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Stories in Stone - with David Williams · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_02: You're always just coming up with random one-offs there, Chris.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: What are you talking about?
0:06
SPEAKER_01: Why?
0:07
SPEAKER_01: You're just uh you're just a spitfire on the point, actually.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: I am.
0:11
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm I'm a little ornery today.
0:13
SPEAKER_02: You are, but uh, I think your mood just got lifted because we just had an interview discussion with David Williams.
0:18
SPEAKER_02: Uh and that fun, fun, easygoing, really, really interesting geology talk.
0:26
SPEAKER_02: You know, that's the kind it feels like that's the conversations where it just feels like you're just kind of sitting around talking about something you're passionate about, um, with some cool, like mind-opening factoids sprinkled in.
0:38
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
0:38
SPEAKER_01: I guess.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: Well, here's here's what I loved about it.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: We're talking about the uh we interviewed David B.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: Williams, the author of Stories in Stone.
0:45
SPEAKER_02: What I loved about it about geology, uh walking tours of Seattle.
0:50
SPEAKER_02: I mean, his his publication list is is huge uh and really impressive and covers a wide range of stuff.
0:55
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but but stories in stone is one of them.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
0:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I I just loved the walk down memory lane for me as I read the book, which I I found the book like very easy to read.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: It was enjoyable, it was written very well.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it took I just found myself thinking about my own experiences in different cities, big, small, everything in between.
1:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, I can't help it.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: When I, you know, when I'm in a city, when I'm up in Marquette in the upper peninsula in Michigan, I'm looking at the Jacobsville sandstone, and I'm you know, I just all the buildings commonly.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then I look, I you know, I see some of that in downtown Grand Rapids too, and I'm like, oh, that's cool.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: That I know exactly where this came from.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: And so I just, yeah, I loved that aspect of it.
1:38
SPEAKER_02: I agree with that, Chris.
1:39
SPEAKER_02: And it's like uh it was really, really well-written book with kind of the type of book where you're learning something but you don't recognize it yet.
1:46
SPEAKER_02: Like it's kind of learning sprinkled in.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: It's just easy learning where you don't recognize, and then you know wake up the next morning, you're like, Oh, yeah, oh, brownstone, this really cool fact about brownstone and the history of you know New York City buildings.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: And it's like, oh, okay, I didn't even realize I was learning.
1:59
SPEAKER_02: It was not forced upon me.
2:01
SPEAKER_02: I just kind of assimilated the information because it's really well written and covers a wide range of stuff.
2:06
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's a great book.
2:08
SPEAKER_02: He's a really interesting guy, really interesting geological story.
2:11
SPEAKER_02: Has his undergrad from Colorado College, which has produced, as we talked about, lots of geologists for a small liberal arts college, and has a pretty wide-ranging experience set from being a park ranger in arches to now author leading these walks and talks and guided walks, and has a newsletter for geology.
2:30
SPEAKER_02: So you can find all of that at geologywriter.com, which is David Williams' website there.
2:34
SPEAKER_02: Um, but we love this conversation.
2:36
SPEAKER_02: Stories in Stone.
2:37
SPEAKER_02: It's a great book.
2:38
SPEAKER_02: You can purchase it on his website.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: Um, I don't know, Chris.
2:41
SPEAKER_02: I have a new appreciation.
2:42
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna go look at the bank building that I drive past every day, and I'm gonna see is it made of granite?
2:47
SPEAKER_02: Is some some stone that signifies you know security and protection and longevity?
2:52
SPEAKER_02: Um or what's going on here?
2:54
SPEAKER_02: And look at some of this, the the stones at Penn State and uh see what they're made of.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: Well, before hey Jesse, before we get to the interview, I do want to just say I had a thought, and uh my thought is that we always we always ask the question at the end of the interview, what was your best day as a geoscientist?
3:12
SPEAKER_01: And I had the thought today that you and I have never had we've never asked each other that question.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: And so just that's coming up some not in this episode, but I want to in the future.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: You and I know okay, all right, yeah, we're not gonna, we're not gonna be stressful.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: We need to think about this, but yeah, we're gonna we're gonna bring that as a part of an episode.
3:33
SPEAKER_02: Chris, you know, I'd like to think my best day as a geoscientist is still ahead of me.
