From September 5-14, I was in eastern Oregon helping out with the High Lava Plains seismic experiment. This was a huge project, and there were people from Oklahoma, Oregon State, Stanford, Carnegie, PASSCAL, Arizona State, Idaho, and Rhode Island. There are probably more that I don't remember...

I arrived in Boise and met up with Randy Keller's Oklahoma students, and we drove to Burns, OR on Friday night. When I got to the hotel, I found out I was rooming with an Oregon State student and Cathy Snelson! The next morning, we went to Big Bear Inn for some informational talks and an overview of the project. Then we headed over to the agricultural research center and learned how to dig holes for burying the Texans and geophones.

The actual work of deploying the instruments went by very quickly. I was teamed up with David James from the Carnegie Institute and I think he did most of the work - digging the trenches and planting the geophones. The work could have been monotonous or tedious but David was so easy to get along with and we finished early on Monday! We buried 75 Texans along a stretch of highway over two days. I used something nicknamed the "lunchbox" to electronically record the coordinates of the sensors and took notes for locating our instruments later. The shots were taken Monday night and I went to watch one of them. There was a visible explosion above ground though, so the coupling probably was not great on that shot.

On Tuesday, we had a field trip to a grad student's research area in the morning and Steens Mountain in the afternoon. Steens is a shield volcano with a gentle slope on one side and cliffs on another due to faulting. The view from the top was amazing!

We had Wednesday and Thursday to pick up the instruments, but everyone finished on Wednesday. The work was easier and went so much faster. One of our geophones had been pulled out of the ground, but the rest seemed undisturbed. Since everything had gone pretty much according to plan, we were basically done and there was a party Thursday night!

Mostly Oklahoma people were left by Friday, and we had a field trip to Diamond Crater.

On Saturday we went north for ophiolites and saw lots of serpentine.

I'm really glad Dr. Hole got me involved with the project and Dr. Keller let me help out. It was so much fun and I met interesting people from many different places!