Where in the World??

If you haven't quite noticed yet from the few entries I've had in this blog, Geotripper and my wife have played extremely important geologic roles during my formative years of young adulthood. My wife, has been a rock of support for me and an excellent adventurous spirit that enjoys exploring North America as much as me. Geotripper... well he was the glint in my life that can best be likened to a partially visible topaz face mostly buried in rhyolite in the middle of Utah. He, like the topaz, spurred a desire in me to dig deeper and uncover the beauty and stories trapped within the geology of the American west. Because of Dinochic and Geotripper, ( and very caring parents that exposed me to many roadtrips as a child) I can embolden many of the following categories within Geotrippers meme of 100 things I've done. It looks to be 53, or so of those things, as a matter of fact. Not bad for 30 years of existence! I'm just happy to have most of the experiences on "film". I've tried adding my photographic evidence to as many experiences as possible. I hope you enjoy.
1. See an erupting volcano
2. See a glacier
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage (I'll have to dig for the film of the '97 Tuolumne & San Joaquin floods)
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia)
8. Explore a subsurface mine.
9. See an ophiolite, (still looking for pics)
11. A slot canyon (it'll have to do until I can find childhood pics). Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana (and look what's around my neck... sigh.
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic. We have an amazingly old gingko at Turlock High, and I always take my students out observe to its beauty, and then make leaf rubbings to compare to a gingko fossil. These pics are a bit blurry. Sorry.
18. A field of glacial erratics
19. A caldera (it's not Yellowstone!)
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high (camera was stowed as to not get sand in it)
22. A recently formed fault scarp (I know I have the pic somewhere!!!)
23. A megabreccia
25. A natural bridge
27. A glacial outwash plain (photos to come)
28. A sea stack (photos to come)
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals
33. Petrified trees
34. Lava tubes (I think you'll like this pic)
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back (I haven't gone up & down yet... someday when I'm not the driver for the trip)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale (No ariel pics yet).
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing (I was an infant the last time here)
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone (hmmm, where did these pics wander off too?)
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress) (need to scan old pics from '92)
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0
84. Find a trilobite (it's my wife at a great collecting spot)
85. Find gold, however small the flake
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope

Whoa! I knew my wife would test me... but on a real test?

Apparently the universe has just sent several messages to me all wrapped-up in one drop-your jaw, amazingly crazy story of my wife (above in Death Valley, 2005) testing me... and I mean this literally. She actually appeared on a test I just took. Not a mere apparition like Jesus on toast. Not an apparition at all. This was a real angelic infiltration that had been conjured four years ago by an amazing geologist, photographer, storyteller and apparent sorcerer, Geotripper.

In future posts I'll have to tell the story of how Laura and I met on one of Geotripper's summer field studies, how we still help Geotripper in whatever ways we can to make his roadtrip life easier , and how he gave gave us the best wedding present ever. But for now those stories will have to remain as yet untold prequels to the amazing moment of my wife testing me.

Tonight was the culmination of my first semester of graduate studies in Geoscience Education through a distance learning program at Mississippi State. Just like all distance learning programs, the lessons are taught via DVD (or podcast for the even younger generation... apparently I'm already a techno-hasbeen at 30). Quizes and test for this course are administered online and must be completed during a given amount of time. No biggie, other than the fact that when one has a polite disagreement with a professor's test questions and answer rationale, it can be a bit hard to muddle through email correspondence to make sure everyone is on the same page.

My professor knew not of my background and extensive geologic travels with Geotripper, nor that I was married to a field geologist-turned great high school teacher. So imagine my immense surprise when up popped Question #~~ on tonight's semester final: "What type of fault is shown below?"

The question didn't throw me for a loop (this is the stuff 2^nd graders learn), but the accompanying photo did. There, on my semester final, administered through Mississippi State, staring me straight in the face, was someone that looked quite familiar in a setting that I recognized. Within milliseconds of positively identifying the model in the picture, my unhinged jaw hit the computer desk so hard that it woke my wife... which was a good thing since it WAS MY WIFE looking at me from within the photo on the test! Here I was taking a test, and there was my wife, standing on the footwall of Mosaic Canyon’s (Death Valley) famous fault looking back at me. The photo-Laura was probably wondering why it took me so long (.05ms) to recognize who it was. My excuse was being "in-the-zone".

I hurriedly ran upstairs and dragged my recently tucked-into-bed & tired wife downstairs so she could witness her celebrity which you can view below. I only allowed her 15 seconds of fame because I only had twenty-nine minutes and 47 seconds remaining to complete twenty more questions. Laura relinquished a tired, bemused smile, groaned “I’m famous” and promptly went right back to bed.

If you’re wondering what Geotripper’s connection to all of this is, well, he’s the photographer. The photo below is an exact replica of the one that appeared on my final. He took it in 2005 during an amazingly wet year in Death Valley. So wet infact, that there were once in a lifetime wildflower displays, yet we instead focused our trip on rocks (bio-beauty is no excuse to hide geology, in Geotripper’s opinion). You can see his awesome Death Valley posts here, and then sit back, relax and wonder what it must feel like to have your loved one literally test you... on a mutiple choice test. It’s a story for the ages. It’s one that lets me know that my semester of hard work is done, and that I should spend a good deal of time with my wife, who has been so supportive of me during this time. She rocks.