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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
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1:20 pm - birdie
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Yesterday, I saw a bird fall to the ground. (I only saw the last foot or so of its fall so I don't know if it fell out of a tree or what). It didn't look injured, but it was just sitting there and didn't really move when I prodded it. So I took it to the local wildlife rescue (so the cats that sometimes hang out near the geology building wouldn't get it), and they told me that it was a cedar waxwing that had probably eaten some fermented berries and got too tipsy to fly, and that it should be fine in a couple days.
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| Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
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5:38 am - Lucky!
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I really am a lucky person. Despite declaring a couple days ago that I had never had so much bad luck in a single day, everything turned out just fine. My finger is almost as good as new, my cell phone and small camera were returned to me the next day, and Europcar is sending me a new car key today.
Then, this morning, I found out that I was awarded an NSF fellowship! I guess I might as well not drop out of grad school :P.
I’m lucky in so many other ways too… but I’m going to stop writing now before I start gushing about everything from the wonderful people in my life to the opportunities and advantages that I’ve had to the incredible beauty of the world.
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| Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
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4:16 pm - Mala suerte
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Today’s word of the day is f***. The day started off well enough, I was checking out some silts on the east side of the river, and I even found an volcanic ash, which would allow me to know the age of the deposits and help me figure out the relationship between these sediments and the ones on the west side of the river where I have been working most of the time. As I was hammering a chunk of this ash into smaller pieces to put in a bag, I hit my finger instead of the rock. F***. I suddenly felt nauseous and light-headed and my face suddenly felt cold. Yes, my finger hurt a lot, but I think my body overreacted a bit. Anyway, I lay down on the hillside and propped my feet up on a rock for a few minutes until I felt better. I caught myself thinking, as I often do, that perhaps by this small bad thing happening to me, it was preventing something worse from happening to me later.
While my finger was still throbbing, I thought about quitting early, but I decided that would be kind of wimpy. So, I drove along the dirt road, past some kind of scary parts where I was a little afraid the car would roll off a small cliff, until the road ended. Then I wandered around another nice outcrop of silts until 5 pm, and decided to finish my day a little early since I didn’t really have time to go to another site.
However, when I got back to my car I couldn’t find my key. F***. It wasn’t in the pocket of my backpack where I usually put it, nor was it in my pockets, nor anywhere else I looked. I knocked on the door of a nearby house and explained my situation. They were very nice and tried to break into my car for me (no luck), and gave me some delicious cake and tea. A couple of the people were just visiting and were going to leave soon anyway, so they offered to drop me off at my hotel in Tilcara.
Unfortunately, I still had one more piece of bad luck. When I got back to my hotel room I realized that my cell phone – which I had taken out my pocket to see if I had the phone number for the rental car company – had fallen out of my pocket. F***. So I stood out on the corner, shivering, in hopes that I might see the people who gave me the ride as they left town and see if my phone was in their car. Again, no luck.
I called the guy from the car rental company, and he said the extra key was in Tucuman (an extra 3.5 hours south of Salta), and that it would cost 900 pesos to send it tomorrow, but they could send it Monday for 30 pesos. So hopefully, I will get the key Monday evening and then Tuesday I can get back to the place where I left my car (pretty far from the main road) and also ask about my phone at the house there; and hopefully my finger doesn't get infected and fall off in the meantime.
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| Friday, April 2nd, 2010
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7:02 pm - Viernes Santa
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Today, when I left my hotel to go to dinner, the first thing I noticed was that there were police directing traffic at the bridge into town. The next thing I noticed was that the streets were closed to vehicles and full of people. I heard religious music and words coming from loudspeakers placed throughout the town. When I came to the first street corner, I saw a huge (maybe 10 x 15 feet) image of Jesus made of flowers, seeds, stones, and the like. There were several of these [ermitas] throughout town. As I walked toward my favorite restaurant (which happens to be half a block from the church), the crowd grew thicker and there were marching bands [sikuris] of children and young people with drums and pan pipes preparing. I’ve been hearing this same type of band around town the past week. Soon, the procession began. First came the bands and their wonderful cacophony. Next, a wooden cross wrapped in white cloth, then a statue of a saint [San Juan], then the body of Jesus lying down in a glass case [Cristo Yacente], and finally the Virgin Mary [La Dolorosa]. No, finally, hundreds (maybe more than a thousand) of people walking slowly behind.
When I returned to my hotel room, I read about Semana Santa in Tilcara online to better understand what was going on tonight and what I might expect in the next couple days.
