1 Day 5 starts with Geoffrey teaching us about Mt St Helens (in dry sunny weather) at Central Washington University.
2 Horace holds the Wenas Creek Mammoth leg bone.
3 Dr Pat Lubinski - The awesome dude in charge of piecing together the Wenas Creek Mammoth. SO far they've constrained the bones to between 15 and 20K years old. They've also found piece of a flaked stone tool in the mix which would be BIG news if they can get a definite age.
4 Some of the many pieces of Bison, Squirrel & Mammoth from Wenas Creek that needs to be put back together.
5 Me holding actual mammoth bone.
6 Mammoth Rib.
7 Steve was happy to hold the Wenas Creek mammoth femur.
8 Laura models just how big the mammoth would have been.
9 This roadcut near Vantage, WA featured some amazing pillow basalts that were part of the Columbia flood basalts.
10 The rounded darker rock is a pillow... it forms from rapid cooling that only occurs underwater and give the lava a very rounded shape as it crawls along the lake/ocean floor (think 4th of July snakes). Thus this flow hit a watery end 14 to 15 million years ago. What was the watery source? Swampy boglands and forests. How do we know that? Bazillions of specimens of petrified wood in the area like gingkos and elms.
11 A very nicely preserved pillow.
12 The yellow between the pillow basalts are a special rock called palagonite. Mars rovers have found palagonite signatures on Mars, thus adding more evidence that the Martian surface once had water on its surface during volcanic episodes.
13 Columbia River overlook... really a stop for me to get the dime out of my seatbelt latch. It fell right out of my pocket and into the slot.
14 I-90 and the Columbia River.
15 Lake Lenoore Caves.
16 Looking up the columns of basalt at Lake Lenoore Caves.
17 Lake Lenoore.
18 David & Geoff = BFF.
19 Laura looks the other way.
20 Damsel fly
0619_CWU_Scablands