Painted Desert

Painted Desert

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Right now

I keep meaning to post some final bits about Arizona, and not getting around to it, so I'll just skip that for now and get on with some of what's happened since I came back in the fall.

We had another geology field trip, this time to New York. We saw a cave and some rocks, and camped out one night. Here we are looking at rocks.

And camping. I and my roommate are sitting down on the left and the professor is showing me how to do a chord, I think.

The cave we visited was named Secret Caverns, and it seemed to be sort of undervisited smaller cousin of the famous Howe Caverns in NY. To make up for its status, they had installed all kinds of wonderfully ironic signs on the property.

Click to view close-up.


In the gift store they also had a wonderful arcade game called BAD DUDES vs. DRAGON NINJA. I think this was a real classic back in '84. Here it is, with one of our heroes from this summer at the controls:

Though it's hard, of course, with school and employment and everything, Katie and I still find time to continue the good work of making fun of things, screwing around and hitting each other with rocks that is an essential part of friendship. Here is Katie trying to improve my photo of the Helderberg Escarpment at Thatcher State Park:

Gratuitous wildlife photo:

This is some kind of orange newt. There were a lot of these on the Helderberg Escarpment.

Unfortunately, by the time we climbed to the overlook of the valley, it had gotten a bit misty:

You will just have to use your imagination.

We were looking at units of rock on this trip but we were also looking at fossils. These rocks are from the Devonian period when a shallow sea covered much of the continent. So the rocks are limestones filled with ancient sea creatures.
This is a whole bunch of crinoid columnals. This is a crinoid. They are related to starfish. They still exist, but aren't nearly as common now.

Well, I can't have adventures every day, but I will have them sometimes, so there will be more posts in the future.