That Was Awesome

Seven full days of running around the New Zealand countryside with a clipboard, a hammer and a compass. It doesn't get much better than that. Actually it was better than that because along with all of the geology students, there were five very smart and enthusiastic geology professors with bigger and better hammers running around with us. A typical day went something like this:

6:00: wake up, shower, get breakfast, make lunch

8:00: get on the bus to go to field location

8:30-5:00: geology stuff

5:00: back to camp, shower, unpack field gear

6:00: dinner

8:00: evening lectures

The weather was pretty good at first, but then it got really, really bad. After an hour and a half of hiking on the fourth day, we climbed down a cliff to study some amazing formations in a secluded cove. It was raining most of the morning, but by mid-day the skies had opened up and the rain was so heavy that you could barely see fifteen feet in-front of yourself. We backed away from the cliff because big boulders of basalt and limestone were falling off onto the beach. The lecturers gave up trying to teach anything because nobody could hear anything they were saying over the rain. 

We had to take a couple of detours on the way back because our path had been flooded or the rivers we crossed were dangerously high. It was amazing. 

Unfortunately, this same storm cause flash flooding of a nearby river where some high school students were canyoning. Seven of the students and a teacher were killed when the river to quickly for them to get to higher ground. Our field trip was organized and run by professors with over a hundred years of field experience with them. At no point did I fear for my own personal safety. I can't imagine what it must have been like to have been a part of that canyoning group. Even those who survived are left with the awful experience of watching their classmates swept away by a freak flood.