We've been expecting a day of crazy rain for the last few days, and it never arrived. We ended up calling an office day yesterday, because we need to catch up on our database entries, note-scanning, rock-cutting and sample-organizing. I ended up doing about 2 hours of scanning notes (about as entertaining as watching paint dry) and then slabbed rocks for about 3 hours in the afternoon. Slabbing rocks is a lot of fun. I love being able to see the textures inside after slicing them open, and seeing the secrets that the moss and lichen are hiding from us on the weathered surface. It's neat. One of the rocks had an epidote vein on the one side, and when it was cut open, it was pretty obvious as to how much it had altered the rock. The green stain was about two inches deep into the rock. So neat. 

Glomeroporphyritic Plagioclase

I've been liking the igneous rocks up here a lot more than I expected. I never really got into igneous petrology much, I think mostly because my prof at the college was more of a sedimentologist. Anyways, I am learning a lot about igneous textures, and the rocks up here are super interesting. There's a lot of volcanogenic sedimentary rocks where there's plagioclase in the matrix, clasts of amygdoloidal basalts, and the only way to tell what the heck it is is by the weathered surface, because the clasts weather slightly differently than the matrix. Sometimes when it gets real difficult we just bring a sample home and slab it, but packing a sample from each station out is a bit heavy after a while, and the chopper pilot doesn't really like that either. 

Some vague-pillow looking basaltic rock

It's been interesting too, because a lot of the rock is pretty altered, so some of the original textural features have been lost. Like, the pillows in the pillow basalts. They don't really look like pillows anymore, and we have a bit of a running joke that they're vague-pillows. That's how previous mappers have described them, and honestly, that's what they look like. You have to kinda tilt your head and look for other textures. I got into a good discussion about the rock in the photo above, because we found calcite and epidote filled amygdules (little bubbles that form in the pillow basalts that get filled in with minerals by fluids moving through the rock later), but my trav partner didn't want to call them pillow basalts because of the provenance associated with pillows, even though we not only found these vague-pillow shapes and the amygdules. It was a good discussion, because he kept finding clasts of amygdoloidal basalts, but I kept calling them pillows. It was entertaining. I'm not really sure if either of us ever figured out who was right. I don't know if we ever could have. 

Today was my official day off, so after changing another tire on the infernal black truck, Catie and I went into town to do some laundry. The internet in the cafe is super fast, so I uploaded a bunch of photos onto my flickr site but most of those I've already put up on here. It takes way too long to upload photos to Facebook, so that's just not happening until the end of the summer I think.