May 2022- I set out on a rockhounding quest with fellow Tulip City Gem & Mineral Club members to explored Kentucky's famous roadcuts and creek beds! We are so lucky to have family in Kentucky who supported us on this field trip adventure. It helps that Mom's cousin is a very famous geologist and Mom's uncle a retired physical science educator who live in KY. Thankfully, they both still love a great rockhounding quest and acted as our personal guides and living science encyclopedia for this experience. Thank you so much to the Sale's of northern Kentucky and Geologist Kim!
Adventure awaits as we pack up the Subaru and hit the roads...
Destination: Midway, Kentucky! I'm thinking about what neat things await us so I'm always excited as we take off.
Saying our goodbyes as we pack out. Mom says Verity wants to join the adventures, but I love my time alone. I want to say to my sister that sometimes it's your turn for adventure, and sometimes it's not.
This was somewhere in Indiana where it started to look like we were in Tornado Alley!
While driving I spotted what looked to be a tornado forming right before my eyes! We have never seen a tornado so we pulled over on a side road to watch what happened. At first I thought this was just a landspout. A landspout is a weather event sorta like a tornado that forms without the supercell storms that produce powerful twisters. Landspouts are weaker and do not last as long as a tornado so they are hard to track and we were lucky to see one. While in Hawaii we saw a landspout on the Big Island while driving the saddle road between Maunakea and Maunaloa. Pretty awesome right! As we watched this storm it did develop a dark rotating shelf cloud and I watched it hoping to see something develop more, but it roped out before it touched the ground! I was very excited and felt like a pro Stormchaser even if it was brief moments. Below are some cool photos of the storm
Here you can see my photos of the landspout encounters I've had this spring! Hawaii was looking like a dust devil until it grew and Kentucky trip landspout was mostly up in the clouds and not on the ground. I'm very very interested in this
We crossed some cool bridges and we were officially in Kentucky at last! It was funny to see the rocks on the side of the road start so suddenly as we got to this point. It was flat lands our entire trip south up to this point just like what I believe Torando Alley would look like and then it suddenly looks different and we had rock wall cliffs alongside us. Curious to notice.
We called these rock cliffs on the side of our car Roadcuts and Mom said that was what we would be looking at when we fossil hunt this week. We needed to find a safe road off major highway first because traffic can get to bad levels and they speed next to these big roadcuts.
We made it finally! Midway, Kentucky. We stayed with family overnight. I got to see Kim, Todd, Aaron and Mallory who are all my relatives. Kim is a real geologist and she knows so much about oil and gas and drilling wells. Just in case you need to ever know
Holy cow! I hit the rock collection jackpot this day! I'm adopting such amazing specimens for my collection.
more to come later....