It has hit again. Conference and meeting travel doesn’t count. I can wreck my neck and hands while typing into a laptop and then trudge over to happy hour right here.
I also long for real outcrops. This last trip to Fort Collins afforded no time for a hike or even to touch a dipping sandstone for five minutes, to commune with the texture of its well-sorted quartz grains. See, I need a fix and quick.
You heard me, real outcrops. Not my yard’s glacial erratics or the painfully horizontal Mississippian argillaceous shale down the road. D keeps talking about a trip to Ireland this fall. One Precambrian marble in place. That’s all I ask for. Like this one. Never mind that it’s as far away from Dublin that you can get in Ireland.
Folded Marble, County Donegal (courtesy of Ulster Museum)
Go, Matri! I love it that you need you some rocks. I love ’em, myself.
I once climbed down the bank of the Snake River and filched the biggest river rock I could carry and brought it home to New Orleans in a carry-on because we don’t have rocks here. I’m sure you noticed that.
While you are a scientist and have a professional interest in the matter, I think I also recognize a kindred love of rock for its own sake. Who knew one semester of Rocks for Jocks would leave me with a crush on John McPhee and the world’s tiniest Wyoming basalt boulder in my garden!
Folded Marble. Clearly you must go.
Anita, I just love rocks. Your Snake River story reminds of the time I found a large-baby-sized boulder of Precambrian Baraboo quartzite (with gorgeous ripple marks intact) near Ableman’s Gorge in Wisconsin. It was freezing but I took my sweatshirt off, wrapped the rock with it and hauled it uphill across contour for more than a couple of miles back to the vehicle. The quartzite sample still sits in my old landlord’s yard in Madison and I have vowed to reclaim it this Christmas.