Clark's Fork Canyon, Wyoming. Credit: Phil Norbeck
Penn State Field Geology has been and continues to be a capstone experience that integrates previously-studied subdisciplines of the geosciences and facilitates visualization of geologic history from outcrops in the canyons, mountains, and plains of the American West. For 2006, the camp was shifted to the environs of Coldigioco in the Apennines of Italy. The course is built around a series of intensive mapping projects that require solution of geologic puzzles with all the tools and concepts at the student's command.
But field camp is also fun in other ways. A group of people have to live, work, and play together through wind, rain, sun, cold, vehicle breakdowns, deadlines, dirty laundry, and everything else that goes with a journey that lasts many weeks and involves different living venues. Ultimately they find joy in their shared trials and triumphs. Walter Ebaugh (1971 field camp) has summed it up: "It was surely the best. I learned almost everything I know about geology that summer."
If you remember field camp that way, these webpages are designed to let you reminisce but also to reconnect with your past alumni friends. If you would like to contribute to any Field Camp pages please contact us.
In addition to those named on individual pages, general thanks to Barry Voight, Derrill Kerrick, Rudy Slingerland, Kevin (Doc) Hoover and, especially, Duff Gold for photographs and materials.
Fanshawe Lodge, YBRA, Red Lodge, Montana
Jim Walker writes "Field Camp 1960. It's been almost fifty years (or was it just yesterday?), and some of my recollections are a bit fuzzy, but here goes. I dug out my old Geology Field Book, No. 1G, and some maps and sketches for a 'refresher.' The field school actually was in two parts. The first session, which started about June 12 or 13, included Geology & Mineralogy and Geophysics & Geochemistry students. There may have been some others, but my notes don't say. This first session lasted 2-3 weeks, after which all students other than G&M left camp. There were several instructors for this initial course. Activities included plane table mapping, pace-compass mapping, Brunton compass instruction, Stone Valley area geology, formation ID, etc. The only instructor name I know for sure was a grad student, George MacKenzie. I think that Frank Swartz spent some time on the paleontology in regard to formation identification.
Where They Stayed
Jerry Bartholomew's Recollections of the 1963 Field Camp (Jerry still teaches at the Penn/YBRA Field School), with additional comments by Lynn Brant
arriving at YBRA. I believe that it was the 4th of July when we were collecting feldspar crystals (which I still have) from a granite in the Beartooths when we got a blizzard that dropped about 7-8" of snow before we got back to YBRA. 
I was at the Penn State summer camp among the Lima Peaks in 1962 as a student and 1963 as a student instructor. I also popped in several times in 1964 when Oscar Huh and I were working on limestones in Idaho. 
ED BEUTNER: "I was working in Idaho, but I remember driving over to Lima to meet to spend the 4th of July with the field camp group and the other grad students (Baerbel Luchitta, Oscar Huh, Bob Ryder) who had gathered. To uphold the honor of Penn State, several of the group (fortunately not including me) entered the wild cow milking contest at the local rodeo, an event which required consumption of a lot of beer by all of us beforehand. This event involved a team of three being given a rope at the other end of which was a range cow. The goal was to get a perceptible amount of milk from the cow into a Coke bottle. The cow, on her part, tried to drag the trio face down across the arena through the dirt and cow poop"
I hadn't thought about that wild cow, the one I attacked with a pop bottle, in a long time. I mean, who thinks much about the summer of 1963 these days? Shoot, I have trouble remembering last summer.
I think it was Dr. Scholten himself who suggested that we enter the local Lima rodeo to earn goodwill and show them we were just regular people. Or maybe it was the devil himself who suggested it, thinking he would get a good laugh. Both got their laughs, and both were smart enough not to enter themselves. 
And an addendum from Jerry Bartholomew: Since I was not at the Rodeo, your "hands on" experience is important for people to appreciate the extent to which the field camp folks tried to blend in with the locals. In that same spirit, I don't know if you remember or not, but there was also a dance at the schoolhouse in Monida (south of Lima a few miles on I-15) that at least some of us went to. That old school house was not in too bad of shape in 1983 when I moved to Butte, where I lived and worked for a decade, but it is now in ruins.
