Bruce's Death Marches

So, excluding yesterdays rain out, we have been hiking everyday. Two of those days in perticular, monday and today, stand out was what I have decided to call Bruce's Death Marches. Bruce is the director of the field camp and he hikes at a fervent pace up and down the sides of mountains and cliffs. It is truely a sight to see and an aerobic challenge to match. Today's Death March took us up 5 seperate "hill sides" each with at least 300 feet of verticle relief. In actuallity, I probably only scaled 2000 feet or so. But, the fun thing about doing these climbs is that there are no trails. This means you are walking in a field of cow pies, sage brush, mountain moghany (spelling?), varrious grasses, and trees. I had the good fortune today to be scalling back down the side of the first hill side and knock into a dead mountain moghany brush. I, of course, struck one of the pointy ends of the brush right into my shin. I immediatly screamed out "****, that hurt". I looked down at my pants to find that they had not ripped so I kept walking no big deal. By the time I got down to the valley beneth the hill, the group had stopped for water and to document the igneous sill that had intruded the area. I happened to bend over and look at my pants, low and behold my shin was covered in blood. Hurray! So I pulled up my pants and found a small puncture wound. I got antiseptic and a band aid, which it promptly beld trhough. I decided I needed a cover story for why my pants were bloody. The best one I could think of, and the one I mentioned to anyone who asked about my pants, was that I had been attacked by a cougar. In all seriousness, though, I am fine just a small cut. But, in the middle of the hike with all my gear, and having very little clue about the geology of the area I was supposed to be mapping, it made the march just that much more frustrating. About 3/4 of the way through I managed to make at least one postive out of the hike. On a huge ledge of Cambrian Pilgrim Fm. limestone, my friend took a picture of me with a visibility of some 50 miles or so in the background looking back at the moutain range and showing the cliffs I had already climbed.

In other news, I am getting pretty excited for the weekend. Ha, the local bar in Whitehall, MT may have 2 stepping lessons for us on Saturday night. Sunday, I will either go to the Montana Folk Festival in Butte or panning for Saphirres (spelling) in some of the gulches around south west MT where numerous Tertiary (young geologically speaking) igneous batholiths have been subjected to hydrothermal alteration creating the conditions for outstanding mineral deposits. In the meantime, however, I have the mapping project to finish by 10:30PM Friday for the hike just described above and our first independent exam (a 4 hour solo hike/mapping project) to complete by 5 PM Saturday afternoon.

I have gotten my grades back for the first two projects. They say the average grade for the first assignment, mapping the plunging anticline in Lander Oil Field, was around a 6/10. I managed to get 7.8/10. The second assigment, keeping a field notebook for the Geology stops on the way to MT, had a similar average annouced, but somehow, even with all my horrible organizational skills, I managed to bring back all 10 points. Ha, I can only hope to keep that up. It's going to be damn near impossible though.

We had the most miserable dinner in the world tonight. It was some sort of jalepeno chicken dorrito casserole. It was disgusting and didn't sit well in my stomach. I hope they never serve it again. The only side they served was a fairly gross salad. I went up and asked if they had any rolls or anything and the old cook lady looked at me like I was crazy and said, "there are dorritos in the casserole."

I have written a tun for the day and have to get back to working on this mapping project. I hope everyone is doing well. I'd love to hear from you either by comments in the blog, email, or if you are really daring by snail mail. The address should be on the IUGFS website.