how to read topographic maps and came to know the basics of reading a geologic map.

I got my first real taste of geologic mapping at field camp. I found it fairly challenging: I was still getting up to speed on the tools in use—simple tools like a quadrant-based Brunton compass—and I was also becoming gradually familiar with following contacts up and down and around hills, and across broad and hot expanses, mostly of desert.

Geologic mapping really became fun for me on our second mapping project during the summer of 1978 (several early stories are listed here), when I found that I could do it well and that a good geologic map tells a story about what has taken place in an area during past geologic times. I learned then that preconceived ideas about how the geology of an area might be such and such, accompanied by ideas that certain processes or events couldn't have taken place, or that others must have taken place, often didn't fit with the story the rocks were trying to tell me.

As geologic mappers, we must follow the contacts, over hill and dale as necessary; we must check out, ascertain, and describe the textures and rock types; we must follow basic geologic principles, while observing obvious signs and vague hints in the rocks that point to the order of events as shown by the principles of superposition and cross-cutting relationships. If the rocks are telling us something unexpected—or something thought to be unlikely or even impossible—we must listen to them. For myself, geologic mapping became much easier after I was willing to give up my limited preconceived ideas about what I should find out there in the field.

Geology of the Conterminous United States,
Digital version at 1:2,500,000 scale, courtesy USGS.

A geologic map is a thing of true beauty—although I don't really like the use of gray for Quaternary in this particular rendition of the geology of the 48 states.

Map courtesy USGS Geologic maps of US states.

Maps and Mapping Resources:

Geologic Map Day resources at AGI

FAQs about geologic maps at AGI

What is a geologic map? USGS at National Park Service

Introduction to geologic mapping, by the National Cooperative Geologic Mapping Program at the USGS

Geologic maps of US states at the USGS

Geology of the Conterminous United States, at the USGS

Nevada geologic map at the USGS

A puzzle of geologic regions at the USGS

The Basin and Range province at the USGS, Tapestry of Time and Terrain

Tuff All Over: ESW field trip by the NBMG on Saturday or Sunday, October 20 or 21, 2012

Accretionary Wedge #50: The Fire at Field Camp

I had been thinking about doing a repost for this wedge—Accretionary Wedge #50: Field Camp/Trip Moments, being hosted by Evelyn Mervine over at Georneys—but realizing that the wedge is supposed to be about *one* fun moment, song, etc, put me into a tiny bit of a quandary  For me, field camp was a long, long time ago. By and large, many of the specifics of my memories of field camp have faded, and some (many?) of the specifics really shouldn't be reported online because they involve other people (plus or minus myself) doing things that shouldn't be reported without the permission of those involved, or shouldn't, perhaps, be reported at all. Not that we were the rowdiest bunch of field camp attendees of all time, or anything; I'm sure we weren't. As for fun field *trip* moments...well, there have been many, and a lot of those fall into the same category of things NSFO (not safe for online). I'll leave you to your imaginations. Or maybe I should just post sometime about shooting and rock throwing contests I've won out in the field...

Back to field camp. One fun or memorable moment or time [there, I've done it: used "fun" as an adjective three times now!] was at our last mapping project in the Swisshelm Mountains of Arizona, helping to fight a range or brush fire that had broken out across part of the map area. It was an exciting thing for a new field geologist to experience; at the same time, there was a certain tension involved: would we succeed? would our map area be ruined? (there were good and bad points to this latter possibility); would we get burned or injured in anyway? For the latter consideration, I think we were mostly in the invincible category at the time and probably didn't think very much about the danger to ourselves or about our overall safety, which was not treated as a huge deal back then the way it is now.

I was mostly involved in shoveling dirt onto hot spots around the edges, and in helping to move water containers to the lines. It was hot and smokey, the visibility was low, and my memory is tinged with orange. Memorable aspects of the day: we joined together in a common cause, we were fed dinner by ranchers also involved in the fire fighting, and the fire was stopped. I'm not sure whether we really cared that much about the range fire, at least not as much as the local ranchers or other fire fighters did, and we made jokes about hoping that the fire would at least burn down the cholla forest located on one of the east-west spurs of the north-south mountain—hoping at long last to be able to map that part of the spur, or to at least be able to walk through the area without massive attacks from stray cholla balls.

