Wind Rivers

Posted by Alyssa Howlett , Wednesday, June 30, 2010 12:41 PM

We made it to the wind rivers, this camp site…. Ummmmm….. special…. Really testing my camping/ mountain women ability. It was literally in the middle of no where with no running water, and a hole in the ground with a little room around it for a bathroom….. yeah. We stayed here for three nights… yeah. Anyway, we set up camp, we are pros now, and then went into town (aka 40 minutes away) to have dinner. It was a really good dinner, I had fish and chips and we hung out there for about two hours. Not going to lie, at this point I was really iching to get home…. REAL BAD. I can check camping of my to do list and I was ready to be done with this whole thing. We went back to camp and had a fire and hug out. The next day we actually had to work in the field. So we got all our gear on and headed out. Not climbing mountains for a week really gets you out of shape, ha, we had to climb a ridge, it was hard work! We were looking at metamorphic rocks and had to take stike and dip (like we have been doing) as well as trend and plunge of the rocks. This shows how the rock was squeezed and stretched during metamorphism. We saw many dikes and basaltic intrutions and we even saw PILLOW BASALTS! They were so cool looking! It rained on us for a bit then went back to being hot. Gotta love crazy WYO weather! We then dove to the BIF (banded Iron Formation) and got to collect rocks! I went kinda crazy and got a ton plus a couple big ones! They are heavy too since they have iron in them, but I think they look cool. We then went into town (Atlantic City, and hung out at the bar. The people are so nice, we didn’t have to pay for over half the stuff we got. We walked back to camp and then hung out around the fire.

The next day was our LAST DAY IN THE FIELD EVER!!!!!! Our team rocked it! We had to attack a mountain and describe all the types of rocks and take measurements! We found a lot of cool rocks and enjoyed our final geology field moments. After we finished mapping we went to South Pass City, an old mining town and we saw gold flakes in the river! NEAT! It was a cute little town! Then we stopped at town more places to see more rocks from the same formation, they were sparkly, so I loved them. And the last stop was to see kinematic indicators that told us what way the rocks got stretched. Then WE WERE DONE! We celebrated by jumping in this huge mud pit by camp and got covered in it! Then we jumped in the lake to clean off! It was a lot of fun!

The next day we headed back to base camp. On our way we stopped at Thermopolis and went to swim in the hot springs. Boy, they were hot! It was cool though, then we tried to shower… but I was really ready to take a real shower. I have never been so excited to head back to the base camp in shell! It was so nice to get back. Tuesday we finished out Wind rivers project and then did laundry and hung out by the creek. It was 102 here yesterday and Is pretty hot again today. We are all ready to leave I cant wait to get back. I had a blast while I was here, but getting back to GENEVA and AMES will be great!

We leave Thursday (tomorrow) and we drive for two days to get back!