Wolf on the rocks

Here's my "backyard".

That's the Rockies in the distance. Little Dry Creek carves a nice valley down from this point. One of the sources is a marshy area across Yosemite, here:

When I walk to the top of the rise to the east, I see this:

a different world with an actual horizon.

This area is a geotourism dream...the Rockies with canyons cutting into their granitic hearts, rich paleontological sites, ancient volcanoes weathered down to their basaltic innerds, carved sedimentary bluffs. I am fortunate to live in this area.

But, y'know. Everywhere I have ever lived has been geologically fascinating. Earth is geologically fascinating.

My earliest hobby was mineral collecting. When I was three, my family moved to Lagrange, Georgia, built over a gem rich pegmatite lens. My father and I visited a quarry about five miles outside the city and we knew nothing of the "space age" minerals that were being mined there so we picked up a couple of chunks of pretty rose quartz after googling at the towering walls of rock and then we left.

Years later, a couple if guys broke into the site late at night with a pickup truck and jack hammer. The owners closed the quarry to the public. From then on, the rock was crushed and sold as land fill. The site has produced beryls the size of barrels. Some are in the Smithsonian. Garnets, rutiles, tourmalines abound there...to be crushed and used as land fill 

We went back many years later and picked around the sides of the highway. Just before I moved to Colorado, after my father had died, the site opened back up to the public.

I didn't see much of my father during my childhood. He had to work (a lot) to support our family. (I didn't realize until much later how truly poor we were. Dad did a good job.) When I was in high school, he decided that we needed something we could do in common and his answer was mineral collecting. 

We spent a lot of time on the rocks. Any local construction project was fair game. Whenever we traveled, we looked for holes in the ground to explore. We connected with college professors and hermits that also collected.

Our personalities were different. He was meticulous, pouring over a single boulder on the dike of a dam, while I would start at one end and quickly traverse the granite, making a mental note of rocks I would revisit. But it tied us together. 

When he found out that he was dying of lung cancer, the last year and a half of his life involved joyously panning for gold and gems and chipping away at boulders.

Georgia intrudes into Alabama with a wedge of igneous and metamorphic rock that always delivers surprises. When I was ten, we moved from Lagrange to Valley, Alabama. During my high school years, we lived on a street that dead ended at a power line easement where I spent a lot of my free time. It was forested and sculpted by several small creeks. I once scooped some sand from one of the creeks for examination. When I got it home, I found that it was full of grains that glowed bright orange under my black light. When I looked at it under a microscope, I found sharp, octahedral crystals of thorite. Thorite isn't common.

I'm not crazy about fossils, but most of Alabama is fossil country. I was surprised though to find big, textbook quality crystals of pyrite popping out of the clayey banks of the Alabama River in Selma, where I lived for twenty years.

Alabama isn't known for it's ragged landscape. It's not known for the network of canyons that stretch across it's northern border or the waterfalls the dot the landscape from Lookout Mountain in the northeastern corner of the state to the forested area thirty miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. I was glad that it was an "undiscovered" outdoor paradise.

Geology is accessible but that's not the only thing that recommends it as a hobby. It's inexpensive. You don't really need much equipment to pursue it. Here's a list:

Small rock pick: has a hammer at one end and a pick at the other.

Chisel (or set of chisels) and rubber mallet.

Safety goggles: for when you make rock chips fly.

Small dropper bottle of dilute hydrochloric acid (or vinegar).

Small magnet.

Mohs Hardness Scale: either the nine mineral samples or common materials such as an iron nail, glass microscope slide, emery paper square, and your finger nail.

Magnifying glass

Freezer bags and tissue paper for specimens.

Something to carry it all in.

There are some incredible phone apps for geologists. In addition to the regular science stuff like Google maps (or Google Earth), Vieyra's Physics Toolbox, Walter Stubb's MC50 Programmable Calculator, and the Arduino Science Journal, check out Workshop512's Dioptra and University of Wisconsin Microstrat's Rockd, an all in one utility for geologists. The last app provides a major necessity for geological exploration...maps, both geological and topological. You can also poke an area on a map and it will give you the geological lowdown on the area. Definitely check it out!.

If you want to try something special, that's usually not too expensive either. Ultraviolet prospecting is a cool nighttime activity. A combination long and short wave ultraviolet light is available at Home Science Tools for less than $50. An added benefit is that scorpions and rattlesnakes also glow under a blacklight.

Earth is our home and it is exquisitely carved. Anyone can find adventure in their back yard.