Do Geologists Have A Death Wish?

I’m a little late on posting about the current meme permeating the geoblogosphere, started by Geotripper and Chris Rowan, do geologists have a death wish?

A lot of the posts have involved photos of geologists playing with still glowing lava flows but being of the cowardly persuasion I don’t really have many tales to tell.

Two incidents though do spring to mind from my younger, more reckless days. The first was doing geology many years ago in the Atacama desert in northern Chile. It was my last day before having to fly home and my co-geologist and I decided to have one last look at a particular area. Instead of the meticulous planning that had gone with the rest of the fieldwork we just went for it. With only a single vehicle, no food and very little water we just turned off the pan-american highway and headed out across the desert, without telling anyone where we were going, aiming for a distant mountain. We had no maps, only a landsat image and compass to navigate by and this is in the days before GPS. The inevitable happened and we got the four-wheel drive irretrievably (for us) bogged down in the soft sand. Nothing for it but to walk out of the Atacama Desert with no real idea of exactly where we were or where nearest settlement was. After about 20km of walking on a compass bearing we picked up a road which fortunately lead to a small village. We found a bar where we did a reasonable attempt of re-enacting the bar scene from ‘Ice Cold in Alex’. We then cadged a lift to the nearest military base and persuaded the army to come and dig the jeep out.

The Atacama is a superb place to study geology – it’s so good they signpost it from the side of the road.

The other occasion is from a time working as a field assistant in the Spanish Pyrenees. We decided to climb Monte Perdido but I didn’t have any crampons and had to borrow an ice axe, something I had never used before. Most of the climb was fine but the last 100m was hard ice. Just near the top I slipped and learned to use the ice axe first go – otherwise I would have ended up in France several hundred metres below!

The views from the top were spectacular though, as seen here with recumbent fold of El Cylindro in the foreground and the high Pyrenees in the background.

I don’t think it is a death wish, but good geology can be in some risky places. It should be all right though as long as you take the right precautions!

~ by hypocentre on March 6, 2008.