Field camp is done!

And ended with a bang - literally. On I-90 in South Dakota. So I needed a new tire. I mean - KABLAM! SCRREEEEECH! THUMPA-THUMPA-THUMPA-THUMPA... etc... etc...

So that's that. the car's OK.. I'm OK, and field camp is over. I think i got an A (I slacked off the last week, so the A is no longer guaranteed). Now... on to baseball!

I'm in Chicago, Chi-town, the second city, the city with no real redeeming features... what? too much? too little? wrong color? Regardless, tomorrow is a field trip to Wrigley Field. Woo hoo!

And who knows when I'll be able to check email next. It's all in God's hands. lol.

You know it's a small town if...

...you can lap it while talking to people on the phone.

Dillon closes up nearly everything on Saturday (and may not be open much monday thru friday or sunday). So there's not much to do. It's a nice day, though, and I'm cooped up from 15+ hours of putting together maps and cross-sections. I need out. Of course, the school computer rooms are closed - leaving me stuck in the town library (which closes in an hour as well). I'm thinking of seeing the 'Fantastic Four' movie at 4:15. Why? THERE'S NOTHING ELSE TO DO.

The campus dorms have no air conditioning (or ventialtion of any sort) making the rooms somewhere in the low 90s during the day (and cooling off to a chill 80-something at night). Still, I like this town with its killer plants, more hat shops than computer stores and being smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

The downside is that I need to get a haircut and can't. (Shops are all closed). Keep this up and I'll look like a hippie. I dunno. Maybe it will help me get lucky. Lucky in Dillon. I believe that defines an oxymoron.

Short post - tons to do!

(Kevin'll be happy for that.)

Finished the mapping portion of Block Mountian today. Went looking for an Olivine Basalt, but couldn't find it. It's about 92 out there today and I'm still wearing a jacket because of the &$#@#$#@ medicine. So naturally after a half an hour i was boilingin my own jacket juices. Yum. Fortunately we knocekd off at about 12:00 pm and came back to the dorms, which gave me time to shower, catch up on planet earth and write this little blurb. Now that I'm done with that, I can.. erm.. go back to work.

Damn.

South Dakota is getting rained on and the Yankees suck.


Isn't feild camp hard enough without the Yankees losing three against the Rockies? Seriously, they seem as allergic to winning as I am to juniper. (note for those who weren't english majors - that was a segue.)

So two days in the field and no itching. Lots of sweating, but no itching. Some sunburn on the hands (which is all that;s really exposed) but otherwise I'm OK. One more day. Amazingly, I've managed to cover in three days what it's taken most others four to do. Which is great. I don't know how right the data is, but there is data and that's the important thing.

There's not much else to report. Lots of map revising, hopefully a good night's sleep and then out for the last day's mapping tomorrow. Then it's two office days (one being erroneously labeled as a 'rest day') and a half a week till we head home.

As of this writing, it's six days, three hours and twenty-seven minutes till the last project gets handed in. But who's counting?

Thank you science!

Thanks science... specifically steroids. Thank you for no longer making me itchy. Oh, i may be sterile now, but i no longer scratch. You may think that isn't an equitable trade, but please, itch as much as I itched the last two days and you'd be selling your dead sperm on the street for a cure, too.

Seriously, I no longer itch. Yayyy! I went out into the field today - nervous and sweaty because (a) I was afraid I'd be itching by 10:00 am and (b) I was clothed head to toe. This was partly because I didn't want to touch anything out there and partly because some of the medication I was taking was photosynthetic. Meaning that if I was exposed too long to the sun I would (get this) get a rash. Ladies and gentlemen - Irony.

Regarless, today was a fun day. I saw a losing stream - that is a stream that gets smaller and smaller the farther it goes downhill. It came out of a spring, went about a thousand feet and dried out. The spring was at the base of about 50 feet of dolostone and there were some small cave openings higher up on the cliff. It was very cool. There were a bunch of dried streams (or arroyos) out there. We climbed up and down some dry waterfalls, saw jack rabbits and fire ants and came across the kill site of coyotes or wolves or something. There were a collection of bones there ranging from cow to antelope to rabbit. Strange.

