June 11, 2025 - Summer Historical Geology for Teachers Field Day

Today I recruited Kristen Smith (MS in Geology @ BYU in progress and UVU Alum) to help me lead a couple of field trip stops as a part of Peter Edmundson's summer course for science teachers looking to get a certification for teaching Earth Science classes. It was a fun group of teachers! Teachers make some of the best and engaging students!!! 

We met at Spanish Oaks Reservoir at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon with a vantage point of West Mountain and great views of Lake Bonneville shorelines and triangular facets all around. It was so windy, so unfortunately we didn't dare unfurl the latest poster from RM GSA, so we made due with print outs. My main objectives were to talk about the Wasatch as a fault zone, rather than a single fault by discussing West Mountain and the faults that run along both sides of that mountain and link up with the Utah Lake faults and possibly the Nephi segment of the Wasatch fault. Also, I wanted to discuss shorelines and river terraces and how these can be used as markers in the landscape to study other processes such as faulting. I think by in large we covered most of these topics, but it didn't go exactly how I envisioned it. 

The teachers had all sorts of questions they wanted to get at including are the mountains still going up?, is the height of the Wasatch mountains all due motion on this fault or other processes?, How do all of these things relate to earlier convergent mountain building? AND of course what I presented led to other tangential questions. Somehow we talked about bias in science, how our models for earthquake ruptures have shifted with time as we have seen more complex ruptures, and also we addressed why talk about slip rates since the fault doesn't move steadily (my answer was something along the lines of we need a metric to compare various faults, to look across geologic time and see if things change, and talk across geology and geophysics). It was great overall wonderful science students and teachers. 

Kristen and I also followed the group up Spanish Fork Canyon to look at the Thistle Landslide and discussed catastrophic events and how they are also part of the steady march of geologic time (just like earthquakes). Kristen and Peter did most of the talking up here. We even visited the former townsite that was buried by Thistle Lake and briefly talked about how some of the river terraces in this canyon are actually lake Bonneville terraces because the Lake Flooded into this canyon. We finished with lunch at 'Little Acorn' at the mouth of the canyon. 

Field trips with interested parties are probably the best part of my career, so it was a wonderful way to spend 6 hours of the day! 

Major question of the day, why did they have two excavators on top of the Thistle slide... doing expensive work???