It never rains in central Australia…

Famous last words. Shortly after returning from diving and rainforesting up in northern Queensland, we were off on a new adventure: taking the third-year geology students at Uni Adelaide to central Australia for two weeks of mapping. Central Australia is known for its warm days, cold nights, and excellent Proterozoic (2500-542 Ma) rocks.


There are a few things about taking the geology students to central Australia. Number one, they haven’t done any mapping since they went to Pichi Richi as second-year students, which for them was over a year ago (actually, they map regolith in between there, but that doesn’t really count). Number two, most of the students (with a few notable exceptions) aren’t very well prepared for being in the out-of-doors. Number three, there are 80 or so of them. That complicates things.

To move eighty students to a location more than 1500 km from Adelaide requires two coaches. This is great, because the coaches each have two drivers and they don’t have to stop. But the coaches don’t really have room for the tents, food, cooking gear, and beer that the students bring. This means that we (the obliging staff) drive cargo vehicles. And we have to stop, so we leave a full day and a half before the coaches. Chelsea and I thought that while driving slowly for 1500 km might be a bit tiring, it might be better than trying to sleep on a coach with 40 noisy, sweaty students. So on Saturday morning our convoy of two cargo vans and a 16-foot moving truck (is that a four-meter moving truck here?) headed north for Alice Springs.


After the obligatory stop in Port Wakefield, the drive was really quite lovely. It’s been wetter this year than it has for the previous ten in the eastern half of Australia, and the landscape is unusually green. This also means that kangaroos can find water out in the bush rather than coming to the road (where moisture collects) and jumping in front of cars. Our rented cargo vehicles all lacked roo bars, so this was a good thing. And we never had to drive for too long, because the moving van could only go about 250 or 300 km on a tank of petrol, so we stopped frequently. Driving on the Stuart Highway, which goes from Port Augusta to Darwin, is a pretty simple affair. There is a station every 150-250 km, so in a normal car with a 500 km range, you stop at every other station for petrol (except in our case, where we stopped at nearly every station). The road is so straight that if you need to pass, you just wait until there are no cars, which is nearly all the time.

We stopped for the night in Coober Pedy, the world center of opal mining, before pressing on to Alice Springs the next day. Alice Springs had everything we needed: grocery stores to buy the food we needed to feed the 15 teaching staff for two weeks, wireless internet, and a fabulous café. It also had rain. Who thought I would be digging to the bottom of our bag for my rain pants in Alice Springs? The following morning, we food-shopped, bought ponchos for unprepared students, and met the buses to drive ~130 km north to Aileron, the next station up the Stuart Highway.


Like most of the stations along the highway, Aileron serves up petrol, food, beer, tourist souvenirs, and other necessities of life—in many ways it is the local market and meeting place. Aileron’s name has nothing to do with the flaps on an airplane; my guess is that it is a corruption of Alyuen, a local community of indigenous Anmatjere people. However, Aileron seems to have attempted to make amends for this by erecting a giant (>10m tall) statue of a male Anmatjere hunter on a hill behind the station. At some point, someone thought that some gender equity should be established, so there is a separate sculpture of an Anmatjere woman and child next to the station as well.


Most importantly for us, Aileron has a caravan park and is just a few kilometers from the mapping area. And when we arrived to set up camp, it was raining. We let the students stay in camp rather than mapping in the rain in jeans, but the staff headed off to look at some sapphrine-bearing rocks (sapphrine is a mineral considered indicative of ultra-high temperature metamorphism). The following day the rain had decreased, and by late morning we were out in the field with the students. It’s a little intimidating to be thrown into leading a group of students through rocks that you have never seen before and have next to no background in, but then you remember that you know more than they do about mapping and metamorphic rocks.


