October 2008 issue

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The Geo Beat
Field Trips III: The Ghost of Field Trips to Come

BY TOM SNEDDON, P.GEOL.
APEGGA Manager, Geoscience Affairs

The room is warm and the glass is now only a quarter full. The map becomes a landscape in all glorious 256 colours and I am walking with a group of colleagues through the thrust, climbing benches to get a better view and to look for meso-scale structures.

It is a cold, windy autumn evening. Dried leaves rustle on the cobblestones outside my library window and the first flakes of winter begin to drift about the door.

Inside it is warm and cozy under my favourite soft-ray reading light, the light dancing on my half-filled glass of 2006 Okanagan Cab Sauvé. An old fashioned paper map of the Rundle Map Sheet and copies of several ancient Geological Survey of Canada publications are strewn upon my battered old map table.

I am reviewing some old colour slides taken at various times in the Bow Valley and up the Cascade on field trips, week-long and weekend hikes dating back to the 1960s.

I wonder if there are places within the Rundle Group that resemble the duplex thrusts we saw at Yamnuska last spring? Should be. Same kind of structure. Hmmm.

The room is warm and the glass is now only a quarter full. The map becomes a landscape in all glorious 256 colours and I am walking with a group of colleagues through the thrust, climbing benches to get a better view and to look for meso-scale structures.

Being within a National Park, of course, we are stripped of our hammers, sample bags, acid bottles and related burdens, left with only our GPS receivers and field books. Oh yes, and our 10X hand lenses. The authorities can take away our hammers, but never our hand lenses!

Then, a mysterious figure appears — the Ghost of Future Field Trip Leaders. She takes the map and gestures excitedly to a creek whose orientation seems out of place. We look at each other and slap our foreheads and laugh roundly: how could we have missed it.

We are all creekology experts and we failed to see the deflection of the stream course along the up-thrust edges of a package of Livingstone Formation limestone. It was clearly contorted and replicated!
Off we scramble through the trees, up the scree and over the ridge. There it is! A beautiful exposure of the fault plane and contact, showing all the diagnostics for a duplex and clear for all to see. The rest of the afternoon passes in a flash, with great views and new insight into the tectonics of the western Front Ranges.

Comparing notes, we all agree that we saw many new things on this trip, despite having been through that landscape many times. We turn to the Leader, who had vanished as completely as she had appeared hours before.

Who was this mystery Leader? There was no mention in the pre-trip materials. Could it have been the ghost of Helen Belyea?

Just then, I wake up with a start. One of the Bulletins has fallen to the floor with a bang. The trip seemed so real — was I really sleeping or—

Well, maybe I should take another trip up the Cascade — just to see where that fault trace leads and what it looks like. I could get a few interested people together and get one of the Alberta Geological Survey guys to lead. Who knows what we might see.

The foregoing is a fictitious event. Well, sort of fictitious. The wine was a Pinot Gris and the CSPG Classic Field Trips Volume 1 was the book involved.

It is intended to promote the idea that Continuing Professional Development events do not necessarily have to be generated by the APEGGA crew in Edmonton. Personal study counts. So does volunteering to lead a field party for PD reasons wherein everyone benefits from a colleague’s knowledge of some facet of Earth science, to say nothing of a day in the field.

Yes, Earth science. It could be a geophysics field trip demonstrating equipment, doing a sample survey or some such thing. I’m talking to you geophysicists out there. Yes you — who never seem to log any field time. When was the last time you put a collar on some of your geological and engineering brethren/sisteren and hauled them outside to demonstrate that your celebrated methods do work and you can find things?

The nice thing about geophysics is that we don’t have to wait for summer to do field work. What better way to spend a bright, crisp winter day than being outside planting electrodes or geophones!

We need more cross-disciplinary stuff going on. There are still some of us who think geophysics has something to do with inspecting the entrails of chickens and casting magic bones. There are others who firmly believe geology is for people who have trouble balancing a chequebook.

The same thing goes for some of our engineering types who do geotechnical work with tools the rest of the litho-phyles could make good use of. Site surveys do include dirt and rocks, the stuff we thrive on.

Maybe (just maybe) we could learn something from each other.