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2017 Yard List
New year’s day is the time I tally up my accumulated bird species seen in my yard on the forested slope of Massanutten Mountain. This is my sixth such annual list. Here are the previous iterations:...
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Friday fold: crumpled quartz vein from VGFC
Remember the Virginia Geological Field Conference from back in October? Well here’s a folded quartz vein we observed along a small shear zone in the Blue Ridge basement complex. There are two views of...
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A kid and his slicks
My family and I took a hike this past weekend in the George Washington National Forest. We hiked up the hill from our house and explored along the trail system that runs along the crest of Massanutten...
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Raider of the Lost Anticlines
Yesterday, I took a hike in search of anticlines. I started off in Veach Gap, a place where I bring students and where there are four excellent 3D outcrops showing SW-plunging anticlines of ~human size...
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Friday fold: Recumbent Harpers
Stop the presses! This late-breaking Friday fold has just been submitted here at Friday Fold Headquarters. This is from Philip Prince/Virginia Division of Geology and Mineral Resources: It’s a...
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Friday folds: Moomaw Reservoir outcrops
My friends Josh Benton and Kristi Leigh are the sources of this week’s Friday folds. Kristi reports that on a recent kayaking trip, they visited: Lake Moomaw, a reservoir that’s just about 3 hours away...
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Q&A, episode 5
After a bit of a respite, it’s now time for a fresh edition of “you ask the questions” here on Mountain Beltway. Anyone can ask a question, serious or spurious, and I’ll do my best to answer it here....
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Beautiful Swimmers, by William Warner
The subtitle of this wonderful book is “Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay.” It’s an excellent account of crab ecology in the Chesapeake Bay as it stood in the mid-1970s, and simultaneously a...
View ArticleFriday fold: quartz veins in metagraywacke of the Mather Gorge Formation
It’s Friday! Here’s a lovely sight, contributed by reader Fred Atwood: Those are quartz veins in one of my favorite local rock units, the Mather Gorge Formation. Fred reports, This is at Madeira School...
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Friday fold: gneiss from the Southside Virginia Piedmont
Reader and former student Paxton DeBusk shared this lovely folded gneiss with me at the conclusion of the Virginia Geological Field Conference a few weeks ago: That’s a lovely hand sample, with a high...
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2018 Yard List
New year’s day is the time I tally up and report the bird species seen in my yard on the forested slope of Massanutten Mountain in Shenandoah County, Virginia. This is my seventh such annual list....
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New discoveries in the Martinsburg Formation
Last Tuesday, the weather was great, and I was on spring break, so I didn’t have to teach. There are a bunch of local outcrops I’ve been meaning to suss out, and it seemed like the time was right. I...
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The Dinosaur Artist, by Paige Williams
[Note: this book review was scheduled to run in the May 2019 issue of EARTH magazine, but with last week’s announcement that EARTH was being shuttered, I was notified that nothing contributors or...
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Friday fauxld: concentric weathering rinds
Here’s a deceptive Friday “faux”ld I saw last week on the South Page Valley Road whilst learning about the Martinsburg Formation outcrops there: Looks like an isoclinal fold in this slab of siltstone,...
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Friday fold: Totier Creek phyllite
I have moved from the Fort Valley to Charlottesville, Virginia, where next month I’ll take up a new position teaching geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College. I’m excited to be in a more...
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Friday fold: Two Mile Run Overlook
I spied an anticline last weekend while engaging in a day of solo geologizing along Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. At Two Mile Run Overlook, I gazed west toward the southern tip of...
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Peering through
When hiking recently in my neighborhood, I saw this gleaming apparition appear in an eroded gully in a dirt road: Those multicolored stripes are varying compositions in a zone of ultramylonite:...
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Friday fold: Lynchburg Group
Last weekend, I went to get my second vaccination, and because of the ridiculous quirks of the way the vaccination campaign is (dis)organized, I had to travel to Lynchburg, Virginia, to get the shot....
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Friday fold: The Blue Ridge Tunnel
On Wednesday of this week, I went for the first time to the newly-opened-to-the-public Blue Ridge Tunnel, a county park in Nelson and Augusta counties, Virginia. Built in the 1850s to serve as a...
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Revisiting Tinker Creek
While my son takes banjo lessons downtown, I stroll Charlottesville’s walking mall and browse the bookstores. Last week, I dropped $40 at one of the used-book stores, walking away with an armful of...
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