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Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
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11:10 pm - just when you thought my livejournal was dead...
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Last weekend was really fun. Friday evening I went out for beer and pizza with my labmates, then I stopped by a party for an hour or so, before driving to Franklin's for the weekend.
Saturday morning we had a nice sleep-in, then we hiked the Towsley Canyon View Loop Trail (http://www.localhikes.com/Hikes/TowsleyCanyon_4472.asp) in the afternoon. The trail started out fairly flat and as we strolled along, we saw a lots of pretty birds and a little gopher poking its head out of a hole. Next the trail entered a fairly narrow canyon, where the creek was running high from the recent rain, and we had to pick our way across it hopping from stone to stone using a big stick for balance. After that, the trail rose up a series of switchbacks. Along this part of the trail there where tar seeps. I enjoyed watching the tar flow slowly out of the hillside along with a trickle of water making pretty patterns; I also enjoyed poking the tar with a stick. At another point along the switchback, there must have been some hydrothermal activity because we saw and smelled sulfur. At the top of the switchbacks there were some nice views. We got back to our car a little after dark and got a ticket for being in the park after sunset.
We got back to Franklin's just in time to change and eat a quick dinner before heading out for the evening's entertainment, a musical play called "Wisdom 2116" by Ray Bradbury. It was at tiny little theater in South Pasadena, and Ray Bradbury was actually there! Before the show, he gave a little introduction that concluded by him showing us a medal he had around his neck and reminding us that a couple years ago he was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by France, and as commander, he commanded us to enjoy the play. The play itself was really weird, but definitely enjoyable.
As if that weren't enough excitement for one weekend, the next day we went skiing! We drove to Mount Baldy, where we had bought season passes for $50 each (less than a full day lift pass). Unfortunately, a lot of people wanted to take advantage of all the fresh snow that last week's storms dumped in the mountains. It took us about 2 hours to go the 13 miles from the freeway up the mountain, so we only had a couple hours of skiing, but it was a good couple hours!
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| Monday, October 5th, 2009
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9:35 pm - last weekend
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In my last lj post, I mentioned my lack of sleep and the "fun I have planned for this weekend." Well, the weekend didn't go exactly as planned (though it was still more good than bad)... ( Read more... )
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| Thursday, October 1st, 2009
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11:12 am
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Last night I fell asleep on a bed with no sheets with my clothes on and my contacts in while waiting for my laundry to finish. The night before I slept 3 hours on the couch in my office. I was already eating chocolate chips at 10am this morning, though I managed to stop myself before I made myself feel physically sick to match the sick feeling of dread of impending deadlines.
Happy posts (about the great time I had in Europe a little over a week ago and the fun I have planned for this weekend) coming soon.
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| Sunday, August 30th, 2009
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10:06 pm - LPC Birch Point 2009 (my summer in great detail)
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| Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
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9:03 am - 9:30 PM Saturday May 2, 2009. Bhulbhule.
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We had a fantastic thunderstorm this evening. We started to hear thunder and the wind picked up a little after 5pm. As the first drops started falling and wee took shelter in our rooms, there were so many seed-dispersing white fluff-balls drifting through the air that it looked like it was snowing. Soon the rain started pounding on the tin roof. I watched, listened to, and smelled the storm through my open windo. The wind blew the rain in sheets and bent the treetops. It began to hail. When the rain temporarily lightened, low cloudsclung to the surrounding hills. As it grew darker, pink lightning lit up the sky every few seconds. During dinner the rain was so loud, we could hardly hear each other; it reminded me of Nicaragua. The storm finally let up around 9PM.
Before the rain came and cooled things off, the day had been very hot and humid as we hiked from Chyamche to Bhulbhule. As we were leaving Chyamche a dog bowed low to Doug (at least that’s how it looked to me, though it was possible he was just stretching to get ready for the hike) and then follwed us for most of the day. However, he wouldn’t cross the bridge about an hour from Bhulbhule. I was hoping he would follow us the whole way and then I could take him home and he would be my awesome hiking geology dog. Tomorrow is our last day of fieldwork, as we make our way back to Kathmandu by Jeep.
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8:49 am - 7:20 PM Friday May 1. Chyamche.
