Jonah Bartrand

August 31st, 2017

This trip had been in the works since the end of May. However, prior to departure, the full itinerary looked something like this:

Friday: Drive to Grand Canyon

            Lodging: Camp site

Saturday: Go to Grand Canyon

            Lodging: Uncertain

Sunday: Drive back

            Return Time: Prior to 8 AM Monday

As one might imagine from the above itinerary, there was not a lot of specific planning going on; we were pretty much flying by the seat of our pants the entire weekend. After seeing the canyon for the first time at sunrise, we needed to figure out what we were going to do with the rest of our day. We were all pretty much agreed on a hike into the canyon, so we looked at the list of day hikes into the canyon. We all felt pretty good, so we decided on what was advertised as a “Difficult” hike -- the South Kaibab Trail to Skeleton Point, 3 miles in and 2000 feet of elevation change. We all packed for a six-mile hike: a couple PB&J sandwiches, some apples, a cliff bar, and 2-4 liters of water depending on the person. From the Visitor Center, we caught the shuttle to the South Kaibab Trailhead and began our hike at 8 AM.

The South Kaibab trail follows a ridge down into the canyon, so the views were spectacular, and the exposure a little brutal. I was personally impressed with the state of the trail—wide, even grade, a notch below paved—although I suppose that is about what a person should expect of a main trail in a heavily trafficked national park. That said, I still knew that the walk up would be strenuous. We were consistently reminded of the dangers of heat and dehydration: a cartoon of a sun-burned fellow vomiting was nearly a constant companion for us on our hike. At the Cedar Ridge stop, 1.5 miles in, I spoke with some park rangers about the trail. They recommended that all day hikers turn around at Skeleton Point, to make sure that the return trip is possible. They promised great views of the Colorado River from there.

Well, we made it down to Skeleton Point, the end of the ridge we had been descending up to that point, at 9:30. I must confess that I was not particularly struck by the views of the river that we had there. I had been jokingly declaring that we should go all the way to the river, but Liam, Jimmy and Claire were obstinately opposed to the idea. However, they were all willing to continue beyond Skeleton Point, as our return time would have been approximately noon, and we didn’t know what to do with the rest of our day if we turned around then. So we descended down to the last large terrace in the canyon above the Colorado. We passed several strings of mules headed up as we were headed down, which was pretty cool. Well, after what seemed forever out in the sun, we made it down to Tip Off—the last stop before the river (another 3 miles beyond)—and ate lunch. Well, we all wanted a good view of the river, so we went about half-a-mile below Tip Off to where we had amazing views of the river up and down the canyon.

From there, we took some group pictures and started heading back up the trail. We walked back up to Tip Off, and by this point it was late enough in the day (about noon) that it was starting to get hot, especially at that low elevation. Back at Tip Off, we napped for about 15 minutes and took stock of our situation: we were 4.5 miles from the trailhead and in the hottest part of the day. Worst of all, we were very low on water. We discovered that Claire drinks water like a fish, so she was out, Jimmy had a half-liter left. I had a liter left but had only drank a liter up to that point. Liam was in the best situation, with almost 2 liters remaining. I had discovered a water cache there at Tip Off, but I was reluctant to take more than the minimum necessary, as I didn’t know what its intended purpose was. So I told Claire and Jimmy to take a liter each. Even with a moderate restocking of our water supplies, the trip back up the South Kaibab seemed quite daunting.

Alternatively, there was a tie trail (the Tonto) that went downstream on the same bench (so negligible elevation change) to the Indian Garden campground on the Bright Angel trail, where there was water. We were unsure of the distance to Indian Garden from Tip Off. Claire estimated it to be a little over three miles from the map, which I thought a little conservative, but I said nothing, as I still thought it the best route out and I didn’t want to discourage the others.

Growing up in Eastern Washington and spending a lot of time outdoors, I am used to walking in the heat, and being short on water. Liam has spent a lot of time hiking, but mostly in places (like Maine and New Zealand) where one regrets not bringing an extra coat, not extra water. Jimmy is more of an indoor person. As he told us, “It gets this hot in Indiana, but nobody goes outside when it does.” Claire has a ton of get-up-and-go, but she was also starting to get worn out when we began our trek on the Tonto, and the water shortage was especially difficult for her. All these factors taken into account, I wasn’t particularly pleased with our situation, but I still thought the Tonto our best option.