Tomorrow will be more of the same. Today was brutally hot. 90F. I drank two and a half nalogene bottles and two cans of lemonade and still felt dehydrated. A storm front came in late in the afternoon, cooling us down which was neat. While the storm was still a bit away I climbed up to a ridgeline and watched the rain come down a couple of valleys over. There was thunder and lightning in the clouds and at least one ground strike about ten miles away. Fun day!

June 19, 2007 - The Itchy and Scratchy show.

Poison Ivy, meet Juniper. Really. It sounds like the 'Bad Villains' week on Batman. instead, it's a list of plants I'm apparently allergic to. Which is a bummer because Montana is covered in Juniper. Where's alt.pave-the-earth when you need it? People ask me - why do you like caving so much? I can now answer that in a very simple and straightforward fashion.

THERE ARE NO PLANTS IN CAVES.

Happy?

Dillon, Montanta would have to drive, stay at a hotel, and drive another day to GET to the middle of nowhere. Despite that (or maybe becuase of it) it is a friendly, warm town reminiscent of Lewisburg, WV. This makes it the second Lewisburg I've found on this trip (the first being Custer SD). I like it. The biggest store is a Safeway and the hardware store is exactly that - a hardware store. The Union Pacific runs along it's western side and a good jogger can cross the long axis of the town in under an hour. To the north is sage and juniper while to the south is... sage and juniper. Yet the place has a decent outdoors store (with bike equipment, kyacking and headlamps) directly adjacent to a Patagonia outlet store. There is a Lover's Leap cliff about thirty feet high just north of town which has become a state park because Lewis and Clark stopped there. (Lewis and Clark is to the northwest as George Washington is to New Jersey). The cliff itself is about ten feet high with another tewnty feet of talus below. I suppose 'leaping to your ruptured spleen' wasn't as poetic.

The mapping area is somplace called 'Block Mountian' just over the border in the next county. There's free range cows there (and free range rattlesnakes for that matter). There are no trees. Just juniper shrubs. Standing on top of the tall ridges, the wind comes at you unimpeded fron the next mountain range, some eighty miles away. No wonder montananers feel the Northeast is claustrophobic. I'm sure the Mongols felt the same way about Europe.

Here, by the way, is the topo map of the area:


and here it is in the full color of google maps. Can you guess why we're mapping it?


Anyway, that's about it. I'll end off by saying that there are about seven different schools doing field camp here at the same time - constantly cycling in and out. So I'm meeting new people. Which is nice. I can be a people person with people I'll never see again mostly because I'll never see them again. lol.

Saturday June 16th. I have seen the nineteenth century (and i want my IPod)

A week of sightseeing through Wyoming and Montana. Well, mostly Wyoming. Well, mostly Yellowstone National Park (YNP). Wyoming has a lot going for it, but population isn't one of them. Like, we forgot to populate this state. With people anyway. It seems that cows are the dominant species in this state. Not that I'm complaining.

Aaannnyway. Six days without internet. Though they did have these daily printouts called 'newspapers'. Highly amusing. Nearly two days without phone service. I mean sersiously. Though they did have a cell tower RIGHT NEXT to Old Faithful. Wow.

Speaking of YNP... oh, i'm sorry, Disney-West. I once picked on my sister for her loving the Wilderness Lodge at WDW because it looked exactly like the Old Faithful Lodge. Then I got to YNP. Where is Michael Eisner anyway? This place is so touristy you expect a rapids ride down Firehole river (don't get out of the boats... no seriously, don't get out.) and a log flume down Yellowstone Falls. Put a light show to Old Faithful and you can turn half the park into Epcot and the other half into Animal Kingdom.

Honestly, I loved the geology and the natural beauty of the place. Grand Tetons had all that minus the hand holding of YNP. I would go back to both of them in a heartbeat. I mean, i had to love them... i took 300+ pictures of the place. It wasn't ALL buffalo ass (seriously, can they face the road FOR ONCE??) ...but a combination of the 'Greek' sleeping arrangements (two to a bed) the Great Adventure priced foods ($8.00 for a cheeseburger??) and the run, run, run through everything left us all tired and worn out from out 'rest' week.

Now we have the Block mountian project to look forward to. Twelve more days. Everyone is counting down. As Jessica pointed out yesterday - "Doctor Toro has 20-odd tired, cranky, horny students on his hands now."

Even the buffalo are starting to look good. lol.