Andy’s Los Alamos Blog

At last, someone has asked a question! Chs asks about the geology of rock climbing: do I ever think back to my Earth Science classes? How does rock formation factor into climbing?

Indeed I do think about geology. I actually took, in addition to my high school classes, and introductory earth and environmental science class my freshman year of college. (If you have a free elective, it’s a cool thing to take; you’ll learn to notice a lot of cool things). Around here, it’s sometimes hard to believe that the walls we climb are naturally formed. Though it’s not easy, there do seem to be nicely hand-sized handholds most of the way up them. At first I thought sure people had come along with pickaxes and made them, but it turns out that they’re a result of this area’s unique geology. So, this whole place used to be a giant volcano, as tall as 16,000 feet. When it erupted, creating the Valles Caldera I have pictures of on Flickr!, it created the Los Alamos area’s unique mesa structure (the area is situated on five finger-like mesas, with canyons between) and deposited up to 600 meters of volcanic tuff. The tuff is pinkish and tan, and relatively soft, so canyons formed easily. In many places, the vertical canyon walls have become pitted, forming those neat handholds. The rock has also fractured over the years, creating cracks of various widths that are fun to climb as well as interesting notches, ledges, and overhangs.
The rock at the Chicago Basin was quite different. It was primarily granite (mostly quartz, feldspar, and biotite), but like no other I’ve seen. The crystals were pretty large, about a centimeter wide, and it (the quartz, mostly) was really, really sharp. It was great for traction, as we were climbing in hiking boots, but not so good on the hands. Ah well, in that situation, it’s worth it for the extra grip.

Chicago Basin (CO)
White Rock, NM
El Rito, NM

So, in sum, rock type is a huge consideration in climbing. Operationally, I guess it doesn’t make much of a difference to a climber, but I can’t help but wonder how such formations come about. It’s certainly interesting academically to understand what makes a particular wall great from a quantitative, scientific perspective.

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Today’s lecture was quite interesting; among my favorites so far. The talk was about using sports as a relatively simple of jumping-off point to applying the tools of statistical physics, formerly confined to tracking particles and such, to modeling more complex competitive systems like evolution, business, and social dynamics. He presented a surprisingly simple mathematical model that can replicate the probabilities of league and tournament competition from a purely theoretical basis. He also proposed a quantitative metric for competitiveness, and deduced that soccer is the most competitive sport. Football is the least. Thought provoking, anyway.

Today at the lab, I spent some time preparing and running some new simulations in RAT. My first attempt proved a little computationally intensive, clocking in at about two and a half months of CPU time. Considering that I’m only here until mid-August, that wasn’t going to work. I managed to get it down to about six hours, hopefully without losing the integrity of the simulation data. So far, so good…
I also finally started building my angular PMT testing setup on our optics workbench, after doing some minor optics upgrades, and as soon as my last part is ready from the machine shop I’ll be able to start my experiments. I’m pretty excited, but I’m afraid it’ll come across as pretty dry here… I’ll do my best.

Thanks for reading. Ask more questions!

EDIT: I finally put descriptions on my Chicago Basin pictures on Flickr!, and added a bunch of new ones.