Now I know why they call it Big Sky country…

Guest Blogger: Jesse Davenport

That is, when you look outside all you see is sky for miles upon miles upon miles upon…well you get the picture. It is extremely beautiful here. In Island Park, Idaho, we are sitting right on the border of Montana. Yellowstone is just a mere 30 miles away. It is one thing to read and study an area like I did for my junior thesis, but is an entirely different to actually be able to see the areas that I read about.

After a shaky first two days of traveling arrangements at the lovely Bozeman airport, everyone was finally together. Everyone including me, Caleb Lucy from Williams College, Danielle Lerner from Mt. Holyoke, Kristina Doyle from Amherst, Parker Haynes from the University of North Carolina, and Ali Walker from Smith College. And of course our two lovely professors, Tekla Harms from Amherst and John Brady from Smith. Saturday, Sunday and Monday we traveled out into our field areas in the Antelope Basin of the Gravelly Range to conduct some reconnaissance work. We familiarized ourselves with the rock formations, practiced our Brunton skills, and talked about the upcoming month.

Today, we sat down with Tekla and John to discuss our specific projects and what we would be doing individually. I will be doing geochemistry in what is termed the Madison Mylonite zone to try to determine the protolith of these highly sheared rocks by also doing the geochemistry on some of the other rock types around the region. These include diorite, schist, marble, phyllite, and many others.

The rock here is a biotite schist. The main significance, however, are the wonderful crenulations in the rock (very small folds in the rock).

The rock you are looking at here is one of the many mylonites in the area, which I will be taking samples from to do my analyses.