Geology grad school is inevitably fraught with muddy field trips, dirty and dusty field work, broken down cars and popped tires, adventures and misadventures. During my Master’s degree (2016-2018) I studied the formation of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. Here’s a peek into what it’s like to work in a hot valley sandwiched by the highest and lowest points in the US lower 48 (Mt. Whitney and Death Valley) in southeastern California, hunting for amoebas hiding in rocks that went extinct a quarter billion years ago.
Part 1
It was around 17:00, and still 40 degrees C. We had a few hours until sunset and were eager to get to town and back before dark to stock up on supplies -- but not too eager -- because these off-roading ATV tracks were the devil when it came to popping tires. The AC was blasting inside the car and Hannah, my field assistant, and I were relieved to escape heat, the sun, and the bickering professors.
We’d only been in the field a few days, and were already beat. My advisor, committee member, another professor and a post-doc were all there to help at the moment, and today had been a marathon of traversing scree fields to investigate tangential questions and hopping from one juniper bush to the next in seek of shade. We were just outside the backcountry of Death Valley National Park. The Sierra Nevada Mountains were just hidden from view to the west behind the Inyo Mountain crest, while we ambled amongst Joshua trees, geckos, dust and a beating sun. I was studying the Sierra Nevada, but the history of the mountain range lies in the dirt she shed millions of years ago, some of which is now the backbone of the Inyo Mountains.
So there we were, five minutes out of camp, and the “check tire pressure” light went on. I had rented a Ford Expedition XL, and it was a literal BUS. When that stupid light went on, I knew it was already too late… one of my committee members, Paul, had popped a tire yesterday of the same car. So between the two cars we had one more spare.
Hannah and I got out and checked the tire – it was a side-slash, so un-patchable. We looked for the culprit that popped it and couldn’t find anything, but the road was so bad – jagged spikes of limestone outcrop poking up at you from the road – that we figured it could have been pretty much anything.
We tore the car apart for the manual, pulled everything out of the trunk, eventually figured out how to extract the spare, fiddled around with the jack, and after a couple hours, finally got the new tire on. The sun was starting to set, and dusty golden rays brushed the arms of Joshua trees, fuzzy-looking in the dusky light. Death Valley National Park stretched out in front of us towards the east like an anti-ocean in vast and intimidating splendor. I was nervous about getting back behind the wheel right away, so we each popped a beer and strolled the 15 minutes back to camp, covered in dirt, giggling and tipsy after a day of heat and dehydration.
When we got back, the professors were lounging on camp chairs in tiny patches of juniper-tree shade. Now we had two cars between us and no spares, so the next morning, we all had to drop field work and head to town for two new tires.
***
Thirty degrees out at six am, AC blasting, and early morning sun rays kissing the scrubby hills. I was at the wheel, gazing out at the dusty yellow desert, terrified of the horrendous road, but also convinced that the way karma works, once you’ve popped one tire, you’re good to go for at least a few weeks (right?) But no – we got to the SAME EXACT SPOT in the road, the tire pressure low light went on, and we felt the familiar sinking in the bottom left hand corner of the car. The tire we just changed!
There were no more spares, so the only option was to leave my advisor and the post-doc with one car while Hannah, Paul and I drove Paul’s car to town. Around ten am, we rolled in to Lone Pine, the nearest town, population about a thousand.
Lone Pine was a farming town back before the water in Owens River, which runs through town, was stolen by the city of Los Angeles and routed away via the LA aqueduct. The City of Angels tried to make up for it when Hollywood showed up and big-shot directors filmed some Westerns and a few blockbusters in town (like Ironman 1 – remember the scene with the tanks when he gets blown up?). But at some point, Hollywood gave up on Lone Pine, and now it’s only claim to fame is Mt. Whitney and the lure of the Sierra, which bring in a fair amount of tourists, but don’t sustain the town year-round.
Miller’s Towing is the only towing company in town. The guy who runs it is an old, grizzled cowboy with a white gnarly beard, a sneer, and a bad attitude. When I told him our story, and he just laughed: “I put those rocks in the road for you, so that you would bring us business! Ha ha ha!” They sold us three tires for $300 each. It took a couple hours because the card reader was off line: “we operate by smoke signals in here! Ha ha ha!” Luckily some grant money had been recently deposited into my account, so I had $600 for two tires. I don’t get paid over the summer as a graduate student, so this was a serious blessing.
We had the new tires, and got back on our way. I was expecting that the rental company, Budget, would repay me at some point.
The next few weeks unfolded in sweaty, dusty, cactus-spine-ridden glory, without any major mishaps. The professors stayed another day, tried to help me figure out what I was doing, and then drove off back to Flagstaff, Pheonix, and San Francisco, all probably relieved to get out of the depths of the backcountry of Death Valley in July. Hannah and I measured the thickness of sandstones, mudstones, limestones, and conglomerates in the dry hills of the Inyo Mountains.
We collected samples for zircons, which are minerals that eroded off the Sierra Nevada at the beginning of its existence and could tell us when the first volcanoes erupted. We searched for fossils in the rocks, and tried to figure out if they lived and died where we found them, or if they were transported by currents, tumbling down an ancient tropical underwater slope. Our job was to reconstruct the landscape of 280 million years ago, which is around when an oceanic tectonic plate started to “subduct,” or get pushed down under, a continental tectonic plate. When subduction happens, you get volcanoes and earthquakes. Coastlines that were once sitting quietly (like the Florida shoreline) start to warp and fold into hills and valleys. We had a laundry list of questions – how deep was the water? Where were the hills and valleys? Where were the volcanoes? When did they start erupting?
***
A year later, I had drafted up most of my thesis. I’d figured a few things out – the earliest evidence of volcanoes we found were about 260 million years old. We found out there was an ancient hill between my two field sites with valleys in between. We found out that the rocks had been deposited underwater, on a steep slope.
But one thing hadn’t been resolved yet – I hadn’t been paid back for those damn popped tires. I called Budget Rentals, and they insisted that I had “broken the contract” (which I don’t remember signing) by driving off-road. Bah. I pretty much gave up and took out a fat student loan.
It wasn’t until I was on my way back into the field in May, that the issue came up again. I was telling the Geology department secretary the story, and she insisted that I could file an insurance claim and get the money back – if I had the receipt from Millers. I didn’t. So I called them – surely they had a record of sales from the last year.
It was the SAME dusty old jerk cowboy who picked up the phone.
“Hi sir, I bought two tires there last July and need the receipts.”
“Ha ha! We operate with smoke signals here. We’re totally off line. We throw all the receipts in a box with no organization whatsoever,” he guffawed.
“Could you look through the box for my receipt?”
“Hell no! That would take three to four hours of my time!”
So that was it. Nearly a thousand dollars lost for some asshole in Lone Pine with a monopoly over any car-related business transactions.
..... For Science!!!
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