Drew's Blog

 Last Tuesday I drove with one of my supervisors to a town in Utah called Hanksville to pick up a BLM Jeep that had been left there. The town itself was little more than a tiny collection of buildings in the middle of no where. But they had a few interesting sights that I wanted to share. The first was a yard of scrap metal that some local artists had made into a number of sculptures. Another was a gas station with a general store that had been built, literally, into the side of a mountain. And a third was a replica of a mill from a gold mine that was supposedly cursed by a Native American Medicine Man back in the 1800s.

 So last Tuesday my advisor had me work on a little project where I drove to three different public areas that our under the management of the Bureau of Land Management to take pictures of said areas, as well as any notes that a felt were significant, basically all to monitor said areas to make sure that the public hadn't caused to much damage. These areas were pretty isolated, to the point where I'm pretty sure I was the only person for several miles. But they were also very pretty, and I wanted to share some of the pictures I took here with you guys. These first three are from an area called the Little Grand Canyon. Now I've never been to the actual Grand Canyon myself, but I can defiantly see why the place I visited was named after it. This picture is from a camping area that is basically a long stretch of road squeezed between two walls of rock, with the occasional area for visitors to set up their camping supplies. These last three are from a picnic area called Fossil

An animated dark fantasy series with anthropomorphic dinosaurs as the characters! Grab a syringe and just stick it in my veins I'm ready for it!! In all seriousness this really does look like what you would get if somebody animated one of those little stories I would make up by myself while playing with my toys as a kid. I just love it when I find fun stuff like this on the internet.  

 Have you ever stumbled on a group of people just having fun while doing what they clearly love and think to your self: "Yeah, these guys have life figured out pretty well." P.S. This was my first real introduction to the band Black Sabbath and their song 'War Pigs'. I can defiantly see why this group lasted as long as it did.  

  Here are some pictures I've had on my phone for a little while now but never got around to posting them on the blog.   I took all of these pictures while one of my supervisors was giving me a tour of a camp site near the Jurassic National Monument where I work. The first picture is of a fossilized dinosaur foot print. The animal seems to have stepped in a puddle of mud during the Jurassic period that soon harden and then was buried, only to be exposed again in modern times by weather and erosion. Don't as what made the foot print exactly, no one can agree on a single answer.     The rest of these pictures are of paintings and carvings in the canyon walls that line both sides of the camp site. No one knows exactly who made this images, or what they mean, for they predate all of the Native American tribes who used to live in this area. Archeologists have even gone so far as to show these images to members of various tribes to see if they could interpret them, and they either s

 So a couple of weeks ago while I was working at the Museum in town they taught us how they make models with plaster and molds. It's actually a surprisingly easy process. You just take a rubber mold that houses the plaster and a couple of hardened plaster mold casings that give the model its shape. You then use some tape to tie the whole thing together then wait about 30 minutes for the model to dry. Then you can just peel the rubber casing off and you're done. There is a pretty interesting chemical reaction that occurs while the plaster is drying. While it's still semi-wet the plaster gives off heat as if it was just recently pulled out of an oven. Then during the first hour after that its finished drying it feels cold to the touch, like you just pulled it out of a refrigerator. Makes it easier to tell when the drying process is complete I guess. The model I made is of a T-rex tooth, and its so detailed that if you look at it closely you can see serrations running along th