![The gang at Hebgen Lake. Duff Gold's daughters are down by the water's edge. Bob Lanning is on the roof in a red jacket and wearing a white cowboy hat. Nancy Mariella [Rice University] is the girl sitting on the railing.](/sites/geosc/files/alumni_field_camp/images2/1969/The_gang_at_Hebgen_Lake_sm.jpg "Duff Gold's two daughters at Hebgen Lake")
Jim Ewart in February 2006 writes about the Teton Wilderness trip, sometimes referred to as the "death march":
I was on the death march. We mapped the Wapati Formation, as I remember it. Actually, I would not refer to it as a "death march." I rather enjoyed it and have done a similar hike many times since. I thought we had a nice tight team, got some mapping done, and everyone made it back safe and sound! It is a very pleasurable memory and something I will never forget!
These guys have great memories and/or really good field notebooks. I remember pretty much all of it, including the tinny sounds in the bushes that turned into a pistachio-coated spoon and the challenging Yellowstone fording. Pistachio thus became a regular import into the Iceland project in late 1970s-1980s. The take-off and return spot for the trek was Togwotee Lodge, on the road heading east from Jackson Hole. The trout were cutthroats. Like Jim, I remember our first tall beer in the Lodge, at the end of that long dusty and sweaty day, as the best I ever had. 
I just found the wonderful archive of Field Camp memories.... Thank you for your work on it! I was one of the students in Summer of 1975. The 1974 field camp group had the second part of field camp in Dillon, Montana (after YBRA, Red Lodge) but I think there was a scheduling conflict at Dillon, so Derrill Kerrick & Barry Voight made other plans. For our field camp, we split into two groups after Red Lodge. The group pictured for 1975 chose the Teton Wilderness experience with Dr. Voight. The other group, including myself, drove to Salt Lake City with Dr. Kerrick, to be the first PSU field camp to study the contact metamorphism up at Alta. Once I knew what we'd be studying up at Alta, there was no question which option I'd take! For me Alta was the perfect culmination of field camp... studying everything I loved most -- igneous & metamorphic petrology. It was the perfect textbook example of the P-T changes in mineralogy through the sediment layers that the intrusion intersected.
where I was an instructor for several years in the mid 1970s. It is a sobering thought to know that our students there, so young and vibrant, apprehensive at being in the field for the first time in such forbidding terranes, are now well into their professional careers. I cannot remember all their faces or their names, but I can still see them, with their packs and picks, boarding the vans in the morning in the parking lot of the Alta Peruvian Lodge for the trip down Little Cottonwood Canyon to the field area along the Watch Front above Salt Lake City. For them, as well as for their teachers, the moment of truth has finally arrived. For after years of sitting in classroom and laboratory, the student finally gets to face the rocks alone, and will find out how well he or she was instructed and has learned, and whether or not he or she has the capacity to apply such knowledge -- in effect, if he or she has the makings of a geologist. I would hope that experience at Alta provided a solid base for future progress, because the geology of that area was most inspiring and wide-ranging. I have no way of knowing how well they fared, for I have heard from very few.
the Alta Peruvian. The subject is a report of the U.S. Geological Survey entitled "Lake Bonneville" by G K Gilbert. The lecturer is Dr. Larry Lattman, a Professor of Geomorphology at Penn State, and the subject the history of a Pleistocene lake which once occupied a much larger area surrounding the present Great Salt Lake. The next day we will travel to the valley to examine the evidence. For the history of the lake presented by Gilbert is one of the great classical papers in American geology. In addition to providing the student with relevant technical aspects of a subject, it would be desirable if one could illustrate, by example, something which would represent the best of its kind as a way of providing inspiration. Thus the students heard one of the most brilliant lecturers in geology speaking about one of America's greatest geologists and how he worked out the history of Lake Bonneville. It is not necessary that everybody be good, but that there be an example of it somewhere. That was a day, some forty years ago, near Salt Lake City, Utah, where that excellence was both seen and heard. This was a rare treat, not only for the students but for all the faculty as well.
