Bancroft Canada

For my mineralogy class I got to go on a field trip to Bancroft Canada. Wooohooo!. We went to many places around the bancroft area and collected many different minerals. My favorite that I collected was called Betafite. Yes, it emites beta radiation and I found the biggest chunk of it. It makes the gieger counter go crazy. But we also went to old inactive mines like a mine called fission mine, and McDonald mine. Saw some bats in the fission mine but the McDonald mine was much cooler I thought. There was a mine shaft in the McDonald mine that the teachers told us to not stay too long in the shaft because there was some crazy radioactive mineral in the shaft. If we stayed in the shaft too long it would be like getting a short burst of X-ray. Cooooool beans. All in all it was a awesome trip where we found some sweet crystaline minerals and went on some cool hikes to get to the places where we find the minerals. The crazy thing about this area was that we drove for miles and miles on random dirt roads and pass tons of lakes/swamps but no matter how secluded the dirt road, there would always be a random house at one point during the trip down the road. This area of canada was pretty awesome. The only problem for me was I did more exploring then collecting. whoops.

Hutch's Pool

So me and brooke went for another little hike. We took the tram all the way to the top of sabino canyon to start our hike. We wanted to hike to Hutch's Pool. It was a trail that hiked out of sabino canyon and into the national forest. The hike wasn't very exciting. It was hot, but not to hot. The problem was that there really wasn't to many cool things to look at.....except for brooke freaking out when a snake went across the trail and went a grass hopper jumped in her boot. I tried out some new photography. Its called HDR. What HDR (high dynamic range) is when you take mutliply pictures of the same thing but each picture has either a different shutter speed or a different apeture. Then by using the wonder of photoshop you blend all the pictures together. So what you get is a pictures that has a high dymanic range. THis all works because everytime you take a picture you really are only setting your camera up to pick up a dynamic range (the highlights, or lowlights) So by taking pictures of all the highlights or lowlights and then mixing them together you get a really strange looking picture. Now i'm not sure is blogspot has the correct format to show the pics, but i'll try, i'm just getting started so these pics don't look to wierd, but google hdr photos and you will find some cool ones.........alright but back to the trail, the only problem was the trail was like a 5 hour hike, so me and brooke hiked to what we thought was the pool, took some pics and then left, but really it wasn't the pool and we saw some cool pics online.

Turkey Camp on Mt. Lemon

Brooke and I made a little fun trip up to mt lemon to do a little camping. The camp ground was pretty cool because on either side of the road the mountain would drop off into a valley and at the bottom of each valley was, of course, a little stream. The first day we climbed down a good ways to a the small stream to the left of camp and found a small water fall and so we relaxed and read books. The next day we hiked to the right of camp and found another small water fall and a perfect view of tucson. We again relaxed and read books. Here are some of the pics from the trip i got some cool pics of the stars, i'm getting better at taking pictures of them, hope you enjoy.......

The Family Pictures to End all family Pictures