8 March 2011

A couple other Montana shots

Posted by Callan Bentley

Friday’s prompt to post the French Thrust shot gave me the opportunity to dig into my “Rockies” folder a bit. Here’s two other shots from my inaugural summer leading my Geology 295 field class out there.

Hiking the trail to Grinnell Glacier:

…It looks like we’re in the Appekunny Formation here, third from the bottom in the stack of Belt Supergroup strata at Glacier. In the distance, you can see the dark stripe of the Purcell Sill, intruding into the limestone of the Helena Formation.

And here’s a pleasant evening at camp, with the students taking a practical exam on identifying and interpreting rock samples that we’ve seen so far on the trip:

…I love all the headlamps! We had two of these after-dark exams on the class that first summer, and this was definitely the more enjoyable of the two. The other one was amid a menacing cloud of mosquitoes, and that makes it really hard to concentrate on rock identification.

I love this class. The students I’m still in touch with (which is, now that I think about it, most of them) all report that their memory of these field practical exams as something intense at the time, but that they now look back on with fondness.

Want to sign up to join us in the Northern Rockies this summer? We’ll be out there, geologizing away, from June 25 through July 10.