Nott What You'd Expected...

Spelunking, Sheep Shit, and Sandstone

Today began early, as Brandon and I awoke at 7.15 to shower and make lunches before our first and only Physical Landscapes of Britain field trip.... lasting from 9am until 6pm, we were 'looking forward' to a great 'learning experience'.

The premise is this: our class is 10 credits (3 Luther Credit equiv.), and 25% of our grade is based on a Field Notebook that we were to compile during the trip. There are three main 'sites' that we visited, and each site is dedicated a page in the notebook. There are to be sketches, detailed notes, outside research, and our own personal pictures. Essentially, you mess this up, and you had better ace the final....

The sites today were the Dark Peak (Hathersage Moor), The White Peak (Treak Cliff Cavern), and the Mam Tor & Winnatis Pass, all located within the Peaks District of Derbyshire, UK, about 1.5 hrs from the Uni.

The group that assembled was mostly first year geology students, who were taking the class as the first in a long line of geo classes for their very specific major. Taking the class as a sluff-off non-lab science for Luther maybe wasn't the best idea.... About 50 of us crammed into the coach bus provided, and made our way to Derby.... The group was very random- people who looked very interested, very bored, very confused, and very dumb. I'll put Brandon and myself in either the third or fourth group....

The most confusing part of the whole trip was the basic concept behind it: drop the students off, let them 'take notes' and 'snap photos' , but don't tell them anything about what they're looking at.... We were CLUELESS. At one point, the lead professor looked at Brandon and asked him some random question about how peat bogs form (duh, because gritstone and sandstone are so pourous, they become waterlogged as a result of the water-stopping properties of the shale that lies beneath...duh), he instead backed away and slowly zipped his fleece over his mouth.... even in retrospect, it was the best move he could have made....

In summary, we hiked around the White Peak, enjoyed the glory that was the Cavern (hilarious pronunciation of 'Stalagtites and Stalagmites'), and took in some incredible views of the "LOTR-esque" hills that were reminiscient of any New Zealand landscape shot.... unfortunately, my camera itself became waterlogged during our spelunking adventure, and i was unable to shoot pictures from Cavern Exit until about 5 minutes ago...

Enjoy the pics,

tomorrow promises to be boring and crappy, as the Flat is assigned a newspaper article, all of our back-logged journals (the blog is too innappropriate now to copy and paste like last time....), as well as reading and other responses.... should be a good time....

posted by Kevin @ 9:10 PM