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Today we hiked about 8 hours from Koto to Chamje, descending 1000m and trading pine trees for greener leafier plants (the few I could identify included bamboo, nettles, marijuana, and bana trees). Along the trail I saw…a huge mass of caterpillars devouring some nettles, a wobbly foal at lunch in Tal, a snake, and hundreds of goats and sheep heaing the opposite direction along the trail (in this case we were walking through fauna).
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7:29 am - 9:30 PM Thursday April 30, 2009. Koto.
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I’m clean! I had a cold shower after six days without bathing. Tomorrow I’m even going to put on all clean clothes, after wearing the same pants for two weeks, and the same socks and shirt for over a week.
This morning before leaving Meta we had a bit of fun playing a push-the-over-person-over game to stay warm, taking group photos in front of our last guaranteed good view of high Himalayan peaks, and playing golf with our hiking poles and dried turds in in the field where we were camping. Soon after leaving Meat, the valley became much narrower. In terms of flora, we were mostly hiking through pine forests, including some pretty huge trees, though there were also birch trees with new leaves, bamboo, ferns, small purple flowers, etc. In terms of geology, we were mostly hiking through metasediments, sometimes with impressive dikes running through them, though there were also diamict fills, fluvial deposits, augen gneiss, and deltaic gravels. In terms of fauna, well we weren’t walking through fauna, but I saw tiny blue butterflies, white butterflies, a big beautiful moth, and a bright blue bird.
On the way from Meta to Koto, we made a few stops to collect cosmo and OSL samples,so we didn’t arrive in Koto until about 4 PM. Asa result, we had lunch only a few hours before dinner. For dessert our cook made a nice decorated cake to celebrate the end of our trek in the Naar Phu Valley.
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7:15 am - 6:30PM Wednesday April 29, 2009. Meta.
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Today I hiked up (and back down) a steep slope covered with uneven clumps of grass most of the way up and scree at the top from 3850m to 4850 m. Then I hiked another two and a half hours to Meta, though that felt pretty easy after the difficult descent. I am quite tired, but I feel really good about the transect. After Doug anf I collected the top two samples, we had lunch at about 4700 m, with an awesome (albeit fairly hazy) view of Annapurna II, Annapurna IV, Pisang Peak, Annapurna III, Annapurna I, Gangapurna, and Dhaligiri.
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7:08 am - 8:45 PM Tuesday April 28, 2009. Upper Chyako.
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This morning, we walked about3 hours from Metato Upper Chyako. Along the way we had great views of the rock wall full of dikes across the valley, a glacier, and several mountains. We also collected CRN and OSL samples from some lakebeds. After lunch at Upper Chyako, we collected the three lowest samples for the He relief transect we are doing here, hiking 100m down a little gulley then 400m up the hill to ~4150m. I felt quite energetic and happy all day. As we were coming back into camp around 6PM there was a strange pink haze, which had an interesting effect on the appearance of the snowy mountains. Tomorrow we will continue the transect as high as we can above Upper Chyako, then hike back to Meta.
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| Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
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10:29 pm - 6:30 PM Monday April 27. Meta.
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Collecting samples for the He vertical relief transect went very well today. We collected 8 samples from ~3500m up to ~4800m elevation over a horizontal distance of about 2 km. Bhim and I started at the trail (3600 m) and hiked up to 4000m, looking for good rocks to sample at 200 m intervals. It turned out that good rocks were easy to find as the hillside was mostly granite (good for getting apatites and zircons). At 400m, we had a nice view of Annapurna II, Lamjung, and just the very tip of Manaslu. On the way down, I saw a pretty flower that resembled an iris and the national bird of Nepal, the Himalayan pheasant (a brown female, not a colorful male). We then took the trail as low as we could, to a bridge at 3490 m and found a sill to collect our lowest sample. While we were there we saw two yaks cross the wooden bridge. We got back to camp at almost the exact same time as Doug and Vincent, who had collected 4 samples between 4000 m and 4800 m.
Addendum: After dinner there was a red crescent moon just above the mountains.
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10:11 pm - Sunday April 26, 2009. Meta.
