rissy stories

Tuesday, 5/3/16 (my birthday), Day 2 – Missouri 🙂

Hello again! Today I’m going to be covering Day 2 of my trip to Utah. We didn’t get a lot of driving done this day (considering that we stayed in Missouri the whole day), but we visited a lot of really neat places, learned more about geological history in Missouri, and found/collected a lot of rocks.

So, we woke up around 6:30 AM at the campsite in Missouri State Park. It was a pretty cloudy, cold morning and getting out of my warm sleeping bag was a bit rough. However, as soon as Casey and I got up, we grabbed some of our stuff and walked over to the showers. Afterwards, we walked back to camp and ate some breakfast – cereal and oatmeal (what we ate every single morning during the trip).

Once we took down the tents and packed up, we headed back out on the road around 8:00 AM, and the first place that we stopped was the Missouri Mines State Historical Site.

This site is an old mining factory, which has now been turned into a museum. Later on in the day we eventually walked around the place and went on a tour inside, but we stopped for a quick visit at this point in the morning. Our original intention of stopping at the entrance was to get out and take a group photo, but the majority of us were much more interested in the rocks that we found near the sign for the museum: GEODES!

This was very exciting for a lot of us because the geodes that we’ve seen and collected were ones that we’ve bought, not found. This was our first natural occurrence, but I unfortunately don’t know why they were concentrated in this area specifically. We didn’t focus too much on this spot for very long because technically, we weren’t supposed to even loiter there for too long. We also weren’t allowed to take big chunks or too many little chunks of rock because it was a state park. So we just grabbed a few and headed back into the van & truck with the intention of coming back to actually see the museum later.

Then we drove to another park called “Elephant Rocks,” and we arrived around lunchtime (11ish-12ish). That’s when the sun finally came out and it began to warm up for us. We immediately hopped out of the vehicles as soon as we parked and began climbing the large, round rocks. (Technically we weren’t supposed to do that – we were supposed to group together before splitting apart, which Rocky mentioned later on that day). Therefore, that’s when we initially lost Rocky because she didn’t climb up with us, but everyone was excited to climb.

The term for this is actually called “bouldering,” for those who didn’t know. I actually didn’t know before this trip either, but I’ve always gone bouldering, especially as a kid. So naturally, “Elephant Rocks” reminded me of whenever I visited some of my family in Maryland. Whenever we were in town we would visit a place called “Devil’s Den,” where a Civil War battle was fought. There are signs and pictures in particular places that show exactly where a soldier had died.

But this place is also home to enormous rocks that my family loved to climb:

However, “Elephant Rocks” may not be home to a battle like this, but it did have rich geological history and a beautiful view:

Once we all arrived at this one spot by a pond/lake area, we stopped bouldering for a bit to admire the view. Casey and I sat near the edge and took pictures of the area. Some of the guys walked around the water to the other side and skipped rocks on the lake. We found Jesse sitting on top of a large, very round rock for a bit. Then after we were done we started to make our way back to the vehicles.

When we arrived, Rocky was nowhere to be found. We then decided to actually hike for a bit, which was what we originally planned to do when we first arrived before we got side-tracked by the bouldering. We hoped that we would find her somewhere on the hike, but unfortunately, we didn’t. However, I did end up collecting some pink granite while on this hike, and after it ended, we finally found Rocky in the parking lot. It was just around lunchtime, and I was on duty that day, so I helped set up lunch: basically all different kinds of sandwiches, yogurt, and fruit.

Once we ate lunch, we had our first lecture on a picnic bench near one of the rocks. Brent reading some information off of the research he did on “Elephant Rocks,” and here was what I wrote down:

-The tallest rock in this park is 27 feet tall, and there’s a lot of red and pink granite in this area. Granite is an igneous rock, which started from magma. The composition makes it a pinkish color (feldspar), and the crystals are visible. Granite has a phaneritic texture, which means that the magma squeezed into the crust and cooled very slowly, which allowed larger crystals to form.