No such luck, though. The fire burned through the forest, blackening the cholla and dropping cholla balls all over the area, if anything making the forest more impassable than before.

Afterward, our mapping continued, under what turned out to be more difficult, not less difficult, circumstances: The limestone units and contacts in the upper hills had been reddened and obscured by fire retardant dropped from bombers.

P.S. There is some confusion between jumping cholla and teddy bear cholla, with the former being more likely to grab onto you and being restricted to the deep southwest (California and Arizona deserts), and the latter being somewhat likely to grab onto you and being found as far north as the Gilbert mining district northwest of Tonopah, NV.

This may be a jumping cholla rather than a teddy bear cholla, judging from the pictures shown at the previous USDA links. Keep this video in mind if you ever hear of anyone "flaming" chollas. It might be a case of revenge.

UPDATE 5Oct12: Possibly we stayed here, at Faraway Ranch. The location looks good, the view of the area on Google Maps looks okay, although I can't tell if the buildings are right, and the pond might be gone.

Seeking Exposure

USGS Photo: Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. Sunset on Cedar Ridge on South Kaibab Trail. July 12, 1957, by E.D. McKee.

Field camp had been planned to be a rather usual affair, to be located somewhere in the overgrown, fault-erratic littered, carbonates of the greater Blue Ridge Mountains of the Appalachians. It was an upcoming event that I really hadn't give much though to, other than to think things like, "Well, maybe we'll map even more faults down valley drainages for lack of good exposure." It wasn't that I wasn't looking forward to field camp, which would theoretically make me a geologist, at least more of one than those who hadn't yet attended, but I was thinking it would simply be more of the same thing: a few more trilobites and ever more limestones. I'd tell you that they were all Ordovician limestones, but you probably wouldn't believe that, and I'd only be exaggerating. I had, however, long since discovered that guessing Ordovician as an age on an invertebrate Palaeontology test gave better than even odds of guessing right, and Silurian and Devonian weren't far behind for good guesses in case you thought you'd overused Ordovician. (Always know how to play the odds.)

Also, serving a sentence term in an overgrown, kudzu-infested, hot and humid field camp wouldn't be getting me any closer to my ultimate goal, that of returning to the west coast as soon as possible. I was, after all, already six years past the unrealistic deadline I had set for myself when I was going on eleven years old.

Fortunately, due to unforeseen and overall unpleasant circumstances, I ended up taking two semesters off at the end of my junior year, and I ended up working downtown at the Smithsonian Institute (pushing papers, not rocks or fossils). It was my dad who suggested that I go to field camp somewhere in the west, a thoughtful suggestion made as a not-quite-desperate attempt to pull me out of the gray, cloudy and smoggy doldrums I had fallen into.

USGS Photo: Coconino Sandstone at O'Neill Butte,
viewed from Kaibab Trail, July 1957, by E.D. McKee

And so, the application process — of which I remember very little — began, and I applied to several field camps, finally deciding on a camp that would begin by hiking part way into and then out of the Grand Canyon, and would end up at a mapping project in the Swisshelms.

USGS Photo: Sunset Crater, by E.D. McKee. A real volcano!

Yes! Bright, brilliant geology everywhere, just the way I had always — after growing up near the Sierra Nevada — thought it should be. And rocks besides limestones! And volcanic rocks that weren't old and decrepit greenstones of nearly unimaginable age!

My geologic imagination was reignited at field camp in Arizona, and my goal to return west hardened. I came to Nevada a mere two years after my western, bright sunshiney, wide open field camp experience.

The story still makes me smile. ☺

The first rendition of this story for an unpublished Accretionary Wedge, Accretionary Wedge #11: Field Camp, includes a few stories.

This post is an entry to Accretionary Wedge #27, hosted this month by Lockwood at his favorite coffee shop (and blog of that name) Outside the Interzone. Go there to read about more significant geological experiences.

What I Do: Previous Post Links Version (PPLV)

This post is another attempt to show what I do, again, partly in response to Phizzle Dizzle's question, WTF do you do? What I've done here, is to link to already created posts that address this question at least in some way. This also organizes some of my posts in a format useful for me and maybe for others.

