Hello again from beautiful Southern Oregon!

I’ve now been working on this internship for a little over a month starting a variety of projects, but I have also rekindled other projects from my time here two years ago. Recently I have been working on inspecting many mining claims and the associated notices and plans of operations. I’ve even been visiting sites I went to two years ago. It’s crazy to see the active mining or the reclamation that has occurred in certain places after the amount of time it has been. I’ve also been inspecting many quarries lately, part of my job two years ago with the BLM. There’s somewhere around 500-600 quarries on the Medford District.  Some quarries haven’t even been inspected in about 15 years, while others are potentially going to be developed as the needs for roads and timber sales continue. I guess you could say my job kind of rocks!

A part of the Bristol Silica Mine

Okay, that was pretty bad. I’ll show myself out.

One of the other random activities I was lucky enough to partake in was our monthly Lands and Resources meeting. This was a special offsite one at the Road Crew headquarters. The best part about the meeting was getting to try out some of that big, awesome equipment. It was basically getting to play on stationary big kid tonka truck toys. Pretty cool.

A Cat 320. I managed to pick up all the logs with it.

In addition to many quarry and mining inspections, I’m excited to continue writing rockhounding brochures for the area (which basically means I get to go hike around and look for places with good jasper, agates, and petrified wood for recreational collection!).

I’m also excited to be starting another project which involves the geology of the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument. I even get to hike through a five mile portion of the monument this weekend to start to get to know the rocks! The Cascade Siskiyou National Monument is quite the interesting place. It was delegated a national monument by Bill Clinton toward the very end of his term as president and is the first national monument to be designated solely for the preservation of biodiversity (for all you plant and animal folk out there). There’s a few different rock formations I’ll be studying out there including the Roxy Formation, the Colestin Formation, Hornbrook Formation, and the Mt. Ashland granite just to name a few. The area is very interesting in terms of wildlife, plants, and geology. The Siskiyou fault runs right into the monument and as a result has created Siskiyou Pass (the highest point on Interstate 5 in case you like random trivia like I do). As a result of faulting, there’s basically ancient seafloor rocks with shell fossils that have been uplifted to 4000 feet or so and are now mountains. To a rock nerd like me, that’s absolutely amazing that an old seafloor is now a mountain range. Probably one of the things I enjoy most about geology is how the changes in landscape tell you the stories of millions of years of time.

Pilot Rock, an awesome geologic feature of the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument

I’ll let you ponder that.

Morgan

BLM Medford Office