The rocks around Aileron are high-grade metamorphic rocks—granulites, often migmatitic—which means that they have experienced temperatures greater than 700-800°C and some parts of them have begun to melt. Those kinds of pressures and temperatures are found kilometers down in the crust, so the rocks at Aileron have really interesting metamorphic minerals that you don’t get to see at Earth’s surface very often—minerals like cordierite and sillimanite. Remarkably, original details of the rocks are still preserved despite this intense metamorphism—individual packages of migmatitic gneiss progress from very aluminous to barely aluminous, probably turbidites with decreasing clay toward the top (yes, they are somehow still nearly right-side-up). Chilled margins on mafic dikes are still clearly visible, although they have been metamorphosed as well. In a number of locations, shear zones (wet ones which often have kyanite growing in them and dry ones that have become mylonites) cut through these high-grade rocks. And to top it off, this area has experienced a fair number of metamorphic episodes (some people estimate as many as 15) between the deposition/formation of the original rocks and the exhumation of the metamorphosed rocks during the Devonian and Carboniferous (about 350 Ma). This makes it fun to work out the different episodes of deformation.

Kyanite growing in a hydrated shear zone

But enough geo-babble. After the rain went away, it turned suddenly to T-shirt weather and the mapping was great. The food we were cooking in the evening was also great—we made things like chicken laksa, pasta fagiole, and baked potatoes in the campfire. For dessert we had crepes and beer-enhanced damper. It was very satisfying to sit around the campfire with a contented stomach and talk with friends at the end of the day. Well, not quite the end of the day—Martin, the leader of the trip, usually did a brief lecture about local geology and mapping pointers in the evening. But soon after it was off to our tent for a long (and relatively warm) night of sleep before getting up early to set out breakfast and do it all over again.


Folded mylonite-grade shear zone

Before we knew it, the students were finishing up their maps and we packed the vans up to head to Alice Springs for a re-supply and then drive to Ormiston Gorge for our second week of mapping…

(More photos from the first week are posted here.)

June 24th, 2010

The day went something like this.

We woke up early at our Noah Beach campsite, and went for a walk on the beach to see the sunrise. We headed in one direction, but when we saw a sign warning that there had been a recent crocodile sighting, we headed the other way. There were a few clouds on the horizon, so we waited to see the sun rise over the clouds. We shared the beach with an older gentleman out walking and a man playing cricket with his three young boys.

After the sun came up, we headed back to pack up camp. It was still well before 9am (the time the local café opened for breakfast), so we drove down the road a bit to a boardwalk through the mangroves in the Daintree Rainforest. We were the only ones there, and enjoyed the quiet peacefulness of the morning forest.

We finished, and still it wasn’t 9am, so Dave suggested we head down to Cow Bay. We had been there the day before, and found the beach to be absolutely beautiful. There were these amazing patterns made of sand balls all over the beach. They appear to be made by little crabs which excavate little holes, making little balls of sand which they push out of their holes. The patterns the crabs made with the balls of sand were reminiscent of a certain style of Aboriginal artwork which contains lots of little dots. There were also interesting rocks at Cow Bay, with neat little chitons, which got Dave very excited. Indeed, we liked the beach at Cow Bay more than any of the others we had stopped at the day before, so I was happy to make another visit that morning.

We were standing there on the beach, and I must have been standing up on a rock, or on somewhat higher ground, because I was feeling especially tall compared to Dave. I said to him, “I’m soooo big (as in so tall).” And he said, “But not as big as the ocean.” Then I said, “And you’re so small (short).” And he said, “But not as small as these crabs.” “But,” he said, “I can move sideways like they do.” And he proceeded to scuttle sideways across the beach. Very romantic, indeed.

Well, at least Dave must have been feeling romantic, because the next thing I knew, he was asking me to marry him, and pulling a ring out of his pocket. I was completely surprised, not because he was asking, but because I couldn’t believe he had a ring. I assumed he hadn’t really gotten himself organized before we left the US, but in fact, he had prepared everything, and even asked my parents for permission back in December before we left.

When I finally told my parents, I think they were so relieved because they’d had to be quiet about it for nearly 6 months! My Mom told me how hard it had been to keep it quiet, and my Dad told me that he figured Dave had changed his mind since it had been so long! I think Dave’s mom was thinking the same thing as well.

But, I suppose Dave was just waiting for the right time. Cow Bay is lovely – in fact, Lonely Planet describes it like this: “ Cow Bay is simply beautiful.” It was just the two of us on the beach, at least at first. After I had said yes and we’d hugged a few times, a guy walked out onto the beach and gave us a wave. The next thing we knew, he’d taken off all of his clothes and was going for a swim. Not exactly what I expected to see immediately after getting engaged, but there you go!