Here's a link (in Spanish, but there's always Google translate if you don' speak Spanish) if you're interested in reading about Semana Santa in Tilcara: http://www.jujuyenletras.com.ar/jujuy-html/costum/semana-santa/semana-santa.htm
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3:54 am
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Yesterday I saw the biggest rabbit I've ever seen. Maybe it was the Easter bunny. The day before, I saw a fox (or fox-like creature) scamper up a series of boulders sticking out of a nearly vertical cliff.
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| Sunday, March 28th, 2010
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6:52 pm - Rocks and rock
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I had originally envisioned writing something about what I’ve been doing in Argentina every day or every few days. However, it turns out that after spending all day hiking around, a late dinner, and a couple hours of looking through my photos from the day, going over my map, or reading rock descriptions, I’m pretty exhausted. So, the last you heard of me I had just arrived in Tilcara and was sick. That was two weeks ago.
For about a week and a half after that my days went something like…Wake up at 7 AM. Practice driving stick shift for half an hour. 8 AM breakfast of bread, croissant, and orange juice. Possibly buy food or drop off laundry. Geologize. Lunch of crackers, tomatoes, cheese, and fruit. More geologizing. Get back to hotel around 7 PM. Shower. Dinner (at El Nuevo Progreso, once we discovered this great restaurant) around 9 PM. Work or talk to people on the internet until midnight. Sleep. Manfred was with Doug and me for several days, and we had one day where his grad student, Heiko, showed us his field area, which is a little south of Tilcara.
The geology continues to be fantastic. I’m mostly mapping and also collecting volcanic ashes to date the Tertiary units. The idea is to understand the timing of valley filling and incision and deformation (i.e. thrusting and folding), the hypothesis being that the location of the deformation will respond to the lithostatic load of the sediments in the intramontane valley, and the accumulation or evacuation of sediments will respond to climate. Anyway, I’m really lucky. It seems like whenever I think, “it would be nice to know the age of this conglomerate,” right around the corner we find an ash we can use to date it. The older rocks that are being thrust over the conglomerates are cool, too. First of all they’re pretty: bright red sandstones, yellow limestones with oolites and stromatolites, purple and green shales. And, some of them have dinosaur footprints in them!
On Tuesday 3/23, we drove back to Salta because Doug was leaving (back to California). That night we had dinner with some other geologists who happened to be staying at the same hotel as us. The next morning, Doug left, and I picked up my rental car and drove back to Tilcara.
Since then, my daily routine is pretty much the same as before, except I’m by myself, and I’ve been sleeping more (going to bed earlier and no more driving practice), eating less, and I’ve been posting all my photos (unfortunately including the boring ones) to my shutterfly page.
Oh yes, and yesterday (3/27) I went to a rock concert! I came back from the field early because it started thundering and I didn’t want to get stuck up some gully in the hills alone in a thunderstorm. When I arrived back in town I noticed that there were tons of people all over the place, so I asked what was going on, and I learned that there was a big (i.e. thousands of people) rock concert by the group Divididos that evening and that it was free. So I decided to go. The concert was outside, and right before they were supposed to come on it started raining, and we had to stand in the rain for an hour before the concert started. The concert was great: an interesting combination of rock music (the kind people jump up and down to) and more traditional music. Toward the end of the concert it started raining again, but they just kept playing and it didn’t dampen the spirits of the audience either. However, after getting soaked and then standing in the cold air for four hours (this after 6 hours of fieldwork earlier in the day), I was shivering, stiff, and quite exhausted, and I actually left a couple songs before the end.
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| Sunday, March 14th, 2010
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10:21 am - Onward and Upward
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Yesterday we left Salta and drove north to Tilcara along Route 9, which is very pretty. Tilcara is less than 150 km (as the crow flies) from Salta, but the change in climate is dramatic because it is 1300 m higher (at 2500 m) and in the rain shadow of the mountains to the east. As we came up the Humahuaca Valley, the trees disappeared from the hillsides and were replaced with small bushes, grasses, cacti, and bare rock in various shades of red, orange, green, gray, and purple. The weather went from 28ºC, cloudy, and humid to 22ºC sunny and breezy.
On the way to Tilcara we stopped at Purnamarca, where there are beautiful red and orange hills (Cambrian and Cretaceous rocks overthrust by gray-green Pre-Cambrian rocks). We then continued up the road from Purnamarca that heads up towards the plateau. We drove up to 4170 m, where we had great views of the salar in distance to the west, snow-capped peaks to the southwest, pretty folded rocks outcropping on the hillsides, and big puffy white clouds building over the mountains east of the valley. We stopped along the road to look at the Cambrian quartzites, sandstones, and shales, Ordivician sandstones, siltsones, and limestones, and the Pre-Cambrian shales rocks in more detail, since I will need to be able to identify them in the field. There is also extensive fill that forms smooth horizontal surfaces near the sides of the valley. It’s quite impressive. We also looked at some lake sediments within the fill that had fossil leaf imprints.