So began what was likely the most grueling trek of their lives. I fault myself for not taking to heart that the others in my group might not be accustomed to distances and conditions that I accept as normal. I should have insisted that everyone carry more water and food from the start. A big issue that I had not foreseen, and which did not become obvious until a park ranger later pointed it out, is that we did not bring enough salty food, so everybody was low on electrolytes, and the water we consumed was not as effective as it should have been. That being said, I am extremely proud of the gameness with which everybody carried on.

I cannot attest to what the others thought, but I really enjoyed our hike across the Tonto. We got great views up the side canyons which one really doesn’t get from the ridge trails, and we got off the beaten path, which always makes me happy—running into other people on the trail always bothers me a little. I suspect that the others were primarily focused on spotting the next patch of shade (which wasn’t particularly prevalent). There were a couple of springs we passed on the trail, and we stopped at each one to take advantage of the shade of the trees growing there. In more dire circumstances, we would all have drunk the water, and I was very tempted, as I was hoarding a half liter in case anyone showed signs of heat exhaustion. Luckily, that was avoided, but with less margin than ideal, I suspect.

To cover the entire distance from Tip Off to Indian Garden (which turned out to be 4.5 miles, I discovered the next day) took us more nearly four hours. When we got there, Jimmy made a beeline for the restroom, Liam rolled around in the creek, and Claire sprawled in the dirt, and I went to fill up water bottles. I brought out some food that I had left and offered it around. After taking an hour break at Indian Garden, we began the ascent to the rim. Starting out, everybody seemed to be in reasonably good spirits. However, as the enormity of the elevation change became apparent, things began to slow down. It’s about 4.5 miles from Indian Garden to the rim, and as we got to higher elevations, I could feel that I was more out of breath. Everybody else was simply exhausted, and I can’t blame them. Luckily, there are water spigots every 1.5 miles up the Bright Angel trail, so we didn’t have to worry about water. We encountered a park ranger about 2 miles from the top, and she asked us how we all were feeling. Liam said that he wasn’t feeling so hot, and she asked about water and electrolytes. We said water we had, electrolytes not so much. She gave us a couple packets of electrolyte drink mixes and told us to add them to our water bottles and wait fifteen minutes.

We went up the trail a little way to a spot the ranger had recommended to stop, and we waited until Liam felt better. I gave out some more food, and we trudged on. The ranger had told us that the last shuttle left the trailhead a half-hour after sunset, which we weren’t going to make. The ranger had offered us a ride back to the Visitor Center if we missed the bus, which was very kind of her, but I preferred not to impose. Luckily, when we made it back to the top after 9:00, well past 30 minutes after sunset, we discovered that the buses were still running and caught one back to the car. We drove into Tusayan and bought dinner at a ridiculously overpriced McDonald’s. We then drove to the campground, found a site and set up camp. Everybody was in bed by 11:30.

The next day, everybody was in agreement that we didn’t need to do another hike. Jimmy had a National Parks passport that he got stamped, and we walked to the geology museum. We were all pretty proud looking from the rim at the route we had walked the day before. Around noon, we left the park and started heading back to Albuquerque. We stopped in Flagstaff and ate at Sonic, the first time for Liam and Jimmy. After Flagstaff, we drove east to a meteor crater west of Winslow. Claire was able to get us tickets at a discount (we all thought $18 for general admission was a little steep). We would have gone on a guided tour, but we really didn’t have enough time. After the meteor crater, we continued the drive to Albuquerque, stopping for gas in Gallup. We ate dinner in Albuquerque at the Frontier Restaurant, which was cheap and surprisingly good. Thus ended our road trip to the Grand Canyon.

July 24th, 2017

All of the weeks are starting to blur together. Part of it is the four day weekend, and part of it is that I’m starting to fall into a routine, but I couldn’t begin to say what I accomplished last week if it weren’t for my daily logs. One thing in particular does stand out, though. As I was pondering the next step in processing the data , I noticed that there were sections of the data that had been zeroed. I couldn’t figure out why that would be, and I went back through the data files, trying to find at what point in the process the zeroes had been introduced. After four hours reading the data in SAC, Matlab, and Python and talking with other individuals in the department, we figured out that, as some result of a non-standard header format, Obspy (the seismic module for Python) was not reading the negative values in the traces. So that required reading the original SEGY files into SAC and writing them out as SAC files. Once in .sac format, Obspy had no issues reading the files.

