Geo. Logy. Field. Trip

Ok first of all, I want to say that I think it's awesome that I'm 20 years old and I get to go on field trips. This is one of the joys of being an Earth Science Education major. Be jealous.

I'm grateful for the opportunity I had to go on a field trip this weekend. I had a lot of good times. I laughed a lot. I walked a lot. A lot of stuff happened. Here are a few of them (this will be an illustrated blog):

I got to go to the North American Museum of Ancient Life and see dinosaur skeletons, hold a dinosaur bone, keep a dinosaur bone, play in a sandbox, play in a cave, and almost get eaten by a shark.

I also got to split pieces of shale for 3 hours at "U-Dig Fossils" in the middle of freakin nowhere in the beautiful sun (which I had to get reaquainted with) and now I have a wonderful collection of trilobite fossils (Elrathia, Asaphiscus, and Peronopis species if you must know). I also had a gihugant blister...make that two gihugant blisters....and a sunburn which I loved because it meant that I was actually in sun. I temporarily lost my camera so I don't have any pictures of this adventure. Sad...I know.

We camped on a sand dune...also in the middle of freakin nowhere. And I saw a pretty sunset.

I travelled on a gravel road for a few hours to another middle of nowhere (I wasn't aware of the extreme lack of "somewheres" in Utah. What a great state). At first I thought my ride was like a version of the Indiana Jones ride in Disneyland but then it got worse. You must understand that I was in the back seat of a 15-passenger van so my version of the trip was a little bumpier than everyone else's. Anyways, it was a gravel road that we were travelling on. We geology majors were giddy with excitement as we thought about our next adventure "in the field". And then the vans stopped. A rock had bounced off the trailer and blew out the back window of the van in front of us. We weren't going to let that stop us. We unhitched the trailer and then head up a different gravel road. I wondered why we left the trailer behind but my wondering was soon shot down. I didn't even know they had roads this bumpy. I'm pretty sure I could have gotten a concussion considering how many times my head hit the window and ceiling. Freakin heck. We finally got to our destination, parked the vans, and there it was...the finest example of contact metamorphism I have ever seen. It was beautiful. That's all I'm gonna say.

And I got some pretty pictures there.

The next day we went on a hike and studied more fossils and rock formations. Here's the view.

We also went to a playa lake, which is pretty much just a dried up lake. But on the way there we drove over what used to be the lake and the ground was pure white in the middle of mountains. If felt like we were floating and kinda creeped me out. But it was cool. And then we got to the lake and there was a stinkin skull sitting by the lake. For realsville. Aren't those only in fake western movies with John Wayne? Apparently not. Cree. Pee.

You can't really see it that well but there's the skull.

One of the joys of this trip was the people. My van in particular was a hoot and half. They were fans of Nacho Libre and quoted it in almost every conversation. How much better could things get? I don't even know. Fun people those geologists...

I should also inform you that from Thursday morning until Saturday afternoon, I was nowhere near a toilet or any form of running water. It sucked. But everything else? Top shelf. The end.