where I was an instructor for several years in the mid 1970s. It is a sobering thought to know that our students there, so young and vibrant, apprehensive at being in the field for the first time in such forbidding terranes, are now well into their professional careers. I cannot remember all their faces or their names, but I can still see them, with their packs and picks, boarding the vans in the morning in the parking lot of the Alta Peruvian Lodge for the trip down Little Cottonwood Canyon to the field area along the Watch Front above Salt Lake City. For them, as well as for their teachers, the moment of truth has finally arrived. For after years of sitting in classroom and laboratory, the student finally gets to face the rocks alone, and will find out how well he or she was instructed and has learned, and whether or not he or she has the capacity to apply such knowledge -- in effect, if he or she has the makings of a geologist. I would hope that experience at Alta provided a solid base for future progress, because the geology of that area was most inspiring and wide-ranging. I have no way of knowing how well they fared, for I have heard from very few.
the Alta Peruvian. The subject is a report of the U.S. Geological Survey entitled "Lake Bonneville" by G K Gilbert. The lecturer is Dr. Larry Lattman, a Professor of Geomorphology at Penn State, and the subject the history of a Pleistocene lake which once occupied a much larger area surrounding the present Great Salt Lake. The next day we will travel to the valley to examine the evidence. For the history of the lake presented by Gilbert is one of the great classical papers in American geology. In addition to providing the student with relevant technical aspects of a subject, it would be desirable if one could illustrate, by example, something which would represent the best of its kind as a way of providing inspiration. Thus the students heard one of the most brilliant lecturers in geology speaking about one of America's greatest geologists and how he worked out the history of Lake Bonneville. It is not necessary that everybody be good, but that there be an example of it somewhere. That was a day, some forty years ago, near Salt Lake City, Utah, where that excellence was both seen and heard. This was a rare treat, not only for the students but for all the faculty as well.
We did our west-bound cross-country trip through Illinois --- glacier geomorph (first night); through Nebraska and Colorado (second night); stopped at the USGS office in Denver, Red Rocks amphitheater west of Denver, Big Thompson Canyon (this was 3 years after the big flash flood), Rocky Mountain National park (third night); then hiked to the glacier in RMNP and toured the park, stopped at Craig Colorado (fourth night); drove thru Dinosaur Monument then Park City to Alta. Our fearless grad student TA was Dick Craig who survived the cross-country trip both out and back. 
Derrill Kerrick remembers that in 1978 the students were not happy with the food or the quality of the facilities at the Alta Peruvian Lodge. They took to calling it the Alta Peruvian Slodge (see photo and the recollections of Kate and Dan Chess). At the end of camp they sabotaged the plumbing system with toilet paper, a system that teetered on the edge of functionality in the best of circumstances.
Kim Fasching: "Oh how the years have flown by. I took your petrology final on my 21st birthday and just knew I was going to die before I had a chance to be legal downtown.... I mudlogged for a while in Wyoming after graduation, then continued with an ed. degree at U of Wyoming and have been happily teaching 8th grade physical science for 17 years in California. Thanks for the site and the good memories it brought back."
The first Penn State field camp I taught was in 1984, and for the shortest period. I was there for a couple days of the overthrust project and for the stock project. I made a map of the overthrust area, from the USGS map, that I used for 20 years, and which Don Fisher is presumably still using. I actually mapped the country rocks areas north and south of the stock, along with the students, and I used that map for 20 years, augmented a little from time to time as I gained a new insight. I developed some lecture sketches for the stock project from the Kerrick and Moore paper -- a cartoon of the stock and isograds and triangular CMS diagrams for the various facies through the isograds. I used those diagrams for 20 years both in field camp and back home for Geosc 430 and, upon its demise, Geosc 201.