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The Naar Phu Valley segment of our trip has begun. Most of the day, we were hiking in pine forests in a narrow, steep-walled valley. At several points the river seemed to disappear under huge piles of boulders, and just before our lunch spot, the trail passed right behind a waterfall. The hiking was fairly strenuous, especially the steep climb up to Meta at the end of the day; despite pretty cool weather, my braids were soaked with sweat down to the elastic bands. As we climbed up the high terrace fill on which Meta sits, we left the narrow forested valley to enter an open landscape of short grass and shrubs, with views of impressive rock walls and distant peaks. I managed to catch a glimpse of the the glacier above us before it became concealed by clouds. As we took in the scenery beautiful big raptor swooped low overhead. I also saw my first yak.
The Naar Phu Valley is not much visited – we only saw one other Westerner today – so we are camping for the next 5 days. This means that in addition to Doug, me, Vincent, Bhim, and our 3 porters, we have added several more porters and cooks, bringing our party to a total of 17. The porters are my heroes, carrying huge loads by strap across their foreheads and sometimes hiking in flip-flops (at least the first few days of our trip). They even set up our tents for us. The cooks are also great: for lunch we had hot Tang, cheese and tomato sandwiches, cauliflower, cucumber salad, mango, and tea; for dinner they are making pumpkin soup and popcorn, fried rice, and apple fritter for dessert.
While the porters finished setting up camp, Doug, Vincent, and I walked a little ways down the trail to do some reconnaissance. We saw a good number of felsic dikes and grainitoid rocks outcropping on the hillslope above us, so we decided to the (U-Th)/He relief transect here rather than from Meta to Naar as we had originally planned. We also had some nice views of the Ghatte Khola winding its way down from Naar like a silver thread and of the various peaks fading into the haze as the sun dropped out of sight. So tomorrow, Bhim and I will collect samples fro the river up to the base about 600 m above, while Doug and vincent collect the higher samples. I’m excited and slightly nervous to be doing “real” fieldwork without an older and wiser geologist there to tell me if I’m screwing up somehow.
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9:30 pm - 7PM Saturday April 25, 2009. Koto.
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Another beautiful day! In the morning, we climbed up and had a look around on the neo-glacial moraines above Lower Pisang, went down to the river to collect a CRN sample, then started hiking towards Koto, with great views of the Pisang Bowl along the way. After lunch, we spent some time collecting samples from a roadcut, then continued on to Chame, where I spent half an hour on the slowest internet I have ever used to write a few lines of a livejournal post and emails. About a hundred meters down the road, there were some people playing sand volleyball; I think it would have been a better use of my time to see if I could join the game. Leaving Chame, we had an awesome view of Manaslu with snow blowing off its 8162 m peak, which was glowing slightly pink in the late afternoon light.
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9:21 pm - 8:45 PM Friday April 24, 2009. Pisang.
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Today we hiked from Manang back to Pisang via the high trail through Nawal, on the opposite side of the river from the way we came. The weather was sunny and cool, the hiking was pleasant, and the views were breathtaking. I imagined the wisps of clouds clinging to the mountaintops to be the mountains’ dreams. I often wonder what the mountains are thinking about. After passing many prayer wheels stone with the prayer carved into numerous slate slabs, my footsteps fell into rhythm with the mantra “Om mani padme hum,” propelling me up the steep trail to Nawal. A little past Nawal, we collected some quartzite for CRN exposure dating from a breccia with glacial striations on the surface. Later in th afternoon, we got a good view from across the river of one of the outcrops we had sampled yesterday. But for me, the day was really about sunshine, mountains, and “Om mani padme hum.”
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12:54 pm - 9 PM April 23, 2009. Manang.
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Beautiful sunny breezy day of hiking with fantastic views of several Himalayan peaks: Pisang Peak, the Pisang Bowl, Annapurna II, Annapurna IV, Tilicho, Annapurna III, and Gangapurna. I had several of those moments when I think to myself “Isn’t the world wonderful!” etc. The hiking was pretty rolling, with an elevation gain of only 350m (up to 3550 m). The geology was interesting too. There is a huge volume of fill in the valley, which could be from either huge landslides or glaciers. WE also found some glacial striations on the bedrock of the valley wall and took a sample for CRN exposure dating.
Manang sits on a terrace directly across from Annapurna III, Gangapurna, and the Gangapurna glacier. The Gangapurna glacier came all the way down to the valley in the 1950s, but has retreated back a kilometer or so in 50years, leaving a small lake and some nice moraines. The narrow stone streets of Manang wind their way through two- and three-storey stone buildings, which have simple but nice woodwork on the windows and prayer flags flapping on poles above the roofs. There are also many prayer wheels along the paths, though in some cases tin cans have been substituted for missing wheels. Manag is actually a fairly large village, complete with an internet café, a couple places that show movies in English, and shops that sell things like memory cards and play western music. It was particularly strange to hear the music of Tracy Chapman (“But you can say baby, baby can I hold you tonight”) drifting from a shop as we entered town.
