2010 Travel Meme: The PNW Edition

This travel meme seems to be a geoblogosphere favorite! This year, Silver Fox started it, and has a list of this year’s participants. I’m a little late, but better late than never, eh? In 2010, I visited a mere 4 states – but lived in 3 of them!

In January, I hiked up Mt. Si with my family and some of my mum’s caver friends. It was a little chilly at the top, but what a view! Also, my family took a day trip to the Portland Art Museum (and Voodoo Doughnuts!) At the time, I lived in Olympia, Wa. (The state capital, 2.5 hours from Seattle, and the hipster-little-sister-city to Portland, much to the chagrin of Olympians everywhere.)

In February, I went to visit Oregon Caves National Monument with the Cascade Grotto for a conservation weekend. I picked some lint, but my father and another power-tool devotee removed a large piece of metal from the cave, dangling on rope, wielding reciprocating saws.

In  March, my friend Sarah visited, and we went on a lovely lake hike with her mum near Brown Creek.

Also in March, I visited Discovery Park in Seattle with my school’s geology club. We looked at the glacial deposits there, including the Lawton Clay, Esperance Sand, and the Fraser till. Underneath all the glacial deposits lie the pre-glacial, river-deposited, and highly photogenic Olympia Beds.

In April, I visited Elliot Bay Book Company in their Pioneer Square location, the day before they moved to a new location in Capital Hill. There was a reason – high rent or some hogwash – for the move, but I think the new location is fugly compared to the creaky wood floors and dark, brick-lined basement café. Pfft.

In May, I visited the Columbia River Flood Basalts twice: once on a geology club field trip, where we visited Dry Falls, Grand Coulee dam, and went on a geology hike…

… and once on a Northwest Geological Society field trip, focusing on structural geology. I haven’t studied much structural geology yet, so this basically blew my mind, especially this scenic anticline. Overall, it was a pretty basalt-tastic month.

In June, I had a fun-filled four-finals week, and then packed up my apartment and moved to South Idaho. On the way, I swung by the John Day Fossil Beds in Oregon.

In July, I was busy travelling around Idaho, doing an internship at Craters of the Moon.

In August, I went to north Idaho for a trip through Papoose Cave. We rappelled down a 22’ waterfall, but, unfortunately, the 40’ waterfall had too much water to rappel through. We got to see some great limestone during the short trip, but no formations.

After that, my sister and I took a trip to Yellowstone, where we saw hot springs, microbial mats, and a bunch of animals.

In September, I went to the Northwest Caving Association Regional in Bend, Oregon, and saw even more lava caves (and some long tree roots!) Then I finished up my internship and moved back to my parent’s house in the Seattle/Tacoma suburbs.

In October, I went on the annual bike riding / wine tasting trip in Eastern Washington with my parents and their friends. (I always hope for some hilarious middle-aged drunken hijinks, but they’re all too wise for that nonsense.) Also, my brother graduated from Universal Technical Institute in Phoenix, and we went to see him and his wife. During the plane ride, I got a great aerial view of some nearby volcanoes.

The day after returning from Phoenix, I moved my possessions into my parent’s van, and drove down to Oregon Caves to work on a restoration project.

In November, we visited Crater Lake. We went home to Washington for Thanksgiving, and then returned to the caves for more work.

In December, we travelled back to Washington. Before that massive snows and a power outage made life a little adventurous, but we got to have an active lesson in static and kinetic friction, and how the coefficient of friction of ice is different than that of pavement. Sometimes this was bad…

… but sometimes it was pretty useful.

On our way back, we visited some of the historic covered bridges in Cottage Grove, Oregon.

Before the New Year, we visited Seattle three times. (My mother likens these shipping cranes to Brachiosauruses.) We did a toursity gig – the ballet, Pike Place Market, the waterfront… It was really nice to visit the city a couple times before I move to Boise next week.

Here’s hoping 2011 has some more travel adventures, and that everyone had a happy New Years!

Two-sided Dike

This is one of my favorite cave features here at Oregon Caves National Monument. It’s a quartz diorite dike encrusted with calcite.

Water (carrying minerals) flows through cracks in the marble bedrock. Quartz diorite is less permeable than marble, and when the water is unable to seep through. Instead, it flows down the surface of the dike, coating one side with calcite formations.
This is my favorite example of this, but there’s a much more prominent one along the tour route, so you should visit sometime!
If you’d like to learn more about the caves, you should read Ranger Gaelyn’s fantastic cave tour part one and part two!

I Hear It's Pronounced Orr-gun.

This is where I spent the weekend:Doing some of this:
And a lot of this:
Generating this:
It was time for the annual grotto cave conservation lint-picking down in Oregon. I know it sounds crazy, but lint-picking is actually my favorite part of cave conservation. It's very soothing - listening to the cave, picking some lint, chatting with those around, finding a 6" long hair, picking some more lint - and the results are instantaneous.
This year I got to go on rope to do some of the cleaning, which was really cool - and also very nerve racking, as you avoid kicking the cave bacon or scraping the flowstone with your descender. It was well worth it, though.
It really feels as though we just got started, especially on the vertical section. There is a lot more cleaning to be done here!

One of the sections we cleaned on rope:

A section we've cleaned in previous years:

It was so nice to get out of the house, and out of town!

Oregon Caves: A Brief Introduction

Oregon Caves is eroded out of a giant chunk of marble, metamorphosed from limestone that was scraped off the Pacific plate. The black lines are graphite. Only 5% of the world's caves are marble, because it's much more difficult to erode than limestone. This hardness is also why the cave is tiny compared to, say, Carlsbad.

Water drips down through organic material on the surface, picking up carbon dioxide. This carbonic acid drips through the marble, dissolving the rock and collecting the minerals. In the hollow of the cave, the carbon dioxide dissipates, precipitating the minerals, and formations slowly grow.

One type of formation is called rimstone, or gours. These "dams" grow in areas with slow water movement and low gradients.

Back in the 1900s, people destroyed a large section of rimstone in the cave. This rimstone should stretch across the passage.

This is an empty crystal pool elsewhere in the cave. However, it is evident that the destroyed rimstone was covered with crystal.

It is certainly made out of crystal. You can see the tree-like crystal structure.

As a contrast, this is the crystal structure of flowstone.

But observing the crystal structure of these formation should be impossible, because they shouldn't be broken. This piece even has a thick layer of epoxy glued on. It makes me very glum.

But, despite the damage, there are still many cool formations in the cave.

There are also neat cave bugs, like these endemic harvestmen (which are not spiders!) In the winter, they gather inside the cave to stay warm, and occasionally do pushups (no, I'm not kidding you.) They can also self-amputate their legs, and then grow them back. All of which makes them into my favorite insect, ever.

And, on the surface, you can see fawns.