The Angst of the Traveling Geologist

 I am not referring here to the "Itinerant Geologist" in terms of one that travels extensively for work. 

Rather, it is in terms of those anchored to a particular geography by work and family, and when they are temporarily "freed" during multi-state journeys to visit distant family.  Since 1974, I have been acclimated to long road trips, so as long as time permits, I prefer to drive.

From 1983 (when I met my first wife) to early 1991, we lived in El Paso.  From that time until early 1991, family trips were usually during the Summer and at Christmas (sometimes we flew) back to the Atlanta area.  After grad school ended, we moved to Georgia, in April 1991 and the destinations flipped and were a bit more scattered with my wife's parents and siblings in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona.

 

"Freed" - as during a family vacation is in quotations - on those journeys we are allowed to see hundreds of miles of diverse Geology, but to preserve a schedule, we can't stop.  Perhaps to suggest that we Geologists are "hostages" is a bit overwrought, but as we pass outcrop after outcrop, we long for the freedom to briefly stop and look, for just a few minutes.  To seek fossils, minerals, cool rock samples, to touch, and to photograph the "exotica" before us (later on to also include wildflowers).

When traveling, the only opportunity to visit outcrops was to sneak away from the motel at dawn, while everyone else was sleeping in until 8 AM.  One example was one night in Tulsa, after visiting the Woolaroc Ranch (a worthy travel stop, with an interesting story), 

on the way to the Tulsa-area motel, I saw this shale outcrop, so I cleared it with my wife that I would make an early morning visit to the outcrop (it was the only outcrop I had seen).  After scouring the outcrop for an hour, I came to the conclusion that the shale was barren of fossils.  I even checked a number of the tabular concretions and they seemed barren also.  I had to settle for some photos illustrating the shale characteristic of being "fissile" and the fresh air and free time.

On another journey, while at a motel in El Paso (2003?), I had better luck, as I knew the area, but still had limited time to go from East Central El Paso to Trans-Mountain Road, where there are a variety of Precambrian outcrops exposed when the highway was built.

In the middle of the "mess", the light colored rock is Proterozoic Red Bluff Granite, to the right, between the granite and the black diabase, it a tilted mass of Proterozoic Castner Limestone.  On that run, at least I scored a few good photos and some rock samples.

With subsequent "life changes" over the years, at times I am still at times "a hostage" to a travel schedule.  At least now with a good camera, shooting at high speeds, I can get some usable photos (as a passenger) at 70 mph.  Below, from 2017, as my son-in-law was driving out of Phoenix on I-17, I did get this photo of a baked paleosol (red layer with miniature faux-columnar jointing), between basalt flows.

Same journey, I-40 yielded this 70 mph image of the subtle, upturned rim of Barringer Meteor Crater.  Not perfect, but usable for education purposes.

BTW, I have confirmed the phenomenon of the angst associated with bypassing outcrops, during family trips and such with other Geologists.