Dave told me that he’d spoken with the crabs, and if it hadn’t been high tide, they had agreed to write out, “Will you marry me?” with their sand balls. I told him that was OK, and that I was glad he hadn’t decided to propose to me while we were scuba diving under water. While it would have been a good story, I had visions of getting overly excited and losing my regulator. Plus, how would I have said, “Yes!” underwater? Giving the thumb’s up means let’s go up, hugging with scuba tanks on would have been awkward, and what if Dave had dropped the ring down there?! Indeed, I was glad to be on terra firma, even if there was a naked man just behind us!

We celebrated the rest of the day by walking through the rainforest and seeing two cassowaries named Fred and Wilma (these dinosaur-looking birds are often tricky to find), eating four flavors of ice cream at the Daintree Ice Cream shop (they only make four flavors each day, and your only choice is to buy a cup with a scoop of each), eating Thai food for dinner (where we learned from our menu about vegerarianism, which we assume must be some new religion), and finishing off the day with homemade gelato.

So, that’s the story. We have not picked a date yet, but we’ll let you know when we do! For now, it’s off to central Australia for two weeks in the bush looking for rocks. I can’t wait (seriously) : )

And, here's the very excellent photo we took of ourselves just after getting engaged!

What did you do for the Queen's Birthday?

In South Australia, the Queen's birthday is the second Monday in June (for some reason, it is celebrated at the end of September in Western Australia). For us, it was a long weekend and a chance to get out of town and into the out-of-doors. We grabbed some dinner from the Central Market, walked over to the bus station, loaded our backpacks, got on the bus with 40 other people from the Adelaide Bushwalking Club, and headed to the central Flinders Ranges. We arrived at the Wilpena caravan park around 1 AM, quickly set up camp, and went to bed. The next morning, we broke into groups, and headed out for the weekend to go backpacking.


Wilpena Pound is an interesting geologic feature that sort of looks like an elongated saucer. As Dave explains it, after the sedimentary rocks had been deposited essentially flat, they were squished in one direction, reshaping the rocks into parallel folds. The Pound was a syncline, which means that the rocks on either side slant down toward the middle in an arch. Later deformation pushed up the ends of the Pound to make this unusual bathtub-like shape. Early European settlers called it a ‘pound’ because it was a handy place to keep livestock. All they had to do was close off the one entrance, and there’s really no way for an animal like a horse to get out.


There were several walk choices for the long weekend, so Dave and I decided that we would do a walk which included having a base camp in the middle of Wilpena Pound. This trip allowed us to climb two peaks, and also to explore the Edeowie Gorge, which seemed to us to be many of the highlights of the Pound. Also, we thought it might be a good idea to limit the amount of time we spent carrying full packs since we only have our trail runners with us, and not sturdy hiking boots. When you go bushwalking, you usually have to carry all of your water because there really aren’t any reliable streams in the desert. That meant our packs were heavier than normal, so we thought it would be nice not to spend the entire weekend with full packs on our backs.

Of course, a number of other people also thought that this trip sounded like a good idea, so we had a fairly large group. At first, we were thinking that it would sort of spoil our weekend in the wilderness. But, we decided that it was silly to let something like that ruin our time there, so instead, we decided we’d enjoy ourselves no matter what happened with the group. And, indeed, we did. We met Liz and Steve, a wonderful couple from Oregon. (Liz is originally Australian, but she had lived in Oregon for the last three decades). They had recently moved (or moved back) to Australia to learn a little bit about Liz’s own country. We really enjoyed talking and walking with them.


The other people were good value as well, mostly because they provided a lot of entertainment. I know that sounds really bad, but let me explain. One woman (I think this may have been one of her first bushwalks ever) had recently purchased a dehydrator and a vacuum sealer. She had spent the entire week before the bushwalk dehydrating and vacuum sealing all of her food. And, I mean ALL of her food. The first day, she pulled out a sealed bag filled with shredded carrots and lettuce. Then, for dinner the first night, she had a steak and a dehydrated baked potato. (For some reason, she had separated the inside of the potato from the skin.) It was the first and probably will be the only time I meet someone who brings a streak backpacking! At lunch the next day, she pulled out her sealed potato chips (why she felt the need to vacuum pack potato chips, I will never know.) It was really hilarious. And, I can’t imagine how much plastic waste she must have been carrying with her by the end of the trip.


