Pinball Wizards

Pinball Traverse: where you just kind of ping-pong around a small map area all day, going up and down and all around the place, without really getting anywhere.

The traverse was pretty good today, considering that the weather gods were against us. The weather report said it was going to rain, but it didn't! Score! We had some neat outcrops (including a new foliated intrusion, an ultramafic unit, and some sandstones). The sandstone was pretty awesome, mostly because I found some lovely rounded quartz grains that kind of proved my point that it was a sandstone and not a volcanic rock.... The rocks up here are a bit ridiculous, and it's hard to tell the sediments from the volcaniclastics sometimes, because there's a lot of plag in the sediments, the hornblendes are usually euhedral, and it's just tricky. The key is that there is quartz in one formation (Takwahoni), and not in another(Stuhini) (which narrows it down a LOT), and then the clasts in the Stuhini are usually visible on the weathered surface but entirely invisible on the fresh surface (because the rock is monomict). I'll have to take some photos and point out the clasts, or go through my coworker's photos and find some. It's super neat, now that I can finally kind of make sense of these rocks (kind of... I stress the kind of. )

But back to the traverse...
My partner today thought we were going to get skunked (as in not find any rock all day), so I had to tell him to 'harden up' because of his whinging. We found our first outcrop by about 10:30, and had decent luck at finding rock for the rest of the day, although we certainly had to run around in the brush a fair amount. We ended up making our way down into a creek for our chopper pickup, which turned out to be a good idea. We found this epic pickup spot, on a gorgeous gravel bar. Unfortunately the other team didn't have a great pickup spot, and ended up having to chop a bunch of brush down and build a bit of a chopper pad while the chopper was hovering above: stressful. Poor guys.

Yesterday we had a great day off, with gorgeous weather. A bunch of us went into town, ate at the new restaurant (Mama Z's) which was super exciting, mostly because they have french fries there. The other restaurant doesn't. We stocked up on beer, returned the empties(107 beer cans, plus about 20 bottles...$14 towards our margarita party!), and went out to the lake again between loads of laundry. All in all, a successful day.