3:36
SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
3:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think so, but that's not the question.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: What has been your best day as a geoscientist?
3:43
SPEAKER_01: That's the question.
3:44
SPEAKER_02: All right, all right.
3:45
SPEAKER_02: All right, hey, David Williams coming at you.
3:53
SPEAKER_02: All right, uh, David Williams, uh, future Pulitzer Prize winning.
3:57
SPEAKER_02: David Williams.
3:58
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
3:59
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo.
4:01
SPEAKER_02: Uh, we're excited to talk to you, and it's a great pleasure uh reading your book.
4:04
SPEAKER_02: I really loved it.
4:05
SPEAKER_02: Stones uh Stories in Stones, sorry.
4:07
SPEAKER_02: Uh uh one of your many books.
4:09
SPEAKER_02: I really enjoyed this book, so I'm happy to center our conversation.
4:11
SPEAKER_02: Welcome, excited to talk to you.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: Great, thank you for having me, Jesse and Chris.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, for me, it's the book was such a delight to write and to travel to, so to be able to talk more about it.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: And Building Stone, to me, it's just such a great way to allow a wide variety of people to connect into the geological world.
4:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that's really cool.
4:33
SPEAKER_02: It is one way, yeah, you can open your mind, even if you're not out outside.
4:37
SPEAKER_02: Outside, we talk about oh, geology gives you this like really complicated three-dimensional long time horizon view of the world, but you can still do that in cities.
4:45
SPEAKER_02: I really appreciate it about that.
4:46
SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Chris.
4:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, David.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, I do have a question though.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh, why why don't you have the vest?
4:52
SPEAKER_01: Like, I I saw that you have a vest for every book.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: And I'm so I because my brain is I I mean, give me a second, I can run into the other room and get the vest with the dinosaurs and wearing boxers.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: So you have now, is am I right?
5:08
SPEAKER_01: You have a different vest for each book then?
5:11
SPEAKER_01: For the last four books, yeah.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: So I've got I I've co-authored a book about Washington State fossils.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: So that's got fossils, uh it's got what trilobites on the front and mastodons on the back.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: I've got a couple different ones about Seattle.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: One's a map of Seattle.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: I have a book about Puget Sound that has rocked fish in the book, the I have four key directly to books, and then I have another three or four that just fit my weirdness.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: So do you have a vest that has a Brunton compass on it?
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Do you have that?
5:44
SPEAKER_00: No, I haven't sure.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: I know the material's out there, but yeah.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: I did put it.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: So sadly, no.
5:53
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
5:54
SPEAKER_02: All right, fair enough.
5:55
SPEAKER_02: Well, let's go back to the origin story.
5:57
SPEAKER_02: Uh, we always ask this because Chris has a very distinct aha moment, and and Chris was the aha moment for me.
6:03
SPEAKER_02: Why I got into geoscience was Chris Boyce.
6:05
SPEAKER_02: What what was your origin story for geoscience?
6:08
SPEAKER_02: How'd you get into the field and kind of what was your trajectory like?
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Interestingly enough, I did not initially go to college with geology in mind.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: I went to a little liberal arts college, and I that school had a program where you could focus a little bit on engineering and then continue on.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: So I actually went to school to study how to design bicycles, like alternative bot the bikes that are out there now with carrying this and toting that.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: I thought that's what I wanted to do.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Then I took a physics class and I got a 16% bar equip.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Well, that can be okay in a physics class.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, fortunately, it wasn't.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: I to this day, I have no idea how I passed the class, but I had taken a geology class.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: I had been on a bike trip, uh, my first break in college, and someone said, Oh, you should take intro to geo.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: And I took it and loved it, and then realized that I was really good at majoring in field trips.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: So some people call that geology.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: That's that's oh, that's that's one of the upsides.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: It's a huge upside.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
7:12
SPEAKER_02: So that's can I interrupt real quick there, David?
7:16
SPEAKER_02: So you went to Colorado College, right?
7:17
SPEAKER_02: Is that correct?
7:18
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
7:19
SPEAKER_02: Colorado College has, as you well know, has a outsized impact on the field of geosciences.
7:24
SPEAKER_02: Like there, you there are so many professional geologists who are trained at who got into it at Colorado College.
