Petrology Class Field Trip

Southeastern, Missouri
April 2 - April 5, 2009

From left to right: Dr. Sarah Hanson, Aaron Snow, Jake Denig, and John Parvinl

You can click on the photos below to view them at a larger size.

Day 1. We left Adrian in the morning, in the rain and arrived at camp about 7:30; a half an hour after it quit raining.
Day 2. We spent the day looking at cool volcanic and plutonic rocks.
We hiked up to the Devils Honeycomb were we saw, and climbed around on, excellent exposures of columnar jointed basalt. These columns formed as the lava flows cooled and solidified.

More examples of excellent columnar jointing. On the right is John Parvin for scale.
Our second stop Elephant Rocks. Here PreCambrian granite has weathered into really cool looking formations, called Tors.
Yep, the vans are getting old... We had to feed it more than gasoline.
We made a U-turn to stop at this quarry to look at volcanic tephra. Took us a while to make the turn. Sarah got the van very stuck!
Were were headed for some outcrops near the Tom Sauk Power Plant but the power plant was expanding and the area was closed off for construction. So we looked at the dam and the scenery instead...
Late in the day we stopped at Royal Gorge to look at the volcanic rocks, but the students were tired and seemed more interested in the creek...
On the way back to camp we stopped at the St. Francis River where John Parvin showed off for us. The River had flooded significantly earlier in the spring. Note the flood level represented by the leaves.

At camp we cooked tasty tacos
And relaxed
John showed us a creative way to size firewood.
Day 3. Was another fun-filled day of learning about igneous rocks.
After a death march-like slog through the woods we finally found the quarry just off the trail, far uphill from where we had hiked down too.
And we looked at some really cool iabase dikes along the side of the road.
Here was a weathered dike hosted by an ignimbrite. The overlying gravels mark an inpressive unconformity.
This is the old entrance to Silver Mine. Here we collected minerals from the mine dumps.
We had a great view of St. Francis River, the breached dam and some kayakers from the mine
Sarah was kind and cooked dinner Saturday night
Day 4. As we were packing up, it started to rain again. Seems we hit the weather just right!