7 June 2025, Homeward bound, Dalhart, Texas

Long time friend of field camp, USC alum, and Cañon City (Colorado) doctor Marc Sindler waxes poetic about the magnificent geology of the family canyon before hosting us for a delicious closing supper of brook trout.

All is well at the SEOE geology field camp. Having completed the first transect of the North American Cordillera in field camp history, we arose just before dawn at 445 AM this morning at Oil Well Flats outside Cañon City, Colorado with the hopes of completing our cross-country trek by Sunday evening. So far so good — we’ve made it into our third state of the day and into the central time zone, with 1,391 road miles in front of us and some 7,000 behind us (if we account for the Badger’s trip from Columbia to Napa, California that began exactly a month ago today).

We dodged some weather in south central Colorado yesterday as a tornado watch and the threat of heavy rains (which don’t mix well with the mud-rich roads of the upper Jurassic-Cretaceous section of the Cañon City embayment) nearly thwarted our visit to Joan and Marc Sindler, longtime friends of field camp and part of the USC family (Marc’s dad made the sculpture adorning the Longstreet Theater cut-through between EWS and TCoop; Marc is a Carolina alum, and as a Fremont County doctor has patched up more than a few field camp students over the years). But the skies parted in time for a quintessential trek through the Dakota Group rocks in the canyon in the Sindlers’ backyard and a dinner of Sindler-caught brook trout (!), with new friends Bill and Laura, themselves from near Table Rock.

Field camp students examine the rising Onion Creek diapir composed of Pennsylvanian evaporites, mudstones and carbonates of the Paradox Formation.

Since our last post, we wrapped our stratigraphic investigations of the canyon lands of Utah and headed eastward to Colorado National Monument outside Fruita for the mapping of a characteristic basement-cored uplift and monocline that captures the deformational style of the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains. Rough roads and high temperatures had thwarted our mapping of the San Rafael Swell near Green River, Utah earlier in field camp, so I was especially grateful we were able to score a few sites at Saddlehorn Campground that allowed us easy access to Fruita Canyon that dissects the northeastern flank of the (Ancestral Rocky Mountain and Laramide) Uncompahgre uplift.

Lance Tully leads field campers in a kinematic analysis of the master fault in Salt Valley, Utah.

SEOE field campers examine the late Oligocene intrusive rocks of the La Sal Mountains, Utah, that provide critical insight into the tectonomagmatic evolution of the North American Cordillera.

With our Uncompahgre mapping behind us, we pondered the ~3 km thick, ~300 km wide Cretaceous marine stratigraphy of the Book Cliffs — which accumulated atop continental crust, and 100s-1000s km from the modern (and preceding) coastline — and headed across Colorado to Cañon City.

In Cañon City, students considered the meaning of the variable duration of the hiatus represented by the Great Unconformity — some places upper Triassic and Jurassic on Mesoproterozoic, others upper Neoproterozoic or lower Paleozoic on lower Neoproterozoic — across our transect, as well as the great variety of maximum compression directions in different Rocky Mountain structures (compared to the remarkably uniform orientations of structures in the Sevier belt, ‘Nevadoplano’ hinterland, and Farallon subduction system we studied before reaching the Colorado Plateau).

Field camp and SEOE alum Sophie Luna (‘22) describes to the students the use of a water level meter that is critical in the environmental geoscience and geotechnical industries in which many of our alums find meaningful careers.

While in the Cañon City area, we were treated to visits from field camp and SEOE alums Jordan Suttles (‘21) and Sophie Luna (‘22) who have been employed in the environmental

consulting and geotechnical fields, respectively, and provided the students with some insight into acquiring and succeeding in geoscience careers after graduation. I am so grateful not only that our alums come to visit field camp, but that they also share important advice that the professoriate lack.

It is such a joy for former field campers to visit us in camp, providing perspectives, advice and mentorship to our current students. Here Jordan Suttles (‘21) reunites with Dave Barbeau and Lance Tully, bringing smiles to all.

Students wrapped up their final project consisting of a geologic history of the Cordillera and a crustal scale cross-section from the Pacific to Kansas — I look forward to reading them and celebrating all the connections they have made over the past month.

And…scene!

Onward.