Friday, April 4, 2008

Field trip season... almost



At least the rocks are out of the snow now. And the old snow is packed enough so we didn't really post-hole.

It's past time to get outside.

4 comments:

Elli said...

One benefit of living in southern New York: I took my students to the Palisades Sill last Saturday. It was windy & not all that warm, but at least there was no snow! We had good time and at least we didn't have to deal with leaves on the trees to see the cliff faces.

But I went on an attempted field trip in February in the Berkshires. Our first stop, the snow was just pretty (Ron has a good panoramic shot of it...). At the second stop, the snow shifted from pretty to hard to take pictures of the outcrop due to increase in snowfall rate. And then when we went to turn around the vans to move on, one of the vans didn't want to move. The result is posted here

Anonymous said...

Field season started for me last week, and luckily usually lasts through December.

Unfortunately, July-August in Massachusetts isn't exactly that pleasant, what with heat, humidity, foliage (hard to see outcrops when your visibility is 20 feet at most), smog, mosquitos, ticks, poison ivy, annoying suburban landowners, etc...

I like my job, really!

Joe Kopera

Anonymous said...

Elli--

Visiting the Shelburne Falls crop in February is gutsy! A week or two after your fieldtrip / that snow storm, the flashboards on the dam burst, and the whole outcrop has been under a torrent since...

-Joe K.

Elli said...

Joe,

I also thought field tripping in Feb in western MA was a bit risky, but it was offered as a pre-field trip to the Teaching Visualizations workshop I went to--who am I to skip a free chance to go into the field??? The garnets were pretty at the second stop... if you could see them through the snow!

Kim's also commented that my undergrad field area is currently flooding, so that wouldn't be a great field trip site at the moment either :)

Elli