was convinced that we had a bad batch of gas, because one of the vans (mine) and the mamba wagon kept cutting out at high speed. He figured that gas filters were clogged. So one of our in-house mechanics, Ray Kassab, took apart the gas lines of both vehicles and, using a pen, poked big holes in the gas filters. That'll fix those filters for sure, we were certain. Seemed to work for the mamba cruiser, but not for the van. By South Dakota, its performance got so bad, we had to pull over and transfer everyone and everything to other vehicles, which headed on forward to the Badlands. I stayed behind with the van, along with another one of our in-house mechanics, Mark Saccarelli. Mark was convinced that the problem now was in the carburetor, because the big holes in the gas filters had spurted dirt throughout the gas line. So he took the interior hood off the engine and had me begin driving down the highway as fast as the van could go. At the same time, he took a rock hammer and "tapped" lightly on the pan of the carburetor, sure that this technique would help "blow" the dirt on through. Unfortunately his tapping was a bit too strong, and he shattered the plastic pan, which then proceeded to spray gas all through the van and of course on the hot engine block. That was way less than average. Somehow, we pulled off the highway and avoided an explosion and fire. 
of the hobbled van. That put a huge dent into it. I've got a great picture of it in front of columnar jointed basalt at Yellowstone. Al's description of the event to Duff was that he "touched-up" the van a bit. Good choice of words. Al certainly has a certain joy for life. Everything from his multi-colored happy Converse sneakers to dining choices, one thing for certain is that you can't say that Al is a boring person. He apparently does not care much for park rules and regulations, either. In the driving rain, fog, and cold he climbed atop Soda Butte, in the northeast corner of Yellowstone Park, to stand on top like a modern-day Moses parting the seas. You have to climb over the sign that says "no climbing" in order to do this. Dr. Whu, our visiting Chinese professor, was very impressed by all of this so he climbed up too. See the picture for proof of this.
Becky Jaquish Jones (June 2006): "Thanks so much for putting this website together. I found out about this website from folks at work (Rob Lux, Steve Urbanik - field camp 1983 or so). There is quite a community of PSU geologists who have either passed through or still work at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. In fact, I am going to Gil Oudijk's wedding in Brazil next month. If you remember Gil, I'm sure that you'll remember that there's a story to that! Thanks again for the memories!"
Taking strike and dip measurements on Route 322 roadside outcrops while tractor trailers buzz by doesn’t really compare to taking strike and dip measurements in secluded alpine wonderlands like Little Cottonwood Canyon or the geologically picturesque Book Cliffs of Utah. Another successful Field Camp has been completed, transforming us inept book-learned students into rather useful junior geologists. Such transformation was augmented by exercises in sequence stratigraphy at the Book Cliffs, neotectonics and glacial geology at Bell’s Canyon, and geologic mapping of various structures and rock types in Elk Basin, Wildhorse, Idaho and Alta, Utah.
Penn State Field Camp 2009: Seven weeks and 8100 miles, 26 men and three women, eight exercises and many firsts. For some, it was their first cross-country road trip. For others, sleeping in tents was new and exciting. For all, it was a time that we won't soon forget, a time spent with friends old and new, in some of the most beautiful spaces America has to offer.
It’s about 10 am on a sunny day in June of this year, and we’re sitting on a ridge of the Parkman Ss in Elk Basin, Wyoming. From up here the double-plunge of the Elk Basin anticline is a thing of beauty, made all the more
sublime (for us at least) by the nodding heads of numerous oil wells. The work of uncountable rainstorms has etched out hogbacks of variably resistant strata, so that parasequences and topography have become one and the same. But what has our attention at the moment is a mapping team of two Penn State Geosciences undergrads. They are standing next to a 5 m high wall of Virgelle Ss covered by slickenlines. Through our binoculars we see them gesticulate, hands in the plane-of-bedding, hands in the plane-of-the-fault, fingers pointing this way and that. It’s the ritualized hand-dance of the field geologist drawing meaning from rocks and dirt. Finally they commit some lines to their field maps, agree on their next move, and scramble up the wash and out of sight.
