Friday, May 09, 2008

I just finished grading the last of my labs. Whew, what a semester!

Now it's time to think about the old thesis. I head into the woods for a tour of the "Belt Supergroup" on May 20th with my advisor. I will stay in the mountains of east-central Idaho until August 22nd-ish. The Belt Supergroup is an 18 kilometer thick package of rocks 1.47 billion years old. Pretty cool. I will be mostly working by myself mapping the bedrock geology in some pretty rugged country. Some folks think there's a big fault running through the quadrangle I'll map, but nobody has really gone in because there aren't any roads nearby. When the snow melts in the high country (7,000 ft. to 9,000 ft.) sometime in July I will start backpacking into the northern part of the field area for a week and half at a time or so (or however much food I can carry). It's going to be a good summer. All the work I've put into school over the last 8 months translates into 3 months of fun and adventure in the southern Bitteroot Mountains. Sometimes I can't believe how lucky I was to stumble into the geology field.

And I don't think there are any grizzly bears in the area, so that's an added bonus too.

ed