Caja del Rio trip

Yesterday's sightseeing tour was to Caja del Rio, slightly southwest of Santa Fe. We haven't had much time to do fun sightseeing since moving, so this was a nice opportunity to see the lay of the land in the Santa Fe area. I've generally only been there for meetings, so I got to be a bit of a geo-tourist and passenge, instead of drive. Yahoo.

The road to Caja del Rio (the Rio Grande River canyon south of Otowi Bridge) goes past Santa Fe's landfill and across the Cerros del Rio volcanic field (as best I can tell from my limited home references). Once we got fairly close to the Rio Grande, we did a loop along the canyon edge on a Forest Service two-track. This was the five-year old's first two track drive on a bumpy road in a very long time (we did need to put it in low in several locations), and at one point she said "this road is making my underwear creep!"

The view across the canyon towards White Rock and Los Alamos. I think the tall, triangular-faced mountain in the background is Polvadera Peak. You can see the Rio Grande at the bottom of the canyon.
The five-year old and the SO looking north at a tributary canyon wall.


Part of what they were looking at - interfingered sediments and basalts. I have the Geology of the Jemez Region II (put out by NM Geological Society, 2007) at the office and plan to try and figure out the possible formations in this shot.


The windshield view from looking across the canyon. The five-year old said "We're gonna die!" (she says that about a lot of things, tongue-in-cheek).


Another underwear-creeping part of the drive. Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment wrote recently about two-track driving, so I'd thought I'd include these to continue the meme.

A set of beautiful lupines at the last part of the loop, near a stock pond.

More on Deep Creek...

I had found several nice, though informal, bits of information regarding the Deep Creek pillow basalts while hunting around on the internet last fall, but haven't found the one or two really good ones this time around.

However, I did find this link Major Rock Types of the Spokane Area.

The author discusses the Latah Formation, which underlies the basalts at the northern end of the canyon in the state park. The aforementioned slide (in the last post) occurred at the contact between the two. Below is my best shot of that contact.

Eastern Washington Pillow Basalts

One of my favorite hikes as a teenager, visiting family in Spokane, WA, was the disappearing stream at Deep Creek, a tributary to the Spokane River. I loved hiking there in the summer, when the creek was low, and popped in and out of view. It was another of those places that sparked my interest in earth sciences. Of course, when I was a young and fairly ignorant high school student, I never knew about the pillow basalts, just the stream going to ground. It took my ex and a lovely winter hike years later to note the pillow basalts. It has wonderful pillow basalts about a quarter to half mile upstream of the confluence of the two water bodies. In another post (when I have a little more time), I'll share more about the local geology there (think lots of basalt). I got to share it with my mother and daughter (and a friend, via cell phone) this fall. There had been a small slide upstream, and the trail through the canyon was rather obliterated, but the 73-yr old and the 5-yr old did very well at negotiating the basalt boulder field that comprised most of the hike.


The five-year-old, looking at a larger example.

A nice shot of several pillows.The 73-yr old and 5-yr old, in between columns of basalt, looking downstream near the confluence.

I'm back!

I've finally gotten internet access at home after my move last October. Phew! It took almost six months of wrangling with my provider to get the correct gadget with the correct software with the correct locational settings, and hours of phone calls talking to several folks (some helpful, some not) each call. Thankfully, it's done, and I can get back to the enjoyment of reading you all's blogs, writing comments, and writing my own posts. I have lots of photos and musings that I'm anxious to get into the blog and I hope to have two or three postings a week, now that I'm reconnected. Thanks to those of you who queried as to my whereabouts over the last months. Cheers! Coconino

Thoughts spurred by newly found blog...

Silver Fox over at Looking for Detachment posted about a newly found blog, Accidental Remediation. Short Geologist's posts are primarily about working in the HTRW investigation and remediation arena, a field I left about 10 or so years ago.

One of her posts talks about the "indentured servitude" of entry-level geologists (aka field grunts). This type of activity on the part of consulting firms was certainly a portion of why I left that field of work.

I had friends who worked for firms that would charge their clients for overtime worked, but not pay their employees for that overtime. They were on salary, right? I myself worked for a firm that had me work 5 months' worth of hours in 3 (I was working about 12-15/7) - unpaid overtime - and got a lovely $500 bonus that year. Other folks in my firm and other firms in the area were similarly overworked. I had one friend who got herself hooked on ritalin to accomplish the senior project manager work that she needed to get done (more 15/7). I've heard of firms that had a very "enhanced" (aka stimulant-laden) atmosphere to produce results from their junior and senior project managers. Not all engineering/geology firms are this way, of course. There are a lot of very good firms out there who treat their employees well and understand the relationship between sound product/reputation.

Regardless, about 10 years ago I decided it was nuts and changed fields within the environmental industry. Luckily, I had the background that helped me accomplish this transition. The consulting in my arena, wetland delineation, is much more sane and not as subject to that type of servitude. It's harder to get crappy work by the state and federal agencies as they generally need to field-verify the work firms are doing, which is highly visible and mostly above ground (except for those hydric soil indicators). Projects tend to be smaller, and when large, the clients tend to be savvy enough to understand that good data is necessary.