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11:42 am - 6 PM Wednesday April 22, 2009. Pisang.
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For the last four days, we have been hiking a stretch of the Annapurna Circuit along the Marsyandi River from Bhulbhule towards Manag, collecting sand for CRN (which tells you erosion rates), OSL (which tells you how old the deposit is), and Nd (which tells you about the source of the sand). As you can see from my last entry, it is pretty tiring. At least we have porters to carry what we don’t need during the day, and it is getting cooler and cooler as we go to higher elevations.( Read more... )
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11:16 am - 9PM Tuesday April 21, 2009. Koto.
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Yesterday we walked from Ghermu to Tal, then today it was on to Koto, at the confluence of the Marsyandi and the Naar Rivers…
[…and then I fell asleep]
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11:15 am - 11 PM Sunday April 19, 2009. Ghermu.
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Today we hiked from Bhulbhule to Ghermu. It was very hot; by lunchtime my braids were saturated all the way to the tips and my face was beet red. Otherwise the hiking wasn’t too bad and the views and the geology were great: landslide deposits, terraces, debris fans, hanging valleys with waterfalls spilling out of them, pretty blue kyanite crystals along the trail, and a pretty blue river 100 meters below. Non-geology things from today: the bees at breakfast, children asking for pens, pleasant villages along the trail, good food, blasting for the road they are building, a neat grinding stone, and a leech on my leg.
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11:11 am - 9:30PM Saturday April 18, 2009. Bhulbhule.
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This morning we left Kathmandu around 8 AM to drive to Bhulbhule, which is located along the Marsyandi a few kilometers south of the MCT (Main Central Thrust) zone. We start hiking from here tomorrow. Along the way we sampled some fluvial sand from some terraces for cosmo and OSL. Doug also pointed out a nice fluvially polished quartzite strath surface with conchoidal fractures where rocks bouncing along the bottom of the river struck the rock and he explained what considerations need to be taken into account when using the CRN exposure age of such a surface to calculate river incision rates. He also pointed out the remnants of a Gilbert delta (which forms where the river enters a lake) and quizzed me about climbing ripples. I’m a little intimidated by Doug because he hasn’t seen me since I visited UCSB as a prospective student and I don’t want to make a bad impression.
Before dinner, we sat around and looked at the map of where we will be hiking for the next several days and talked about what interesting things there were to check out along the way (e.g. landslide deposits, terraces, abandoned channels, glacial striations on bedrock, etc.). I think this half of the trip is going to be more stimulating. The highlight of the day was when Himalchuli (almost 8000m) came into view: a massive snow covered peak floating in the sky in the late afternoon light.
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| Monday, May 4th, 2009
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9:28 pm
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I'm done with my fieldwork in Nepal. We arrived back in Kathmandu yesterday evening, and we leave the day after tomorrow, arriving in California May 7. Expect a burst of daily journal posts from the last two weeks sometime between tomorrow and May 7.
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| Monday, April 27th, 2009
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12:28 am - I'm still alive
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In the last week, I hiked from Bhulbhule to Manang, along part of the Annapurna Circuit, and back part way to Chame. Along the way we have been collecting sand (both from fluvial deposits in roadcuts and terraces and from modern streams) and looking at other interesting geology things, such as evidence for glaciers in the form of moraines, tills, and glacial striations on rocks. I'm learning a lot, getting in good shape, and enjoying some fantastic hiking. The first couple days of hiking were really hot and tiring, but the last few days we have been at higher elevation (up to 3600m so far) and the weather has been sunny and breezy and beautiful. I have also had absolutely spectacular views of Himalayan peaks. In typical Becky fashion, I spend all day just thinking how wonderful the world is as I hike through this amazing landscape, above the river, through forests, past snowy peaks, walls of prayer wheels and stones, etc. Tomorrow we head up the Naar-Phu Valley where we will collect rock samples for U-Th/He analysis and get up to around 5000m elevation. I will post my day-by-day journal entries when I have fast free internet.
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