7:30
SPEAKER_02: Do you have insight as to why that is?
7:32
SPEAKER_00: You know, like your experience is my one thought would be, you know, the school has this unusual education style.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: You take one class at a time for three and a half weeks, and that's the only class.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: So, like in say the the the basic the 200-level class, crystallography and mineralogy that you know you sort of you either pass or don't.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: The professor said the first day of class, he said, I expect 40 hours a week out of you for this class.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: And that's what I did.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we all did that at least, but then you know, we always were every class had at least a week of field time.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: So I was always out in the field.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: So I think that field time really a bonded us with geology, but also bonded us with other people in the department sort of cohort building.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you just built a relationship around rocks.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: And we and when I was there, there was just a dynamic group of professors.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, how could you not get excited when you're you're in Colorado, phenomenal rock?
8:32
SPEAKER_00: That if you don't like Colorado, you go to Arizona, you go to Utah, you go to New Mexico.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: So you it just sort of it's the whole environment.
8:39
SPEAKER_02: Is there something to that?
8:40
SPEAKER_02: I I've I've always thought that there's something special to that.
8:43
SPEAKER_02: Uh you said three and a half weeks, yeah.
8:45
SPEAKER_02: It's called a block or five.
8:46
SPEAKER_02: So it's the block.
8:47
SPEAKER_02: That block system for geoscience specifically, you can really get it.
8:51
SPEAKER_02: Uh maybe there's something particularly attractive to the the field of geosciences in that block schedule.
8:57
SPEAKER_02: Because you get, like you said, you get to do a field trip every like it's by default basically.
9:01
SPEAKER_02: Uh it's amazing how many professional geologists have come out of Colorado College given its student population size.
9:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and for a liberal arts, a little liberal arts school.
9:09
SPEAKER_02: So totally, totally.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: But you're right, yeah.
9:11
SPEAKER_02: Colorado, it's Colorado Springs, right?
9:12
SPEAKER_02: Is that where it's at?
9:13
SPEAKER_02: I think yeah.
9:14
SPEAKER_02: I mean, stunning geology right out the back door.
9:16
SPEAKER_02: So that's awesome.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, David, do you do you stay in touch with the department there at Colorado College?
9:23
SPEAKER_01: In other words, do you know what's going on there now?
9:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm often on in contact with um I'm a couple of the people who are in the department, uh, majors in my years.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm still somewhat in touch with none of them, well, beyond the professor, but none of my friends who majored stayed in geology.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, I even have one friend, she went on and got her PhD um in paleontology and ended up not.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, she did it for a while, and then she now works to the United Nations.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: So wow, wow, okay.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: Super interesting.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: I asked the question because I wonder if it's the same.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: The the the level of rigor to today, do you think?
10:02
SPEAKER_01: Would you have a thought on that?
10:04
SPEAKER_00: No clue.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's uh you know, it's such a different thing.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: You know I I I would assume, but like, you know, we had to memorize the formula of you know 150 minerals and ID something in that neighborhood.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, maybe they still do that, but I just think it would, it's, you know, people are so much obviously when we were at when I was out, and this was 40 years ago when I graduated from or almost 40 years a graduated from college.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: If I wanted to look up the formula of the mineral, I you know basically had to have you know hurl button clean with me and look it up.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: And nowadays, so I I don't know.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean it's a good question, but I really don't know if that how that would be.
10:40
SPEAKER_02: So was that were you hooked from the outset from that first intro-level class field trip, or was there something later on that really got you into you know rocks specifically as opposed to other parts of the geosciences in your course curriculum?
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Or you know, we our course what the curriculum there is pretty broad, and I mean I loved paleo.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: I I found what I think maybe what the aha moment was really being engaged with the idea of you know, I'm out hiking.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: Why does the landscape look like it does?
11:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's still a central theme for me of of wanting to know why a place look like it does.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: And yep, geology is obviously the driver for that.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: And and then that idea also that geology affects us every single day.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think I did my senior thesis on like the comprehensive nuclear test ban and how you could use seismicity for that.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: And so I think that was it was that combination uh of those two things that really sealed it for me.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: And I've been doing it ever since.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
11:48
SPEAKER_01: Um uh Jesse, do you have a follow-up on that?
