Day2/Week2

We started the day where we left off yesterday, looking for more evidence of a contact. We went back to the best location and decided to walk upstream from there. With the help of Scott, we started categorizing our data better by including more physical attributes than before. We walked up by the Lost sign, stripped away the surface material and took samples. The red material was moist, dense and full of clay. This was sediment from the old aluvial material. We had known this from yesterday, but we hadn’t described it yet.

Our general survey direction followed the contact line on our reference geological map. We quickly found out that it wasn’t that accurate. I’m not too surprised since the map covers the geology of the entire island without too much detail. After several hours of taking samples along stripped walls, we got a pretty good idea where the northern contact line between the old and young sediment is. Tomorrow we will likely try to find the finger of old sediment that sticks out into the young sediment close to the water/ staging area. The last hour or so of my day went slightly in a different direction. I picked a steep slope that I wanted to climb and was determined to make it to the top and back before everyone left. It was a bad choice. Although it was an adventure, I’ve never been covered in more seed pods, crawled through denser brush, or crushed a snail shell in my back pocket. I thought that it would have been a good artifact until half way back down I realized that there was something alive in it.

Time to go clean all of my clothes and attend to my wounds, maybe tomorrow will be a bit more tame.

-Thomas Hervey