In the process, I learned how to write SAC macros, improved my bash shell scripting skills, and was impressed to see other people in the group leave off what they were working on to help me out with my problem. At the same time, I have become further disillusioned with the diversity of seismic data file formats. I suppose I don’t have enough experience to understand why one particular type of data file is particularly well suited for a given application, and I acknowledge that readily. But even for a given file format, certain data collectors have their own special header structure. Why? The files are hard enough to read as is. Well, there’s my rant for the week.

On the other hand, I have really come to appreciate our daily lunch conversations. So far, we have discussed the best and worst airlines, at what point does a person with cats become a cat lady (The answer is three.), the best places to shop for groceries, and other sundry topics.

June 27th, 2017

The internet was down for an entire morning this week, and though none of my work required internet or server access to execute, I realized just how dependent I am upon Google to write my codes. My programming education progresses as follows:

1) I learn how to perform a task by spending about 30 minutes on Google looking at examples and about 30 minutes messing around in the editor.

2) Move onto some other task and don’t use the function for about two weeks.

3) Faced with same task solved two weeks ago, I vaguely recall working on something similar.

4) Spend five minutes on Google and five minutes in the console relearning what I learned two weeks ago.

After enough repetitions, I actually remember how to use the command without resorting to the internet, but it takes a while.

I’ve started working on my elevator speech, and have realized just how audience dependent it is. Despite minimizing the amount of technical jargon, one must make fundamental assumptions about the background knowledge of the audience. Otherwise, I could write one thousand words just about the difference between p and s-waves. Unfortunately, this means that I either need to memorize three different elevator pitches (one for non-scientists, one for non-seismologists, and one for seismologists) or just not worry about anyone but seismologists. Of course, as I become accustomed to delivering the speech in a variety of situations, it will evolve, and I will personalize my delivery situationally.

I have never written an elevator speech before, but I have often delivered them to people asking what research I am working on. Naturally, as I go further into the project and my understanding changes, the content also changes. I have used them everywhere from job interviews to conversations on the bus.

June 19th, 2017

Well, things have finally started to settle down. Rather than fighting with IT issues, now I get to fight with non-standard .sgy files. At risk of stepping on the toes of some in the seismology community, let me digress for a moment: I understand that there is a significant amount of metadata associated with a seismic signal, but I don’t understand why the metadata for a given file could not be stored in an appropriately named .txt file, and the actual trace data stored in a .csv file. As things now stand, one must have specialized software to even read the data files, and Steve Jobs help you if your file headers are non-standard. There, I’m done.

If you couldn’t tell from the above rant, I’m working with seismic data files. The data is continuous records from a three-channel rotational seismometer and a three-channel translational seismometer, with 286 shot points taken along perpendicular, 2-km lines. The seismometers were located near the crossing-point of the two lines. I have already succeeded in cutting the sets of hits at each shot point from the continuous data and storing them in discrete files. I am now in the process of selecting the best hit from each set and picking p- and s-wave arrivals. I would also like to note that, for those with only a classroom seismology background, picking p-wave arrivals is relatively straightforward. Picking s-wave arrivals is a pain in the @%#&. In every scientific field with which I have had experience, there is at least one necessary task which everyone admits is a “dark art”. I have come to the conclusion that picking s-wave arrivals is seismology’s dark art. But, once I have the arrivals appropriately picked, the most monotonous part of my summer should be behind me.

One absolutely indispensable skill in research is concise, thorough record keeping. If you have a success which needs to be reproduced months (or years after the fact), or you are passing your project off to someone else, documentation is critical. Unfortunately, this is an area in which I tend to do the minimum. Hopefully, that will change with this summer.

The first week here, things were a little hectic, and my daily record-keeping was rather slip-shod. However, I believe that I have come up with the system which works best for me. Every day, I type up a description of what I have accomplished each day, including notes which may be useful in the future related to file creation, functions, and modifications.

June 14th, 2017

First week on the job. So far, I have developed a grudging respect for macOS and managed to install all the necessary software on my computer (Matlab, PASSOFT, SAC, Python) with a minimal number of instances where I nearly disabled my terminal.

A note to anyone who is interested: In .bash_profile, explicitly declare the PATH variable to include the standard reference directories. Else, if the variable gets cleared, you will no longer be able to easily access the standard terminal commands, which is quite frightening the first time it happens. Thankfully, web browsers still function when the terminal doesn’t.

I have also found out what my project for the summer will be. I will be looking at rotational seismology data collected from the Nevada National Security Site to see if the degree of wave scattering can be correlated to the location. I’m quite excited about the project.