11:51
SPEAKER_02: Or oh yeah, but I'm sure you do too.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, no, I just so David, uh, kind of along that same line then, what led to the book then?
12:00
SPEAKER_01: Was there an aha moment for this?
12:02
SPEAKER_01: Was there something that happened with the stores in stone?
12:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: So when I so after college, I moved to uh southern Utah.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: And I lived there for nine years.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: It I was a park ranger arches.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: So I mean, like in you know, geology nirvana, you know, it was it really on so many levels from the fact that I worked, I was talking about it, I was hiking it, I was canoeing it, you know, it just really became out of so remove my wife and I moved to Boston, she was going to grad school, and I had this major disconnect with where I was, you know, living in Boston from Golab.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: But tough transition.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a little tough.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: A little tough.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: I started looking at the building stone, and I distinctly remember one day um at Harvard, uh, going up to their oldest building on campus, Harvard Hall, and the base of the building was a brown sandstone.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, what they in the East Coast is called brownstone.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, unfortunately I didn't have a rock hammer, so I couldn't knock off a little piece, you know.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I did, I just was sort of rubbed the building, not not like an ooh, but you know, like feeling it.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: And these sand grains collected in my hand, and I realized at that moment that what people in the East Coast called brownstone was exactly the same rock as the sand, the red rock of southern Utah.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: They just have a different name, you know, a little bit different environment.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: And so I had that connection of being in that idea that I could connect uh these uh stories, wilder stories and urban stories, and mix them together with uh that uh human aspect.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: And and the other part of it was that I think uh what I was trying to do with stories in stone was I think it's easier to sneak in the science with you, weave it through human stories or architecture.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: And so that's that was that realization is I could combine the human stories and the geological stories and hopefully engage people in noticing the geology.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh you did that very nicely.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: That came across very well.
14:04
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I appreciated um you know, both the the depth of geological story that you you tied in for each rock and uh and and also the history.
14:13
SPEAKER_02: Like I really enjoyed, you know, the the Morton Gnice.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: I mean, talking about the some of the oldest building stone rock that there probably is out there, but the quarrying history and the discovery and the sort of recognition of this is a good building stone is a really interesting you you blended it really nicely together.
14:29
SPEAKER_02: Um, how did you go about picking I forget how many chapters now there are, but each other rock.
14:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay, I was gonna say a dozen.
14:39
SPEAKER_02: Uh how did you go about picking those particular, you know, nearly a dozen rocks out of all the building stones that you could that you could possibly choose from, some of which are spectacularly beautiful, and some of which are a little bit more boring maybe to look at in some ways.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: Like what was that filtering process like for you?
14:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so initially, so when I lived in Boston, I there are two things.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: One, I was trying to become a writer.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: I'd done a little bit of writing, but I thought so.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: I got into this idea of building stone.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it's just amazing uh how many people who were non-geologists just saw thought that it was just a great idea.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like my one great idea I've ever had.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: So in Boston, I started noticing, I started piecing together the stories there.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: What are the stories in Boston?
15:26
SPEAKER_00: And then So you mean rocks that are odd buildings in Boston Stones in Boston?
15:31
SPEAKER_02: Okay, quincy crazy.
15:32
SPEAKER_02: Was the first idea to build like a Boston City Building Stone book?
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Or or no, initially I really just wanted to get think about I had those stories to begin with, certain stories to begin with.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: Then as I started, I mean, what really happened was I had submitted this idea of Building Stone to a bunch of different magazines.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: I had I had pretty good success.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: And I decided I either needed to write a book about it or give this, move on in my life and do something else.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: And I found an agent, she really liked it.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: And then I knew I wanted to do I had certain criteria.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to have different rocks from you know, I didn't, I think granite's the only thing that's repeated in there.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: So I knew I wanted to have different rocks, I wanted to have them uh dispersed around the country.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to stay generally in the US, there's two from Italy.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: I knew I wanted to have buildings that were interesting.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: So it was a combination of things.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean the ones I went down, like basalt, like there's nothing I don't have a basalt chapter, which is super interesting, but there were no stories that grabbed me.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: So it was it was those different aspects of it of it.
16:43
SPEAKER_02: I would love to see the throwaway list.
16:44
SPEAKER_02: Like, how long is the throwaway list of like building stones you went through?
