A lot has been going on. A couple weeks ago a few of us decided to try going caving at the Crystal Ice Caves out in the middle of the Snake River Plain. It was a great idea, but none of the roads were plowed so it was a pretty epic day. We ended up getting within about 2 miles of the place. There were 7 of us jammed into a Suburban. We would get stuck in snow drifts every few minutes, get out, dig out the truck, then go again. Then our tire chains would fall off. We spent about 4 straight hours in four-wheel-drive-low gunning it. Anyway, it was an experience.
Then I ended up going to Tucson at the last second to run the LaserChron Zircon dating apparatus. The machine is pretty ingenious. You have a laser which zaps, vaporizes, and ionizes a hole in a zircon mineral grain, and then you have a voltage which accelerates the ions down a mass spectrometer. The machine costs about a million dollars. Anyway, I worked the graveyard shift with one of the undergrads, and we broke the laser at about 1 am on the last day we were scheduled to work. Oops. It actually wasn't our fault, the laser firing mechanism was just old and it wore out when we were working.
I also hit up the Meet Rack when we were down there. We got the tour, and later in the night we even saw one of the locals get branded. He was pretty stoked to get 50 cents off drinks lifetime and 2 dollars off t-shirts. It was hilarious. It was the 1,338th branding done at the Meet Rack.
Then on Friday the geology club crew at ISU had an expedition into the Portneuf Range to one of the yurts the school operates in the winter. I snowshoed in and out. On the way out we were socked in by clouds and we couldn't see a thing. We ended up going down the wrong drainage and came out way too far north. Luckily our GPS was working because by the time we made it out of the mountains it was dark and finding the unplowed road that led back to the trucks would have been nearly impossible (the GPS units the department rents out weren't working on the way up, and never seem to work for me). Everything is new to me out here. We were told to carry a shovel and an avalanche transceiver in the event you get buried in an avalanche. If you get buried, your buddy can locate you with his transceiver and dig you out with his shovel. It really makes you evaluate your hiking path a little bit more.
ed
Then I ended up going to Tucson at the last second to run the LaserChron Zircon dating apparatus. The machine is pretty ingenious. You have a laser which zaps, vaporizes, and ionizes a hole in a zircon mineral grain, and then you have a voltage which accelerates the ions down a mass spectrometer. The machine costs about a million dollars. Anyway, I worked the graveyard shift with one of the undergrads, and we broke the laser at about 1 am on the last day we were scheduled to work. Oops. It actually wasn't our fault, the laser firing mechanism was just old and it wore out when we were working.
I also hit up the Meet Rack when we were down there. We got the tour, and later in the night we even saw one of the locals get branded. He was pretty stoked to get 50 cents off drinks lifetime and 2 dollars off t-shirts. It was hilarious. It was the 1,338th branding done at the Meet Rack.
Then on Friday the geology club crew at ISU had an expedition into the Portneuf Range to one of the yurts the school operates in the winter. I snowshoed in and out. On the way out we were socked in by clouds and we couldn't see a thing. We ended up going down the wrong drainage and came out way too far north. Luckily our GPS was working because by the time we made it out of the mountains it was dark and finding the unplowed road that led back to the trucks would have been nearly impossible (the GPS units the department rents out weren't working on the way up, and never seem to work for me). Everything is new to me out here. We were told to carry a shovel and an avalanche transceiver in the event you get buried in an avalanche. If you get buried, your buddy can locate you with his transceiver and dig you out with his shovel. It really makes you evaluate your hiking path a little bit more.
ed
posted by where's my ed? at 12:33 PM
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