Geology!

This past weekend (the 12th-13th, when I started writing this post) my Geology 111 class went on a field trip. We traveled down to the Saint George area, and we made some stops along the way to look at different places of geological interest in Utah. Basically all of Utah is of geological interest, so we made stops about every 45 minutes on the way down to our campsite. The van ride was a lot of fun. The van that I was in named itself the Party Van. By the end of the trip, everyone in that van had a nickname. My nickname was Jenna. This came about because the boys in the van didn't know my name, so they shouted "Jenna!" to get my attention and ask what my name was. Even after they found out that my name was Lauren, and not Jenna, the name Jenna just stuck. We had a lot of fun in our van, getting to know the other people in our class. We shared stories, wrote a geology rap, had a period of time when we were all asleep (except for the driver!) for about 45 minutes...yeah, I can see why we were the party van...Haha. Another thing that surprised me about the van ride is what those 12 passenger vans can do! We were going about 95mph at one point, we did some serious offroading, drove pretty much straight up the side of a mountain, and other crazy stuff like that. I have a video of us going down the mountain. Going up was much scarier though. Although, watching this video, this does look pretty terrifying! Also, I have no idea if the video has sound or not.

Anyways, on the first day we:
touched a fault line,

 analyzed the age of a huge landslide,

stood on top of a rhyolite dome,

stood on a basalt flow,

walked through a lava tube,

swam in a hot spring, and went cliff diving on the first day. The cliff diving was at our campsite. The water in the Sand Hollow Reservoir was so cold! It was about 55 degrees, which may not sound too cold, but it is! After jumping in, I swam out to the island in the middle of the reservoir, and I feel like I was starting to get hypothermia. It was hard to breathe because the cold water was making my lungs contract, all my muscles were freezing up, I started getting a little dizzy, but thankfully by that time I had reached the island so I could get out of the water before anything really bad happened. After exploring the island with Chelsey, we swam back. As soon as we got back, other people from the class had gotten the raft out to go pick everyone else up from the island so that they wouldn't have to swim back in the cold water. Oh well.

On the second day some people from the class found a bigger cliff to jump off of.

They had a lot of fun with that.

Then we left our campsite and went to see more geology! We saw a river that was fed by hot springs, but later on there was no hot water because of the types of rock and what can filter through it, then we looked off of a scenic overlook and described the different geological events we saw,

then we saw some interesting rock deformations, and then we found dinosaur footprints! I wish that I had pictures, but I didn't have my camera with me :( After that we went back to BYU. On the way back our van shared awkward date stories, and it was very entertaining! It was a really fun weekend!