16:47
SPEAKER_02: Like, no, this doesn't check all the boxes, or it's like this is the ranked second for some reason.
16:52
SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, that must be a must have been a long list to go through all these things.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: That's a good point, Jesse.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: So, David, I have a question for you.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: If you did another edition, what would you add?
17:06
SPEAKER_01: But you can't, you have to take something away.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: Gotta keep the number of chapters where they're at.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: What would you what would you add?
17:11
SPEAKER_01: What would you do?
17:11
SPEAKER_02: Would you do would you re so you're saying would you add one and and kick out of it?
17:15
SPEAKER_00: I might do is I might try and go international, which would open some things up I couldn't do.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, the flint stone, flint, the the yeah, I think it's the flint stone that's used it a lot of places in England.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: Um maybe look at some of the carved, not petra, but you know, there's a lot of places where they're carved.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: And I would definitely probably tie in basalt partially because I really just think basalt is a fat is more fascinating than I realized as a rock.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: Um those would certainly off the top of my head.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've seen some other just beautiful rocks traveling around that would be fun to do.
17:56
SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:57
SPEAKER_02: For just shocking.
17:59
SPEAKER_02: I mean, a picture book of these.
18:00
SPEAKER_02: I could almost imagine a coffee book table that's just you know stunning photos of these.
18:04
SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm okay.
18:05
SPEAKER_02: That leads to another kind of question.
18:07
SPEAKER_02: This came out, this is an old-ish book now.
18:09
SPEAKER_02: I mean, 2009, 2010.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, well, there's two editions of there's two editions of the books.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: There's the original hardback, and then it was republished as a paperback edition.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: So the original hardback was 2000.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then the okay, gotcha.
18:26
SPEAKER_02: So uh um what uh what was my question?
18:30
SPEAKER_02: Oh, what's the interest?
18:31
SPEAKER_02: I mean, have you had you know, is uh people interested in follow-ups or in different versions or different styles of this?
18:38
SPEAKER_02: And and have you thought about is there anything in progress that you would continue on along with the other thing?
18:42
SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't know it's an interesting question.
18:44
SPEAKER_02: Uh it's or are you kind of done with it?
18:48
SPEAKER_02: You're like, I did that.
18:49
SPEAKER_02: I want to move on.
18:50
SPEAKER_02: I'm doing other stuff now.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a it's all of that.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have moved on, but I still it's still how I see the world.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: I still, you know, I watch movies and I notice the building stone in the back of you know, movies that I'm like, oh, there's that.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: And uh I've had um I had a little bit of connection with people, but it's been less than I had sort of hoped because I mean it seems to me it's just still such a fascinating topic.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think where it would be interesting, and I would love to have someone do something, is to put together a field guide to cities.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm not the only person who is sort of a grabbed these or or sort of found these stories of building stone in different cities.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, and I have, I don't know, probably a half dozen plus field guides.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: But it would be neat, I think it would be fun is to put together actually a field guide to you know 10 different and a dozen different cities walking tours with popular tourist things.
19:47
SPEAKER_02: I I seem to I meant to look this up, but I I seem to remember the Smithsonian had something for the Smithsonian buildings because you know everybody's walking the National Mall.
19:56
SPEAKER_02: I I they they something on their app, maybe a short I'd have to look this up, but I thought it was some short geological description of the the the building stones for the specifics of the museums.
20:06
SPEAKER_02: People were places where people walk frequently, but it was not the level of debuff that you go into um in your book.
20:12
SPEAKER_02: It was more kind of paragraph form.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: That there is a there, I've heard if it's an app.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: There's a woman whose name's escaping me right now in London.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: Um Ruth, her last name is escaping me right this minute, who basically put together an app of buildings in London.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: And so you could look at you know, London, you know, Seattle's pretty easy.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: There's like 10 buildings, you know.
20:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
20:34
SPEAKER_02: No, that's right.
20:35
SPEAKER_02: I I um so uh okay, maybe we could do right here, because I think Chris, you had a similar question to what I have, which I want to know, I want to know what your favorite one is, but I'll start with mine and then maybe we can go around.
20:48
SPEAKER_02: Everybody say their favorite story.
