Background
I spent over two decades doing geologic field work in many different states on various projects. There were a few things that happened along the way that I thought might make good stories. Typically there is some form of occupational hazard or risk that forms the main point of these stories, which is what I think makes them interesting.
Although I show a fossilized fish I collected in Kemmerer, WY as the featured image of this article, the stories I am about to tell you are not fish tales. Believe me, I couldn’t make this stuff up, even if I tried!
Tale 1: The Rattlesnake Scare
It was the summer of 1984 when I found myself attending an arduous geology field camp in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. During this course, I learned many things. First, it is not easy to learn how to do the work necessary to create and draw maps of geologic formations in complex mountain ranges. The work is physically demanding, mentally taxing, and requires that you think in four dimensions (x,y,z, and time). It also helps if you are artistically talented, which I am not! In other words, learning to be a practicing geologist is not easy, especially if you are a city boy that grew up on the streets of Chicago.
Although there are many stories I could recall from this field-camp experience, there is one story that remains vivid in my mind because of its primordial nature. The scene of this fearsome-adventure was the Elk Basin, Wyoming.
Elk Basin is a special place, geologically-speaking. A geologic feature known as an anticline exists in this location. This structure is known to trap oil, and in this instance, Elk Basin was a site that has/had oil. What Elk Basin also has is dipping geologic strata that are exposed at the surface. Since the strike and dip of the rocks are easy to measure, this location is used to train young geologists, which is what I happened to be at the time.
Our day started out with a scary story being told to us of a recent occurrence in the basin. The Elk Basin was an active oil production location. Many oil production wells were installed within the anticline, with one of these locations having a subsurface control room. Sometime before we arrived on the scene, there were a series of oil workers that met their demise in a classic-case of workers having more bravado than common sense.
When the first worker climbed down the ladder into the control room, he was rendered unconscious by inhaling a high concentration of hydrogen sulfide (H2S). When H2S is at low concentrations it smells like rotten eggs. At high concentrations, however, unconsciousness occurs rapidly, soon followed by death.
When employee number one didn’t respond to the two other above-ground workers, the second man climbed down the ladder to investigate the problem. As you might imagine, he met the same fate as worker number one. Well, worker number three did not compute 1+2 = 3 correctly, so he became the third fatality of the morning when he went down the hole to help his coworkers, who were already gone.
With that story framing the start of our day, we began learning to map the rocks by placing our Brunton compasses on the rocks to take the strike and dips. The teacher warned us that the Elk Basin was prime habitat for rattlesnakes, which happen to be my least favorite pet. I’ve had numerous encounters with them through the years and they are much quicker than I have ever been!
As we began climbing the hills and measuring rocks, we passed several rattlesnake dens. The snakes in these dens at least had the courtesy to produce their rattling sounds to inform us they were in the dark holes beneath the rocks. As we progressed through the day, we had to “fan-out” into groups of two to cover more mapping territory.
Although it might not be easy to tell from the picture shown above, the dipping rocks created a lot of nooks and crannies that formed great, cool hideouts for all kinds of critters.
As I crested one hilltop, my boot hit a rock, which ricocheted off a coiled-up rattler. This snake was bathing in the sun just outside his den, and he didn’t like being the target of that stray projectile.
As he very quickly uncoiled and began pursuing me, I did my best antelope impersonation and began bounding down the hillside. I don’t believe I have ever covered more ground in less time than I did during those few moments of explosive jumps and sheer terror. If I had a set of wings, I would have been flying off that mountain. If I had been an Olympic high jumper, I would have won the gold.
After regaining my wits, I had to continue mapping the rocks. As I got to the top of the anticline, way above the basin floor, I moved over to a rock that had a dark hiding space behind it. The reason I chose that location had to do with the perfect bedding plane that was exposed in that site.
As I put my compass on the rock to take the strike and dip readings, I yelled at top volume because I thought a rattler was about to bite me in the face. What actually emerged from the dark hiding spot, however, was a bird! As he exploded out of the hole and flew by my face, my scream echoed across the basin, probably much to the delight of the other students! In some ways, I can still hear the echo of my fear.
With rattled nerves, I was glad to leave the snakes behind and move to other prime mapping locations in the great western US. However, before I leave the topic of rattlers, I have to thank National Geographic for producing their late 1980’s or early 1990’s issue that featured the timber rattler.
It was a few days after reading that issue that I encountered a massive coiled timber rattler sitting in the middle of the trail I was taking in the Great Smoky Mountains. There was no ambiguity in my mind as to what he was, so neatly coiled beside a tree root and ledge that crossed the trail.
Luckily, I was able to stop in mid-stride as my friends bumped me from behind, as we were working our way down the trail. The bump they gave me nearly pushed me on top of the snake! After we got a big long stick, we were able to convince the snake to uncoil and head back into the forest without any unwanted conflicts. To this day, I remain vigilant when I’m in snake territory.
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Tale 2: The Drilling Rig Blunder
This story (circa 1986) took place in a cornfield in south-central Illinois. I was in graduate school at the time and we were learning to drill water wells and to install piezometers, which are used to measure the elevation of the groundwater table. We were installing the equipment so that we could perform an aquifer test.
