South Fork Little Butte Stream Hydro Project

This was our final project for field camp! It was 3 field days plus a report and a presentation. Yesterday was the report day and this morning we gave the presentations and then most of us headed home...FINALLY!!!

It was a mellow project and I personally spent almost all day in the stream. Hmmm, maybe I need to check into this fluvial geomorphology thing some more. I could totally do this everyday!

Jake the donkey...any resemblance to another Jake we all know and love?
He belonged to the land owner that hosted an end of field camp BBQ today.

Damn, what a hard day!

Completely staged picture, but this was how I was collecting data the day before. LOVED IT

This particular stretch of the stream had a nice swimming hole, about 4.5 feet deep.
We definitely enjoyed it.
From l-r: Jeanette, Bree, Rachel, Amanda (Kevin in the background)

Crater Lake

Last weekend we went to Crater Lake. It was supposed to be earlier in the week, but Oregon received so much snow this past winter that the Rim Road wasn't open yet! Only 2 days up there (camping 1 night)...it wasn't enough time.


Group shot with everyone giving Ellie's signature thumb's up :)


The lake was INCREDIBLY clear! This was looking down from a hiking trail. The large rock in the lake is probably about 6-feet in diameter and in around 30 feet of water.


Is that the sky or the lake???? (answer: the lake)


Wizard Island. There are boat trips offered that take people around the lake. Certain trips will also drop people off on Wizard Island for a few hours to go hiking. We did the regular 2 hr boat ride without drop off. Another reason to return....


We had two snack-time friends. The baby lizard was only about 2.5" long (couldn't get anything in there for scale without scaring him/her.) There were two "mini-bears" there that were totally willing to assist us in eating our snacks. This one managed to get a Cheeto from Kelly.


An actual picture of me! This was on the boat ride around the lake. Ellie and her long arms.


There was still plenty of snow and we had a great time playing in it. There were multiple snowball fights and Ellie and Kevin (missed the picture of him) managed to find the best way off a rock outcrop EVER!


This was just a cool shot of one of the sheets of snow slowly making its way downhill into the lake.


We made a couple of stops on the Rogue River on the way up to Crater Lake. I finally was able to take a picture of Rachel! (CSUEB students haven't been in groups together until the final hydro project so we didn't see much of each other during the day, usually.)


The amazing Rogue River.

101

It was hot. Today made Morrison Canyon look like a fracking picnic. It was hot and tomorrow is supposed to be hotter...

Weatherbug.com had Ashland's high today at 101.

Field camp sucks

River fun!

So we're still referring to this as Geology Boot Camp, but we finally had a day where we HAD to get into the water. We started our first hydrogeology project today and learned how to gauge a stream.
This is Kevin hard at work:


The REALLY cool thing was that this is an old USGS gauging station for Four Bit Stream. This stream use to be deep and narrow, versus the current wide and shallow profile. When the USGS came out to gauge the stream, they used this cool cable car system...which we HAD to play on:
(Ellie and Cynthia)




































(Amanda and Stacy-from Iowa)















(Wes and Jeanette -

from Sac State)















The best part: view from the middle of the stream approx 15 feet from the stream's surface:


















(sorry for the formatting weirdnesses...I'm tired and can't deal with it anymore tonight)

More random pictures

The workload has been fairly intense and I haven't been able to add as many photos and posts as I was originally hoping. This is a collection of misc photos I've been wanting to put up.


Ode to my dad: Sorry, just small white flowers right now...but I have a new "x" to put on that infamous map











The field area doesn't all suck. This is zoomed in, but I had some nice views of Mt Shasta and Mt Ashland on a couple of my days out.









I had to put this one in for Luther in particular. After my miserable day mapping landslides in Field Methods, I had to show what I had to climb through in my mapping area. These bushes were 4-6 feet high and actually smelled good! My allergies up here have been doing well. My eyes don't itch and I'm able to wear my contacts every day, although I am Sneezy Dwarf most days.




Jara, one of my team members, taking measurements on a fault surface. My team up here has been awesome! I couldn't have asked for a better one. Now I just hope the remaining match-ups will be just as good.

Mountain Goats

Up until now, all the pictures posted have been taken while we've been working on our BIG project of field camp: Hilt Mapping Project. The write up was due this morning at 8am.

I haven't pulled such a late night writing a paper since the first round of college! We had Friday and Saturday off to write the report and it wasn't enough. Us Hayward students went to bed around 2-3am, except Kevin who didn't sleep at all.



The entire class looked a little ragged this morning as we headed out to work on a stratigraphy section for the day.

I snapped this photo of Kevin at one of our stops before arriving at the field area. Looks like a nice place for a picture, right? Smelled like an outhouse. We were explicitly told not to pick up anything from the ground and not to touch the rocks below eye height.

Today we did a stratigraphy section of an area that has 10 man-made terraces of difference volcanic rocks. The first few terraces weren't bad to climb, but by #4 we were going through paleosol layers that were extremely loose. It was like running up hill in loose sand. I think the profs think we're all mountain goats...

The other wonderful element of today was that we were on south facing slopes with very little cover and today's high was 94. FUN!



I'll give it this much though, the view from the top was awesome:

And yes, that is smoke. There's a large forest fire burning in this county. Isn't affecting us or the field class, yet.

Random pictures...

It has been a few days since the last post. We have all been hard at work. We spend approx 1 hour in the morning in lecture then head into the field for about 8 hours. The days are hot and long. By the time we return to campus, eat and shower, I haven't had time to keep up on the blog and finish my homework each night. Consider this a "catch-up" entry :-)

Dr. Bill Elliott showing off his sedimentology skills.

These are molds and casts of fossils found in a bed from the early Cretaceous period, 99-144 million years ago. The fossils are largely molluscs (clams, oysters, etc).

Amanda using her hammer!!!! We were looking at a contact between a sandstone and granitic member. She is hammering away at the rock to get a fresh piece to look at. By looking at a freshly broken side of a rock, general composition can be determined. Knowing what rock units are in the area, you can use this composition to determine which unit the outcrop of rocks belongs to which will tell you its age. This is basically how you map an area.

This is a shale layer of one of the rock units. We needed to take strikes and dips on it for practice as well as future use in our mapping projects. Looks like nice bedding planes right? WRONG! We are working in groups of three. Myself and one of my partners took multiple strikes and dips, thought we had it correct and were completely wrong. Ends up to be a tricky spot. And the ground sucks! We spent more time trying to keep ourselves from sliding down the hill than actually taking data.

A group of students working on their maps standing on a set of railroad tracks that run through part of the area. Thankfully, there's maybe one train/day.

I'm off to read a bunch of journal articles on rocks in the area. I will try to upload more pictures tomorrow night.