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

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I lost my cell phone and I don't plan on replacing it. So if anyone needs to contact me it should be through e-mail (steweric@isu.edu or stew0205@umn.edu).

We (the geology department) defeated the biology department in the annual keg-off. We finished our full sized keg in 36 minutes. It was a good night. Our two departments have competed in the keg-off for somewhere around 15 years and geology has never lost despite always being heavily outnumbered (there are around 100 graduate students in biology versus 15 in geology). We also brought in a bunch of valuable undergrads and a couple of profs to help. One of our profs hushed the crowd and gave a rousing speech at the conclusion of the contest congradulating biology on their excellent effort, reminding us to respect our interdepartmental collegues, and at the end to "let the taunting begin!" It was great.

things are looking good out here in Poky. One of the first things i learned about grad school is the need for money. it's all about money. To get money you have to apply for a lot of grants. I think I applied for 7 student grants. My advisor got a 15,000 dollar grant to cover most of the field expenses for my thesis work this summer, but we needed more money to get mineral age dates (from zircons). We're starting to hear back and so far I'm 3 for 3 on student grants, for a grand total of around $3,400. Together with about the same amount allotted for dating in my advisor's grant, it looks like we'll be able to do the analytical work we were hoping to do. This also will involve a nice 3 week trip to Canberra, Australia next spring, which I am particularly excited about. It looks like we'll get to do some field work too in South Australia. Should be fun! Definately getting excited!

ed

well, I started riding my bike again about a week ago. the plan is to do a few races this spring. i also upgraded to cat. 3 on the road, so i won't have to race with as many sketchballs. we'll see what happens.

There's lots of good riding out here. too many 1 to 2 mile climbs to count, and several 5 to 10 mile climbs. hopefully i'll get into shape one way or another.

As a joke, a couple of us got our advisor, Paul Link, a barbershop quartet for Valentine's Day. They came and sang in the middle of class, and gave him a rose and a box of chocolates. Pretty funny stuff.

Well, I just got back from the Roundup in Vancouver. It was an experience, to say the least. In only 5 days we (myself and two other grad students at ISU) managed to do the following:
-Arrive at our hotel in Vancouver by getting lost in a suburb far to the south and magically driving straight to the hotel
-Have my own bed in a fancy hotel that I paid $0 for (thank you NovaGold)
-Eat free food and have free beer served to us by a waiter on a yacht in Vancouver harbor
-Witness ~27 kegs of free beer be consumed each night at the conference
-Turn in 4 research grants in three days
-Get tickled on the chest - twice - by a 60 year-old gay guy on the dance floor during B.C. night (Each night a different state/province sponsored the festivities - Yukon night, British Columbia night, Alaska night)
-Pay for only 2 or 3 meals the entire time I was in Vancouver (thank you NovaGold)
-Realize that mineral exploration is not the thing for me - though I might try to work a season after I graduate for a company that does work in New Guinea, South America, Pakistan, and elsewhere)

Now I'm back to reality and school.

Except we might build a snowcave outside the department tonight and crash there. You know, cause it's so hard to get up early for those 8am classes.

Ed

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