The water well driller was using a rig that had a boom that was vertical while drilling (of course!) but was horizontal when the truck was in motion. The boom was lowered onto the truck framework by some sort of mechanical system, rather than a hydraulic system. The boom was constructed of very heavy gauge metal and weighed thousands of pounds. As the boom was lowered, it did so in a jerky motion, rather than a smooth, fluid motion that you might expect it to do.
For this reason, when the boom was being lowered onto the bed to move the truck from site to site, we were told to back away and let the driller do the work. This should have been sufficient warning to all of us.
As the sun was setting after a long day of work, the boom was being lowered as the driller completed his work. One of my friends (who happened to be standing next to me), was watching the boom jerking downward towards the truck framework. For some inexplicable reason, at the last possible moment, he stepped towards the truck and reached out towards the boom with his hand to “help it land softly on the truck framework”.
Well, all I can do is try to give you a mental image of what I experienced. I can only imagine what he experienced. His hand got crushed between the boom and the framework in one of those jerky motions. Luckily for him, he managed to pull his hand back before the boom stopped moving and rested on the framework. As his hand was pulled through the air, his squirting blood made a red arch of droplets in the setting sun. The arch flew next to me as he screamed and grabbed his hand.
Since I was next to him, I grabbed his arm to assess the damage. His palm was split wide open and his bones/tendons/ligaments and everything else in his hand were in plain view. Our teacher began the damage assessment by trying to figure out the location of the nearest hospital. Remember, this was long before our ubiquitous cell phones and navigation systems existed.
I’m happy to report that after a 50-mile drive to a hospital and some expert medical attention, my friend eventually regained use of his hand, although it took more than a year for the healing to happen and for him regain his strength and dexterity.
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Tale 3: The Radioactive Cemetery
I’ve known and worked with a lot of really smart people in my life. One of my favorites is my friend that I’ll call GM. GM has been a person that continues to surprise me with his exploits. I’ve always said that GM would be broke while lying in a gutter somewhere, or he will be a multi-millionaire. There is no in-between for GM, and so far, he is on the better path of the two mentioned.
From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, GM and I did a lot of geologic fieldwork. If I write additional articles on this topic in the future, I am sure GM will show up again.
In the current story, GM and I had spent many years working in a variety of radioactive waste burial grounds. I know that sounds sexier than it really is, but all I can tell you is that we had a blast, and it wasn’t from the alpha, beta and gamma particles that were being shot at us as we did our work.
We sampled and monitored groundwater, surface water, and lake water. We sieved piles and piles of contaminated soils to do particle size analyses. We electronically monitored weather conditions, collected all kinds of data, and made predictions of future radionuclide transport.
It can be lonely working in radioactive burial grounds, even if you are working with an incredibly brilliant guy like GM. Although there is a lot of activity all around you (pun intended), there isn’t too much going on.
During a multi-year project that involved installing many acres of impermeable covers over the burial grounds, GM and I had to find some ways to entertain ourselves. As I look back on this, we didn’t do anything too crazy – we were just boys being boys.
In TN, the winter months can be very rainy. Rainy days can stretch into rainy weeks, and the clouds can descend upon us to such an extent that we feel like we are breathing saturated air and need gills to function. During a particularly rainy stretch of weather, GM and I decided to try a quick test to see if we could slide down one of these impermeable caps as the rivers of water were flowing across them.
According to our vision at the time, we were already soaked while doing our work and had our own multi-acre water slide to experiment with. The only things watching over us were fog and rain. No other sane people would have been out in such dreadful conditions.
As we quickly discovered, however, the caps were not as slick as we thought they would be. We didn’t get very far as we tried to slide down the hill. Our Tyvek coverings essentially stuck to the rubberized caps. Our coefficients of kinetic friction were too high to allow us to have much fun. Our imagined fun was far greater than the actual experience.
Unbeknownst to us, it was during this time of extreme rain that the ground got so saturated, that some unexpected things happened. We noticed a long opening in the ground beyond the limit of one of the impermeable caps. As we investigated, we looked into the trench and discovered that the soil covering on one of the biological trenches had collapsed into the trench.
When I called this a biological trench, I’m wondering what type of imagery might have formed in your mind. To paint a picture for you, imagine a mixture of dead animals in various states of decay lying interspersed with each other. Deer, raccoons, opossums, fish, birds, and many other forms of wildlife were included. Some were encased in plastic bags, others in cardboard boxes, others with no covering. Radioactive symbols were strewn about in the trench.
We had previously been told that there was a biological disposal area in the burial ground. The first time you see one, however, leaves a permanent reminder in your brain as to the seriousness of the environmental contamination that has been created in regions like this. After seeing that, all the fun we were trying to have suddenly disappeared and we decided to finish our work.
Now I don’t want to leave anyone with the wrong impression with this story. Radioactive waste is a fact of life. GM and I worked for many years to characterize the nature and extent of contamination, and we also worked with engineering teams to design, install and monitor the effectiveness of various containment methods. Ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of the time, we were total professionals on the job. Without having a little fun once in a while, we might have lost our minds somewhere along the way.
To finish this story, the good news is that the sites we worked on so long ago are now just protected grassy fields. What lies beneath those fields shall remain there forever, protected from rainfall and human intrusion by those engineered barriers and structures that we watched being built. We were living the lives of real environmental scientists and there are many more stories like this one stored in my brain.
Final Thoughts
If people actually read and like this article, I’ll write another. If you want to read more of these, let me know by leaving a comment. I have many more experiences to share! Thanks for reading.