• Field work: Field Camp.
• Field work: Finding a thesis area, part 1.
• Field work: A bit on helicopter work.
• Field work: A few rules of the desert.
• Field work: Getting stuck and unstuck in mud.
• Field work: A bit about field schedules.
• Field work: An old field camp and a bit on people.
• Field work: A 'lost' gold mine.


• Geology Tools: My first Brunton compass.
• Geology Tools: At work and in the truck.
• Geology Tools: Just standing around.


• Exploration: Is this mineral a guide to gold?
• Exploration: How to find gold in Alaska - ha!
• Exploration: The people and the companies.


• Drilling: Some old drill sites.
• Drilling: A little bit on getting drill sites ready.
• Drilling: More on getting drill sites ready.
• Drilling: Logging rotary cuttings or chips.
• Drilling: A stuck rig.
• Drilling in winter 1: Too much snow.
• Drilling in winter 2: Very cold.


• Close encounters 1: Two mountain lions.
• Close encounters 2: One snake.
  

Accretionary Wedge #11: Field Camp

This post is a submission to the July Accretionary Wedge, being hosted by Ron Schott at his Geology Home Companion Blog.

Field camp for me was a long time ago and far, far away (well, it was far away at the time, a lot closer now). The year was 1973. I was in a slump due to various personal events, and was taking two quarters off from what was supposed to be my junior year in undergrad school. It being my junior year, I was scheduled to take field camp that summer, somewhere amongst the roadcuts, stream beds, and kudzu of southern Virginia. Having never much liked the east coast (well, sometimes, but I was getting impatient to get back into the west by this late date in my young life), I really wasn't looking forward to the experience.

My dad had a great idea: go to field camp somewhere in the west. So that's what I ended up doing, with field camp becoming my first step to moving back to the west that I loved. He flew out with me, after giving me his Brunton, and we spent a couple days going here and there around Tucson, including the Desert Museum and the Kitt Peak Observatory. We found what to this day remains my favorite Mexican restaurant, La Fuente, although I haven't eaten there now in more than 15 years.

During field camp, we traversed the entire state of Arizona, from the north at Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, to the east somewhere near Window Rock and possibly Kayenta, to some tiny place in central Arizona somewhere south of Winslow - ah, that was Young, Arizona - with a brief stop at San Manuel or Baghdad, a recoup day in Tucson, then down to southeastern Arizona, where we spent some time around Tombstone and Bisbee, and then spent most of our latter days mapping in the Chiricahua Mountains.

Lots of memories from field camp, but no photos. The first days we spent around the Grand Canyon, including an excruciating hike (for sea-level acclimated people like me) down to the Redwall Limestone - and back up. That was the tough part. Then, we did some stratigraphy and mapping at Wupatki, and a bit of mapping near Sunset Crater, and rode the lift to the top of San Francisco Mountain.

At field camp, I drank more Coors beer than I ever have since, finding out later that it was only favored by people from the east coast who couldn't buy it at the time, and was looked down on by most of the locals; I got stuck in the sand for the first time, and although I wasn't driving the Carryall, it wouldn't have helped at all if I had been; I learned how to pee exceptionally fast so no one would come over a cliff or around an outcrop and see me (we had 40 students, 10 of them women, and 10 professors, although not all the professors were there all at the same time, thankfully); I watched as poor Toya got a name for sitting on a cholla one hot afternoon somewhere in northern Arizona; I saw my first and last cock fight in that tiny place known as Young; and I helped fight a fire on our final mapping project in the Chiricahua Mountains - the cholla burned, but didn't disappear, and many outcrops were red from then on and difficult to distinguish from one another. We got fed by local ranchers that evening, and on the last day of mapping, G. Davis brought in a few cases of beer by helicopter. Later, we had an award night, with most awards being silly to hilarious (including the cholla incident), and all T.A.'s got thrown into the the local pond.

And I learned to sing: the Redwall's connected to the Supai, the Supai's connected to the Hermit, the Hermit's connected to the Coconino, the Coconino's connected to the Toroweap, the Toroweap's connected to the Kaibab, the Kaibab's connected to the Moenkopi, the Moenkopi's connected to the Shinarump, the Shinarump's connected to the Chinle, the Chinle's connected to the Moenave, the Moenave's connected to the Kayenta, the Kayenta's connected to the Navajo... it was at about this juncture that we gave up, having not spent too much time in anything above the Navajo Sandstone.

UPDATE: This Wedge was not published.