In Tilcara, we checked into the hotel I will be staying at for the next month, walked around town and bought food for today, took advantage of the wireless internet in our room, and went out for dinner. It turned out that the restaurant we chose has live music every night starting at 9:30 pm. They played traditional music of the region, and were excellent in my opinion. There was a mandolin (or something similar) player with a big floppy hat that covered most of his face and long blonde dreadlocks whose hands moved so fast you couldn’t see them, a guitarist/singer with a big voice, and a guy who played a type of flute, pan pipes, something like an alpine horn, and drum.
I should be in the field right now except both my adviser and I are sick today. So instead I am reading the report (in Spanish) that goes with the geologic map of the area and writing my journal entries. Doug’s been sleeping off a fever all morning and I’ve been going to the toilet every 20 minutes. I’m going to be more careful about what I eat from now on (i.e. no more mixed salads for a while).
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| Saturday, March 13th, 2010
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11:00 pm - Iruya River
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Friday morning (3/12) we got up at 5 am and drove a couple hours in the dark and the rain along a bouldery dirt road to the Iruya River. I was impressed that Doug was able to take our dinky car down that road; the four wheel drive we were supposed to have would have been useful. It stopped raining soon after we started hiking, but it was still hot and humid, and we were being eaten by these horrible little insects. At one point my lip started to swell up a lot so I took some Benadryl to stop it and felt really tired the rest of the day. I also got sunburned and spent a fair chunk of time thinking about what I would do if I quit grad school.
My bad mood aside, the place is pretty cool. In the late 1800s people diverted the river over a pass. Since it was steeper on the other side, the river started eroding rapidly and a knickpoint propagated upstream, incising maybe 100m since then. Because we know that the fluvial sedimentary rocks that make up the valley walls were only recently exposed (by this incision), they make ideal targets for using cosmogenic nuclides to determine basin-wide erosion rates in the past. We couldn’t get to where we were planning to collect the samples because the river was right up against a cliff. Venturing into the river wasn’t an option as it was very muddy, pretty swift, and we could hear it moving boulders. It was okay though, we just collected samples from somewhere else.
The scenery was pretty nice too: lush tropical vegetation, a large river valley with a flat gravel-covered bottom and steep red walls, tributary stream spilling over the side of the valley as a waterfall, a cow here and there, and lots and lots of butterflies.
After we were finished there, we drove to Salta, where we met Manfred Strecker (a German professor we are collaborating with) and Ricardo Alonso (an Argentinean geologist) for a really nice dinner. We didn’t arrive in Salta until 9 pm, but that was still early enough to have a beer before dinner time (about 10 pm). When we got back from dinner, Brian (a recent PhD student of Doug’s now doing a postdoc with Manfred) had arrived, so it was nice to see him too.
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| Thursday, March 11th, 2010
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11:00 pm - Argentina Arrival
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As anyone who actually reads my livejournal probably already knows, I am currently in northwestern Argentina for a month of geology fieldwork.
I arrived in Argentina yesterday (Wednesday 3/10) morning after two long naps during which I was apparently whizzing through the air from Los Angeles to Atlanta to Buenos Aires. I had been particularly exhausted from not getting enough sleep the past few days and generally from being stressed out trying to get everything ready at the last second. I took a nice bus from the airport to the hotel, where my advisor met me a couple hours later. After lunch, we spent a while trying to connect to the wifi in the hotel and eventually succeeded once the hotel staff gave us the correct password after giving us three different wrong ones. We tried to pick up some geologic maps from Argentinean geologic service, but the library was closed, so we took a walk and looked at nice buildings. For dinner, Doug had a ridiculous plate of all sorts of meat and I had a piece of fried cheese. Sadness. I did have some nice wine though.
Today (Thursday 3/11) was a day of frustrations. We had an early morning flight arriving in Salta at 8:30 am. Doug had reserved a car with four wheel drive from Europcar. To make a long story short, they didn’t have the car, and it took us a long time to find this out, and we ended up taking a taxi into town and renting from another company there. On the way out of town, it was surprisingly difficult to find sandwiches to take on the road with us, and we didn’t get out of town until 12:30 pm. Doug had wanted to do some sampling along the Iruya River near the town of Oran today, but by the time we got there it was too late to get started. We had a fun time wandering around town failing to buy a bucket without knowing the word for it (which we learned is balde). Eventually it was after 5pm so the grocery store was open, so bought a bucket there along with food for tomorrow. After that, we checked into a hotel, did a little work, got dinner, and now it’s late and I should go to bed because I have to get up early tomorrow.
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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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