That said, the quote about consulting I continually tell people is "Good, fast, and cheap; pick any two. You can't have it all." And it's true.

Kids and science

I am quite proud of my 4-year-old daughter. She takes catching bugs to put in her bug box, my somewhat feeble explanations of scientific principles and processes, being taught minerals in stone countertops and my continuous absences for work (with or without her along) in stride.

Yesterday was one of those cases in point. On our way to that horrid bastion of low-cost consumerism originating in the south (aka Wally-world), she asked me very pointed questions about the difference between dry ice and regular ice. For background explanation, when we travel to larger communities with decent food stores (TJs and Whole Paycheck), I bring a large cooler and go gaga. The last time this occurred, she was along for the search for dry ice to keep the frozen things frozen and the rest well-cooled. [Note: In NM and AZ, Smith's almost always has dry ice. Occasionally, Wally-world will have it as well. Albertson's recently dropped selling it.]

It was interesting to see her reaction to the explanation, especially that carbon dioxide comes from air and is separated out and cooled from a gaseous state to a solid (ie., frozen) state.* It's a difficult concept for a small child, first that air that you can't see is actually made up of different gases, and second, that you can actually separate out one of them and cool it to a solid state.

The non-scientific world tends to think of ice in terms of frozen water; most preschool teachers and day care workers don't have a scientific background and have limited ability to present difficult scientific concepts to children of small age. It's one thing to explain to a child what you can see (trees, bugs, plants growing, rivers flowing); it's quite another to explain what you can't (and really don't understand yourself).

I've noted gender-related test score differences for verbal and math/science in the school district to which I will (hopefully) soon be sending my child. Girls lead boys in test scores in every elementary school in the district for both verbal and math/science until 4th grade. At that point, the verbal scores equalize and the girls' math/science scores tank (from about 95th percentile to 75th or less). In discussing this with friends who are both educators and mental health care professionals, we came up with several possible explanations, the most plausible being a combination of non-science background for the teachers and a male-oriented curriculum (scientific ideas and processes being presented in a way easier for boys than girls to grasp). Before you gasp about this statement, anyone with children of both genders will tell you that boys are very different from girls in the way they play and verbalize (certainly with ranges of behavior in each - my ex had his dolly along with his tonka trucks and my girl is not much of a girlie-girl). With the differences in learning abilities and behaviors, it is not a stretch to imagine that an elementary school science curriculum taught by a non-scientist could be easier for one gender to grasp than another.

I'm obviously very concerned about how well my girl learns math and science (and English - see May 15 post) in school. Occasionally, my fears are allayed and today was a case in point. She took the explanation of separate gases forming air and freezing one of those to make dry ice in stride. Her questions made it clear she grasped the basic concepts. Though she may have a bit of a difficult time verbalizing what she understood, I'm quite proud of her ability to understand the concepts, and grateful that she gets the opportunity to do so.

*[1. I left out the discussion of its liquid state existing at higher-than-atmospheric pressures and low temperatures. 2. She easily got that it was colder than regular ice.]

[As another aside, her 13-year-old babysitter can drive a backhoe and dress an elk with the same ease as sending a text message or doing her hair and makeup. I'm quite proud of her, too.]

Art and Architecture in Geology: Accretionary Wedge #10

As I am in the middle of redesigning a kitchen with my significant other and just spent many hours looking at hurking slabs of rock in near three-digit weather (I picked a garnet granite in the remnant yard), my contribution to this version of the Accretionary Wedge (#10) are two of the buildings in downtown LA that had some of my favorite geology in architecture.

The first is 601 Wilshire, or the Figueroa at Wilshire: http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=1357
Construction was finished in 1990, and the architect was Albert C. Martin. As monolithic downtown office buildings go, this is one of my favorites. I spent many hours both inside and in the outer courtyard of this building, faced with pink granite apparently from Brazil (also used on the inside). My favorite building feature: the pink marble sconces in the hallways, sliced thin to be translucent and give a warm pink glow to the interior. I've craved marble sconces like that since, and just raved about them again to a friend, while discussing use of stone in the home.

The other is the Los Angeles Public Library: http://www.lapl.org/central/art_architecture.html
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Public_Library

I also spent many hours in this building, constructed in 1926 by architects Bertram Goodhue and Carlton Winslow in that quintessential southern California meets Egypt style, like many other buildings in SoCal constructed during that era. It apparently had an arson fire in 1986 and was restored to be called the Richard Riordan Library. Unfortunately, the websites don't have a discussion of the floor tile, a beautiful Devonian shale/slate apparently quarried in the British Isles. I don't quite know if this is correct, as I emailed the docents and received that info in reply. It is a beautifully calming dark green clearly showing the sedimentary structures contained within the stone. I've also craved a floor of this, to bring calm to home and a reminder of the ebb and flow of the tides and the seas.