Day 7- Tattler Creek

The day before, Paleontology had been up  Tattler Creek to look at fossil dinosaur  footprints. We decided to do the same today.  It was a beautiful canyon, with lots of cool  geology. We looked at a rhyolite sill, which  is a horizontal intrusion of magma. Derek climbed up  a small scree  slope to look at it. While he was up there,  I filmed a short segment of him explaining  it and sliding down the hill, although it  eventually had to be cut because of time  constraints.

We were walking up the stream when a dog came running down the path. Or, that's what I  thought it was, until I realized that there  was no one behind it. It was actually a coyote, and it just walked  right past us, about 10 feet away, and  continued on its trip, unfazed by out  presence.

At the same spot, we saw two streams that  came together (picture above). One was just  a normal, clear stream, but the other was  yellow. The rocks on the bottom all had a  coating, probably of a calcium carbonate. It  was a pretty cool example of sediment  deposition by streams.

We finally reached our destination, which  was along a stream. The dinosaur footprints had been made in mud, and the fossil was a cast of that imprint, meaning they stuck out of  the rock face.

In the left-hand picture, I’m pointing at a hadrosaur track, the right hand a therapod.
The rock had been transformed and shifted,  as the face now sat upright, with a dip of  about 80 degrees. These were therapod  tracks, which were usually the carnivores.  We also saw hadrosaur tracks which are  usually plant eaters. The hadrosaur (plant  eaters) tracks were more blobular, while the  therapods had distinct toes.

A picture of a Therapod, plus a simple drawing of my idea of the difference.
We filmed a segment here, then headed back  down. That night Derek and Dirck, from  paleontology, went swimming in the river again. We also filmed a segment where Emily used the X-Ray Analyzer and explained it. Afterwards we did a photo shoot of her holding the Niton and a can of bear spray, silhouetted by the setting sun. I guess it was supposed to have a western theme.

(I’m second from the left, in XtraTufs)

ASRA Day 6- Roadside Animals, Roadside Rocks,

Note: I will be posting a bunch of posts at once in the next few days. They won’t have been posted on the right date, since I couldn’t post them while I was without internet.
Note 2: I will try, if I get permission from the rest of my group, to post our presentation video, with all of the video segments I refer to, but if I can’t, I will just post my segments and some video from the trips sometime this week.
We got up this morning and walked out to the river for a bit. Then we headed off on a road trip.  Our guide, Kristen, came with us. We drove  for a while and saw a amazing amount of  wildlife. Enough that it probably took us  twice as long to get to where we were going.

First we saw a dead caribou, killed by some  wolves. When we saw it, a bear was feasting  on it. Next we saw a bear walking down the  road, just a few feet away from us.

We saw a lot more wildlife, so many that I  don't need to narrate each one. Anyway, we  next stopped at Polychrome Pass. The mountain  range across the way was multicolored, hence  the name (poly for many, chrome for color). The road at the pass was on a  mountain side, probably a thousand feet up.  It was also a narrow dirt road with big tour  buses passing every 15 minutes. We pulled  off and got out to look at a rock outcrop.  It was very windy, so I got a chance to try  out my microphone with its windscreen.

We filmed a short interview here for our  presentation, where Derek interviewed Peter, another classmate, about a fault. You can see in the picture the  difference in color and fragmentation  between the different types of rock.
 
The microphone worked pretty well, but you  could still here some gusts in the video.  But then again, I only had a foam windscreen, when you really need a "fuzzy"  one for it to work well.
Next we stopped at the Eilson Visitor  Center, which has a outlook on Denali (or  Mt. McKinley, as it is officially called).  It was cloudy, so we couldn't see all of it,  but I still got some pretty pictures, I  think.

In the upper right corner picture, Mt. McKinley is in the center, covered in clouds.

Our planned hike for the day was out to  Muldrow Glacier, and it was already 3:30. We  missed the turn off, but as a result, saw a  large moose. It was close to where we were  going to hike, so we were careful as we hiked, but didn't see it.

The hike was through tundra, with lots of  little shrubs. We passed a wildlife  observation outpost, then came to a river.  We walked along the river for a bit, then  came to a outlook on the glacier.

The glacier was actually sediment covered,  so the face looked like rock and the top  like tundra. We shot a segment here about  sedimentation, then went back to the car.