CAS CONNECT 2014

25 T he field camp has been renamed the Les Huston Geology Field Camp, and it cele- brated its 65th year this past summer. Despite the changes, geology students are still receiv- ing the same hands-on field experience students like Pickens received in the camp’s early days. Jim Puckette, associate professor of geol- ogy at OSU and current field camp director, attended the camp in 1975 as an OSU geol- ogy student. He returned to OSU in the ’90s as a professor and was asked to assist with field camp. “The next year I went out and taught half- time,” Puckette says. “And then within a year or so, I was teaching full time and I was made director, and I just love the camp.” HISTORY The first Oklahoma geology camps were held in the Arbuckles of southern Oklahoma. When Oklahoma A&M and the University of Oklahoma began looking to Colorado for a new field camp site, a Cañon City rancher named Les Huston suggested some of his land would be well suited for their needs. In 1949, the schools began leasing land from Huston. Originally, the campers and faculty stayed in tents. Over time, the camp would add a kitchen and cabins, and by the ’60s, all the tents were gone. In the mid ‘80s, OU would forfeit its half of the lease to OSU. In 1990, the land was donated to OSU to maintain the field camp, which was then renamed after Huston. When Puckette took over as field camp direc- tor in 1998, the cabins were still “rustic.” He and his staff began renovating the camp. They upgraded the cabins and bathrooms, doing most of the labor themselves. After a flash flood in 2006 washed away most of those cabins, the camp built its pres- ent-day facilities with help from a success- ful fundraising campaign. The camp now sees record high usage with students coming from OSU and other universities. CAPSTONE The field camp is the capstone course for OSU geology undergraduates. The camp helps students apply what they learn in their core curriculum to a real-world setting. Puckette listed the four core areas of the OSU geol- ogy program as mineralogy, petrology (the study of rocks), structural geology, and sedi- mentology and stratigraphy (the study of rock stratification). C.J. Appleseth, a first-year graduate student with the OSU geology program, attended field camp this past summer. He was excited to get out of the classroom and onto the rocks, describing the camp’s mapping exercises as the “meat and potatoes” of geologic fieldwork because they combine knowledge from all the program’s core areas. “If I could sum up mapping … you’re basi- cally walking around and recording what you’re walking on, and then later trying to draw a map based on those measurements you took,” Appleseth says. “It’s a whole different animal being able to climb around these rocks versus just reading about them.” Sedimentary rock and geophysics receive the most emphasis at field camp because many of OSU’s geologists will end up going into the environmental or petroleum indus- tries, but students also get to expand their repertoire through exercises on other types of rock in the area. CONTINUES Students at the Les Huston Geology Field Camp outside Cañon Ci ty, Colo. , show off thei r OSU pr ide.