Shawn at the blog Vi-carius is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge. He asks for a geoblogosphere-wide brainstorm on “dream geology courses” – an inspirational topic! I have a few ideas: A travel course dedicated to exploring the roots of geological thinking and the geological timescale. It would clearly need to be based in the U.K. … Read more
My AGU Blogosphere neighbor Evelyn of Georneys fame is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge. Her topic? “Field camp memories”… I never attended a bona fide field camp myself, but I attended a lovely “regional field geology” course that my undergraduate alma mater, the College of William & Mary, put on each summer in the Colorado … Read more
Grab your coffee and join Callan & Lily for a stroll along the quartzite cliffs of Hermanus, South Africa. Bedding, cross-bedding, joints, faults, veins, folded veins, and faulted veins all await you there in the morning light.
Click through for a big version… That’s the Athabasca Glacier, crown jewel of the Icefields Parkway in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada. Its lateral moraines show well its retreat and “deflation” in recent years.
One year ago today, Lily and I had a fantastic wedding week in Montana. To celebrate the year we’ve been together since then, today I’ve got a gazillion photos to share – reliving the week for those who were there, and sharing it with those who weren’t able to make it… Our first group hike: … Read more
Mountain Beltway reader “Earth Mama” responded to the recent geo-meme (which started here, folks!) by compiling all these visit-worthy locations in a single Google Earth KMZ file. If reading the lists from the various geobloggers didn’t whet your appetite, now you’ve got the ‘virtual globe’ option…. Hi Callan, I wanted to thank you for the … Read more
Last summer, my wife and I spent some time in the Canadian Rockies. One of the things we did was to take a three-day backpacking trip to Floe Lake, in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia. We picked a rough couple of days for hiking – We got a lot of Canadian Rockies precipitation out there: … Read more
After our “pre-honeymoon” sojourn to the Canadian Rockies last summer, Lily and I returned to the U.S. via Porthill, and then drove over to a place I’ve been wanting to visit for a long time: Yaak, Montana. Yaak (or “the Yaak“) is way up in the Kootenai National Forest, in way-way-way-northwesternmost Montana. We camped out … Read more
I just finished reading 101 American Geo-Sites You’ve Gotta See, one of the latest publications by geology-friendly (and Missoula-based) Mountain Press. I’m grateful to the the publishers for sending me a review copy. It’s a nicely written and produced book highlighting sites across the United States of America of geological interest. The book is organized … Read more
This is Dyer Island, off Gansbaai, southern South Africa, a little west of Cape Agulhas: Those are seals, a huge, crazy crowded colony of Cape fur seals. They are loud. They create a God-awful stink with all their fishy excrement. It was like being in a BBC nature program to see this firsthand. I could … Read more