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Inyo Field Notes Pt. 3: Jurassic Lightning

Writer's picture: Emma LodesEmma Lodes

In July of 2018, a year after the tire incident, I was done with my own field work, and had returned to the Inyo to be Hannah’s field assistant, who was doing her own work now along with her friend Bo. We were working in the Triassic rocks now (the other side of the P-T unconformity, the younger ones, post-fusulinid). I thought my most epic field days had passed.

Boy was I wrong.

We were working on the western side of the Inyo range, which was a blessing and a curse. We got to gaze over at the stately and magnificent Sierra Nevada all day, right across Owens Valley, but we were also at even lower elevations closer to the valley, so it was just as hot or even hotter. And then there was the rain in the Sierra.


In late July and into August, monsoon rains rock Southwest afternoons. In Flagstaff, moisture comes all the way from the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico, dumps over southern Arizona, and then really dumps on Flagstaff. Flagstaff sits at the edge of the Colorado Plateau, and the high topography causes the water-logged, northward-traveling clouds to release of water droplets in the form of heavy afternoon rain. In the Sierra Nevada, you get a similar phenomenon at higher elevations with moisture coming from the Gulf of California.

Like the summer before, we took chunks of time off to run around the Sierra, and on every hike we did, as soon as we got to the apex of the hike, we’d get POURED on. The heavens would notice we’d just sat down next to a lovely alpine lake and taken bites of our sandwiches, and they’d maliciously open up to release a downpour of torrential monsoon-style rain.



We figured it was par for the course in the Sierra, but then we’d get back to the Inyo expecting only backbreaking labor and debilitating heat.

It was one of the last couple days of field work, and we were trying to finish up one massive measured section in one day, in an area called Union Wash. A measured section is just a measurement of a section of stacked sedimentary rocks, and it also involved noting the rock type and speculating on the depositional environment of each layer. As you go “up section,” you are moving through rocks that are stacked higher and higher on top of each other that are getting younger and younger. If the rocks are flat-lying, like in the Grand Canyon, you would have to do fifth-class (vertical) climbing to get from one layer to the next. But most of the time, they’ve been tilted to some angle at which you can walk along them and still go “up section.”

At Union Wash, they were tilted just so that we had to climb quite a bit, and the going was rough. It was our hottest day yet, and within the first couple hours, we were severely dehydrated and had already had a run-in with a rattlesnake. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and not a single tree for shade, not even a juniper or a Joshua tree. In fact, at the moment being drenched by torrential rains in the Sierra did not sound so bad at all.

We had come to a point in the section where we had to climb a nearly vertical slope to measure the rocks. It was going to be brutal, but we just wanted to get it over with. Meanwhile, I had noticed that the skies were brewing and darkening like a foreboding scene in a film, and you could see the sheets of rain in the distance across Owen’s Valley falling on the Sierra. But I didn’t say anything, because clearly we were un-touchable on our side of the valley.

We climbed 1,000 vertical feet in 1,000 horizontal feet over slipping and sliding pencil-fractured shale scree and had a couple close moments, but finally made it to the top. The sky was really boiling now, a deep shade of charcoal-gray; one of us mentioned that if it did start to rain, we should head down.


Bo was holding the measuring instrument, which is a one-and-a-half meter-long wooden stick marked every 10 centimeters with a metal holder at the end used to secure a compass. It’s essentially a lightning rod. He measured a couple more meters along the ridgeline, and then we heard him gasp. I looked over at Hannah. Her hair was standing straight up on its end like she was a cartoon character out of Rick and Morty. Bo was laughing, but my heart dropped into my stomach just as I felt a single raindrop.

“Hannah…” I said. “Your hair is standing straight up…”

“Yours is too!”

I looked over at Bo’s lightning rod.

“We gotta go down.”

Somehow, we “sprinted” for our lives down 1000 vertical feet in 1000 horizontal feet in a tiny fraction of the amount of time it had taken us to get up and got down without any broken appendages. By the time we got to the bottom, it was sprinkling. It never rained hard, but we could have gotten struck by lightning. When your hair is standing up on its end like that, that means static electricity is coursing through your body. The charges of your body’s static attract the lightning, and it can travel horizontally over vast distances and zap you, even if it’s not raining overhead. Especially if you’re on to of a mountain, and especially if you’re holding a lightning rod.

Suffice to say, that was the end of our field work for the day.

But then we had to do it all again the next day. For science!

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