Another couple (who were probably also fairly new to backpacking) would use their stove at lunch time to make things like soup and macaroni and cheese. Another woman didn’t bring a stove at all, but instead ate tomatoes, avocadoes and dehydrated bread for the whole trip.
It felt a little bit strange to be riding on a coach up to the Flinders to go backpacking (bushwalking, as they call it here). It was also a bit strange, because we were definitely the only people on the bus under 30.

After exploring around the Pound for a couple days, we woke up in the dark at 5:30 on the last morning to climb St. Mary Peak, the highest peak in the Flinders (at a whopping 1171 m). St. Mary Peak is actually not a long or dangerous walk, but we needed to be back to catch the bus by 11 AM, so we were off walking in the cold and dark. As we climbed upwards, the sun peaked over the top of the far wall of the Pound. After a quick jaunt to the peak for amazing views in every direction and a soaring wedge-tailed eagle for company, we meandered down through the trees to the waiting bus. On the way back to Adelaide we reflected—a regrettably quick trip to one of the classic spots (probably the classic spot) in the Flinders, but it had been beautiful and relaxing, with some hilarious spectacle to boot.

Scuba Dave

Nope, I didn’t misspell ‘dive’ in the title above. I put Dave on purpose, because Dave did such a good job scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef last week. He probably wouldn’t want me to tell you all, but I am going to anyways because I was so impressed.


Before we left on our 5 day liveaboard, Dave had completed his 4 certification dives, and then only 3 other dives. We were scheduled to do up to 14 dives on the liveaboard, at 3 or 4 dives/day. The conditions on the Great Barrier Reef at this time of year do not make for easy diving. Because it’s winter, there can be a lot of wind, which means choppy waves and swell.

We certainly had swell and choppy conditions. The boat was rocking so much at some points, you had to hold on not to go flying across to the other side of the boat. We even had to cancel the trip across the open ocean to Osprey Reef for the shark feed because the conditions were too rough. When we were diving, the boat was usually fairly protected from the swell by the reef. However, it was still choppy and rough on the surface.

It was also a little bit cold – particularly our spot on the boat, which had to be the windiest spot on the whole boat. Even though I love diving, I had to psych myself up to put on my wet, cold wetsuit and then sit in the wind before getting into the water. Also, on the last day, the visibility was pretty terrible (the bad weather I guess had stirred things up.)

Despite all of these trying conditions, Dave completed every single dive (13 – they had to cancel one night dive because of bad conditions) and really did an excellent job. He was very calm in the water, and often saw things that I didn’t. He made me very proud, (which is good, since I was his instructor!)

But, onto the exciting part – the diving! We saw wonderful things out there, including Minke whales, which are sort of like overgrown dolphins. They’re attracted to sounds and things and people, so they came over to the boat, and we were allowed to get out and snorkel with them. It was pretty awesome.

Underwater, the sea life was great. The coral has to be some of the most amazing I’ve ever seen, and we saw lots and lots of small and large things. We have a number of pictures up, and have some great video from the trip, so when we get back, we’ll be happy to have some viewings. We’ve already watched it several times, and just love it!

It was my first time on a liveaboard, and I have to say it was pretty good, especially considering the cold, windy diving conditions. Essentially, you go for a dive, eat, dive, eat, have a nap, dive, and then eat. If you go to the Great Barrier Reef to dive, I think the liveaboard is the only way to go. The reef is not really that close to Cairns, and the best, healthiest parts of the reef are generally the furthest away. To give you some idea, we left Cairns at about 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and we made it to our first dive site the next morning after motoring out there all night.

I’m not sure if I would go again during the winter at the Great Barrier Reef (we went when we did because it is Minke whale season, so now that we’ve seen them, I think we can go when the weather’s better!) But, I am excited to do another liveaboard at some point – we keep hearing how wonderful places like Borneo are, so we’ll have to see how we go.

But, I’m pretty thrilled to have had the chance to dive the Great Barrier Reef. It is huge and unlike any other dive sites I’ve ever been to. Essentially, you’re out in the middle of the ocean – sometimes you can’t even see any land or other boats. Yet, there’s a mooring, and if you follow the line down, you arrive to find an incredible array of life. Pretty sweet! You can see some of the photos from the trip here.