I met up with Ron for dinner tonight. His field camp has just finished their work in the Durango area. I grilled him for information on the spots where they map - I wanted to know why I see so many vans pulled over beside the same big roadcut every spring. (I have never taken my mapping classes to either of the classic Durango field areas, by the way. I have my own favorites, chosen for 1) nice views, 2) variety of rock types, and 3) interesting map geometries - one of them is perfect for getting students to think about features that dip upstream vs downstream.)
During the conversation, I wondered which towns were visited by the largest number of field camps. Some possibilities that I could think of:
Durango, Colorado
Dinosaur, Colorado
Red Lodge, Montana
Jackson, Wyoming (or maybe Hoback Junction or some campground in Yellowstone)
Bishop, California (because the Poleta folds aren't really in a town - I'm cheating and thinking of the UC system's base camp)
Rapid City, South Dakota
I know there are some early field camps that work in Arizona, and there have got to be some classic places in Utah that get a lot of traffic. (Lots of field camps drive through Moab, in part because there aren't many good places to cross the Colorado River, but do many groups stay near there?)
What am I leaving out?
Friday, June 13, 2008
Which town is visited by the most US field camps?
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6 comments:
We had ours in Dillion, Montana, and I know several others go through there as well
Being a community college, with only a smattering of majors and a number of teachers, we keep moving for the whole two weeks we are on the road, with stops in Durango and Moab, and lots of parks. The base camp for University of Nevada, Reno is in Ruth NV, near Ely.
Our field camp moved the entire time as well, traveling much of Wyoming. One of the places in WY that seems to be pretty popular is Wind River Canyon, near Thermopolis, due to the nonconformity that is exposed. It is the southern-most route through the Wind River Mountains, however, and tends to have a lot of truck traffic.
I noticed that my former field camp school, University of Arizona, still occasionally starts in Flagstaff, AZ. They also go to different places each year, not always in Arizona, including Wheeler Peak, NV. The year I went, we started in Flagstaff and ended up in the Chiricahua Mountains.
[Sorry for earlier non-sequitur - I wasn't awake yesterday!]
Yeah, we went to Thermopolis, but I didn't remember why till I read anon's comment. Red Lodge mostly tho.
We did Ely NV to look at an extended orogen (Antler?), Vernal UT for folding of classic Co plateau seds, and Jackson WY for mapping on the Gros Vente and then hard rock stuff in the Tetons.
Vernal to Jackson involved a 70F temperature drop.
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