An optimistic crew heads up the hill to hunt for fossil shark teeth and mammal bones.
Lots of fossil hunters have worked these slopes, but a few teeth are still there.
Eureka!
We drove over Tehachapi Pass into the Mojave Desert on our way to camp at Tecopa Hot Springs. Along the way, we stopped at the Calico Mountains to look at exposures of the Barstow Formation, which contains a rich fossil assemblage of Miocene mammals and other creatures. We were here to look at the intricate folding and faulting that is visible in these exposures up Odessa Canyon.
This was a chance for some of the second year students to learn how to use a Brunton compass to plot strike and dip...
For the first-year students, it was a chance to observe some of the strangely eroded volcanic rocks....
As the sun started sinking low in the west, we arrived at a unique outcrop of rock near Silver Lake, north of the town of Baker. It exposes several intrusions of granitic and basaltic rock into dolomite marble. It is a great spot for investigating the principle of cross-cutting relationships (dikes and faults are younger than the rocks they cut through). Our students drew rudimentary geologic maps of the outcrop, and tried to decipher the order of events...
We finished the problem in the glow of a glorious sunset, and drove the final 50 miles to camp. Dumont Dunes looked like a small city in the twilight. I found out later that something like 20,000 people were camped there. Luckily, Tecopa was a great deal quieter...