Well, I suppose I should include some goals for the internship here. Directly related to the project: By the end of June, I hope to have a script written to extract the relevant portions of the traces from both the rotational and translational seismometers and import them into Matlab. By mid-July, I hope to have a script written in Matlab to integrate the absolute amplitude of the p coda in all traces. And, by the time I leave Albuquerque, I hope to be able to plot the degree of scattering on a map and see if any correlations can be drawn between the wave paths to the seismometers and location. I know that, in the process of doing this, my coding and data analysis skills will inevitably increase.

On a more general scale, I hope to develop my networking skills throughout the summer. I also need to begin searching for graduate schools. To accomplish this, I will try to each week read a couple recent research articles on geophysics topics which interest me. So I need to install Zotero.

June 14th, 2017

First week on the job. So far, I have developed a grudging respect for macOS and managed to install all the necessary software on my computer (Matlab, PASSOFT, SAC, Python) with a minimal number of instances where I nearly disabled my terminal.

A note to anyone who is interested: In .bash_profile, explicitly declare the PATH variable to include the standard reference directories. Else, if the variable gets cleared, you will no longer be able to easily access the standard terminal commands, which is quite frightening the first time it happens. Thankfully, web browsers still function when the terminal doesn’t.

I have also found out what my project for the summer will be. I will be looking at rotational seismology data collected from the Nevada National Security Site to see if the degree of wave scattering can be correlated to the location. I’m quite excited about the project.

Well, I suppose I should include some goals for the internship here. Directly related to the project: By the end of June, I hope to have a script written to extract the relevant portions of the traces from both the rotational and translational seismometers and import them into Matlab. By mid-July, I hope to have a script written in Matlab to integrate the absolute amplitude of the p coda in all traces. And, by the time I leave Albuquerque, I hope to be able to plot the degree of scattering on a map and see if any correlations can be drawn between the wave paths to the seismometers and location. I know that, in the process of doing this, my coding and data analysis skills will inevitably increase.

On a more general scale, I hope to develop my networking skills throughout the summer. I also need to begin searching for graduate schools. To accomplish this, I will try to each week read a couple recent research articles on geophysics topics which interest me. So I need to install Zotero.

June 14th, 2017

First week on the job. So far, I have developed a grudging respect for macOS and managed to install all the necessary software on my computer (Matlab, PASSOFT, SAC, Python) with a minimal number of instances where I nearly disabled my terminal.

A note to anyone who is interested: In .bash_profile, explicitly declare the PATH variable to include the standard reference directories. Else, if the variable gets cleared, you will no longer be able to easily access the standard terminal commands, which is quite frightening the first time it happens. Thankfully, web browsers still function when the terminal doesn’t.

I have also found out what my project for the summer will be. I will be looking at rotational seismology data collected from the Nevada National Security Site to see if the degree of wave scattering can be correlated to the location. I’m quite excited about the project.

Well, I suppose I should include some goals for the internship here. Directly related to the project: By the end of June, I hope to have a script written to extract the relevant portions of the traces from both the rotational and translational seismometers and import them into Matlab. By mid-July, I hope to have a script written in Matlab to integrate the absolute amplitude of the p coda in all traces. And, by the time I leave Albuquerque, I hope to be able to plot the degree of scattering on a map and see if any correlations can be drawn between the wave paths to the seismometers and location. I know that, in the process of doing this, my coding and data analysis skills will inevitably increase.

On a more general scale, I hope to develop my networking skills throughout the summer. I also need to begin searching for graduate schools. To accomplish this, I will try to each week read a couple recent research articles on geophysics topics which interest me. So I need to install Zotero.

May 31st, 2017

It feels like I've been here for a week, and it has really only been two and a half days. It really has been a whirlwind of information and activity. We've learned about Fourier transforms and seisometer instrumentation, focal mechanisms and earthquake magnitude scales. We have gone on hikes with geologists from the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and done field emplacements. It has been a lot of fun so far, and I've been forced to present my more social side to people. It is interesting to note how my personality has changed in the last five years. If I had been part of this program in high school, I would likely have had little personal interaction beyond the minimum, but now I have talked to nearly every intern here, had in depth conversations with many of the faculty about their research and learned a lot in the process. I know that the remainder of the summer will not be nearly as hectic as this week, but I hope that I can continue to make personal contacts at Sandia, rather than simply retreating into a hole as I have largely done at PNNL the last few summers.