Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for the Oberlin College Geomorphology Research Group. We are a diverse team of students working with Amanda Henck Schmidt on geomorphology questions. This blog is an archive of our thoughts about our research, field work travel notes, and student research projects. Amanda's home page is here.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

A typical day in Yunnan

A typical day in the field involves more than six hours of driving from places to places trying to find the river we're sampling at. And every now and then there will be crappy road conditions like this: 
This picture was taken on our drive along the Vietnam border on a narrow mountain road that is undergoing construction at multiple segments all at the same time. (Detailed stories will follow)

Or sometimes the road is like this one:
This picture was taken after we drove up a relatively steep dirt road (not shown in this picture). We got stuck in the middle of the road the first time and had to back down to the bottom of the track and power through it again. Look at all the dirt we stirred up!!

Although we sometimes drive on new and wide highway roads, most of the time we have to deal with the sucky road conditions. Yet we always survive simply by..... SNACKING!
Local people sell fruits along major county roads and we've gotten bananas, tiny oranges  (沙糖桔), pickled green mango salad, and sugar haws. So far we've also finished a whole big jar of peanut butter and eight backs of crackers as well :) Amanda and I each had more than ten tiny oranges in three hours one day. It's also probably the only things so far that the four of us unanimously said "oh yummy!" to. 

Oh and we do actually take samples (and not just driving and snacking)
We have a ton of field gear that we bring to each sampling site including waders, sieves, cameras, field notebook and lots of ziplock bags. (Detailed story will follow) some of our sampling sites are really pretty. Like this one! We got to the Mekong just around sunset and I was stunned by the beautiful scene and pretty rocks. I took this picture before we started digging up the river sand and when we were done the sun has completely set. 


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