The Promise and Pitfalls of Float (Loose Rock)

The Promise and Pitfalls of Float (Loose Rock) Too often when youre out in the field, youll be looking at a hillside and there are no outcrops of bedrock to tell you whats under it. An alternative is relying on float- isolated stones in the soil that you must assume came from the bedrock near by. Float is not reliable, but with care it can provide good information. Why Float Is Unreliable An isolated stone is hard to rely on because once its broken off, many different things can move it away from its original setting. Gravity pulls rocks downhill, turning bedrock into colluvium. Landslides carry them even farther. Thens theres bioturbation: Falling trees can pull up rocks with their roots, and gophers and other digging animals (fossorial animals is the official term) can push them around. On a much larger scale, glaciers are notorious for carrying rocks far from their origin and dropping them in big piles called moraines. In places like the northern United States and much of Canada, you cant trust any loose rock to be local. When you add water, there are new complications. Streams transport rocks entirely away from their places of origin. Icebergs and ice floes can carry stones across open water to places theyd never reach on their own. Fortunately, rivers and glaciers usually leave distinctive signs- rounding and striations, respectively- on rocks, and they wont fool an experienced geologist. Possibilities of Float Float is no good for a lot of geology, because the original position of the rock is lost. That means that its bedding features and orientation cant be measured, or any other information that comes from the rocks context. But if conditions are reasonable, float can be a strong clue to the bedrock below it, even if you must still map the boundaries of that rock unit with dashed lines. If youre careful with float, its better than nothing. Heres a spectacular example. A 2008 paper in Science tied two ancient continents together with the help of a small boulder found sitting on a glacial moraine in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. The boulder, just 24 centimeters long, consisted of rapakivi granite, a very distinctive rock containing big balls of alkali feldspar with shells of plagioclase feldspar. A long series of rapakivi granites is scattered across North America in a wide belt of Proterozoic crust running from the Canadian Maritimes at one end to an abrupt cutoff in the Southwest. Where that belt continues is an important question because if you find the same rocks on another continent, it ties that continent to North America at a specific place and time when both were united in a supercontinent named Rodinia. Finding a chunk of rapakivi granite in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, even just as float, is a key piece of evidence that the ancient supercontinent of Rodinia held Antarctica next to North America. The actual bedrock that it came from is underneath the Antarctic ice cap, but we know the behavior of the ice- and can confidently discount the other transport mechanisms listed above- well enough to cite it in a paper and make it the highlight of a press release.

Hoedads Tool and the Cooperative

Hoedads Tool and the Cooperative Hoedads are wooden-handled, mattock-like hand tools used to plant bare-root trees by the thousands quickly and mainly used by experienced crews. They are designed for steep slopes, versus the dibble, a straight-bladed, metal-handled tool with a foot platform used to plant trees on flat ground. When comparing the use of the dibble and the hoedad, a USFS study in the Western Gulf Region of the United State (2004) shows that neither method is superior to the other. The study concluded that tree planting survival, first- and second-year height, groundline diameter, first-year root weight, and first and second-year growth was found to be the same. The hoedad does speed up planting when used by an experienced user with a strong back. The Hoedad Revolution This hoedad tree planting tool inspired a name given to tree planting cooperatives of environmentalist tree planters who planted millions of tree seedlings from 1968 to 1994. During this period, new-generation tree planters used the hoedad exclusively on hundreds of thousands of regenerated forest acres. The timber industry and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) provided both land and incentive monies during this period to encourage reforestation of cutover lands. It opened up opportunities for private contractors to enter the tree planting business. There was money to be made for someone who enjoyed the outdoors, was in good physical health and could plant 500 to 1000 trees per day on steep ground. Both the hoedad tool and tool users called hoedads  were of some influence on the forest practices of the USFS and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). These spirited men and women managed  to change the stereotypical male forest worker image.  They questioned the practice of single-species reforestation and detested the wide use of herbicides and pesticides. They did extensive lobbying at national and state levels for increased funds for reforestation and promotion of sustainable forestry practices. Enter the Cooperative In addition to tree planting, these Hoedad cooperatives did precommercial thinning, firefighting, trail building, technical forestry, forest construction, resource inventory, and other forest-related labor. They grew in numbers  working in every state west of the Rockies and  Alaska  and living in the most remote areas in the mountains of the West. They later traveled through the Eastern US to planting job sites where programs like the Forest Incentives Program (FIP) were paying private forest owners to reforest and manage according to multiple-use principles. The most notable cooperative was  based in Eugene, Oregon.  Hoedads Reforestation Cooperative (HRC) was the largest of the co-ops, was established by a Peace Corp volunteer and thrived as a tree planting cooperative for over 30 years. These Independent tree planter contractors were able to make millions of dollars (and plant millions of trees) through these planter-owned cooperatives. HRC disbanded in 1994, largely because of a dramatic decline on federal lands in reforestation and other timber harvest associated forestry work. According to Roscoe Caron, a former tree planter and Hoedad president, HRC was also instrumental in breaking the males-only ethic of forest work, questioning the wisdom of monoculture reforestation and challenging the liberal use of herbicides. In celebration of the 30-year Hoedad reunion (in 2001), the Eugene Weekly and Lois Wadsworth compiled some of the most detailed information on Hoedads to date for the article Tree Planters: The Mighty Hoedads, Back for a 30-year Reunion, Recall Their Grand Experiment.