-This park resides in the St. Francois Mountains (The Ozark Plateau), and the youngest granite in this area is around 1.3 billion years old (Proterozoic – Precambrian aged rocks, in geologic terms). The granite here was used for paving roads, in memorials & monument stones, and some of it was even used in Marietta.

–I’m still a little bit shaky in regards to the actual forming of these rocks, but this is the best that I have: “Spheroidal weathering” formed these rounded rocks, which is basically erosion working on 3 dimensions (all sides of the rock), causing the sharp edges to smooth out. The rocks fracture due to pressure (freezing and then thawing), and then water seeps into the cracks – causing the weather. Erosion then moves the rest of the weathered material away. This entire process takes one rock and multiplies it, which is how the bigger rocks form.

After the lecture ended, we hopped back into the van&truck and headed back to a little town that we had passed when we were on our way to Elephant Rocks. We were initially on a quest for ice cream, but then we entered a store with candy and antiques, and we stayed there for a pretty long time. It was a very interesting store with all sorts of neat things. Unfortunately we never found ice cream 😦

After everyone was finally finished looking around this store, we made our way back to the museum. We arrived around 1-2ish and stayed until around 4-4:30ish. We perused outside for a while, and then we were given a tour of Missouri’s geological history (which I unfortunately didn’t take notes on). We were also informed about the mining business in this area. Missouri is very popular for lead. After the tour, we were allowed to walk around and view some of the minerals that were on display (as well as buy some that were on sale), and there was also a video on the process of mining (like what happens in a smelter when separating the galena and lead, etc.).

As I said before, we left the museum around 4-4:30ish. However, before we really got back on the road, we stopped at visitor center/park area to cook dinner. We made chicken, sausage, and rice that night. We still tried to look for ice cream, but most of the stores were closed that day for some reason. After another failed attempt, we hopped back in the vehicles and hit the road again.

Obviously we didn’t get much driving done that day, so we were on the road for the majority of that night. The itinerary stated that we were supposed to be in Kansas, but we decided to drive to Rocky’s mom’s house (in Missouri) instead and then leave early the next morning to make up for the lost time. We took pictures of the pretty sunset while on the road:

And once the sun went down, almost everyone fell asleep. Then Coleman and Mitch woke us up around 11:00 PM once we arrived at the house. Everyone was practically sleepwalking as we grabbed our stuff and headed into the small house. I think we were all happy to be sleeping in a bed after sleeping on the ground the previous night, but we probably shouldn’t have gotten used to it since we only slept in beds 3 nights all together out of the 2 weeks we were on this trip.

The boys were ushered into a couple of rooms with bunk beds while Casey and I were ushered into a room with hundreds of collected Barbie dolls in boxes covering every inch of the walls. It was a very cute and girly room, and neither of us was initially freaked out by it. Casey was too tired to even notice, and she just passed out on the bed about a minute after we put our stuff down. I didn’t care very much at the time either, but I remember feeling a bit uneasy when I woke up the next morning and found a bunch of dolls staring at me.

I didn’t want to take any pictures of the inside of Rocky’s mom’s house, but the stacked dolls covering a good portion of the room looked something like this:

We actually didn’t mention this room at all until a couple of days after the fact because it really wasn’t that big of a deal, but we both did find it to be a tad strange.

Anyways, this was how I spent my birthday this year! It was a fun-filled day and we didn’t drive very much, so I was happy with how it went overall. Casey ended up buying me some cupcakes and we ate those at a later date. I actually wasn’t able to get my first sip of alcohol until towards the end of the trip because we weren’t allowed to bring alcohol in the truck or the van (school policy), but that was unimportant to me. Everyone on the trip wished me a happy birthday at least a thousand times and all of my friends & family contacted me, so I was happy.

That’s all I have for you today, and I will hopefully be posting Day 3 of the trip sometime in the next few days or next week. I start my new job at the end of this week, so I’ll see how much time I actually have.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and I’ll catch you later!