20:49
SPEAKER_02: Wait, wait, hold on, Jesse.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: Hold on.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: Oh, well that are you saying what's your favorite building stone, or which one is your favorite like story that was built into the book?
20:59
SPEAKER_01: What are you asking?
21:00
SPEAKER_02: Well, I I I kind of I kind of grouped them together.
21:03
SPEAKER_02: Um, like what's my favorite chapter?
21:05
SPEAKER_02: What's my favorite rock story?
21:07
SPEAKER_02: Which one gave me new appreciation?
21:08
SPEAKER_02: And I kind of I'm gonna cheat because I kind of had two.
21:11
SPEAKER_02: The Morton Gnice was for me just a really I mean it's an old rock, so it's near and dear to my heart.
21:16
SPEAKER_02: That's what I did my PhD in was super old rocks from Northern Canada, Dave.
21:19
SPEAKER_02: So I was immediately attracted to old, beautiful gneisses as a building stone.
21:24
SPEAKER_02: So that was great.
21:24
SPEAKER_02: And the story of the quarrying there was really cool, but you gave me your chapter on Slate gave me a really new appreciation for Slate, which is everywhere here in Pennsylvania.
21:33
SPEAKER_02: Um, and that that really gave me a really new appreciation.
21:38
SPEAKER_02: The Morton Knice was was I I I kind of liked it because it's near and dear.
21:41
SPEAKER_02: The slate gave me a brand new appreciation for that.
21:44
SPEAKER_02: So I really appreciated that chapter as well.
21:46
SPEAKER_02: Um and so Chris, maybe maybe we can go Chris's and and then David.
21:50
SPEAKER_02: You want me to go next or David go next?
21:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
21:54
SPEAKER_01: All right.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: So um I'm kind of with you, Jesse.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: I I really liked the Morton Nice thing.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I'm gonna I'm gonna choose a different one.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: But David, I want to ask you about this.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: The Morton Nice, you said that they use it as a base in some of the buildings, and then they put, I think, sedimentary rocks on top of that, right?
22:14
SPEAKER_01: Or they look non-conform.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: A light colored rock tends to be sedimentary or on.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: Is that done?
22:22
SPEAKER_01: What was that done deliberately to create a geologic principle with the rock, like the non-conformity, this massive gap in time, or is it just is that just the way it worked out, artistically or for whatever reason?
22:34
SPEAKER_00: I say this affectionately, you're such a geodork to think that.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: I know, I know, I love it.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: Look, the great unconformity.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: No, um sadly, no.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, it was more from a color aesthetic, and they wanted the dark color was often to draw attention to the doorway.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: And and I mean, one thing that's interesting.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: I I started to erupt.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: One thing I really realized in doing this, and I I allude to it a couple times in the book.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: Architects have no clue about the building stone.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: They don't know, really don't care where it's from.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: They have no idea how old it is or anything.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: So if it's blue, they love it.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: If it's green for the building, they don't want it, or whatever that is.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: So sadly, you don't ever, I don't ever get that.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: But you know, it's it's the uh that it's the nice thing about it is being a geologist, you can see those and point those out to people and get people to think, wow, wow.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the more nice.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: I just did a Building Stone tour today, and you know, it's just it's so cool.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: People are just like, wow.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's such a beautiful rock.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's amazing.
23:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
23:44
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's so interesting.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: All right, all right, well, I'm gonna answer the question then.
23:47
SPEAKER_01: Um so I I'm gonna go, I'm I'm between this is really hard to for me to do, but uh, I'm gonna go with the Carrara marble because that we're talking about this warping and buckling and sometimes even spalling off in Chicago.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I just I found that to be fascinating.
24:06
SPEAKER_01: So, David, can you talk, tell our listeners a little bit about what's the story behind this particular marble?
24:13
SPEAKER_01: Because it has an interesting backstory.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we all know the Carrara marble, Michelangelo's marble, the most famous marble in the world.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: And the in the late 60s, I think sort of 70s, the Standard Oil Company decided to build the tallest uh marble monument in the world.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: So they clad their headquarters 80 stories in Carrara marble.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, uh calcite has this tendency that when uh during the freeze thaw cycle to expand and contract differently on the different axes.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: And when you they cut the stone into the thin panels, the way panels are held onto a building is say the panels are one and a half inches wide, down on the top part of the panel, the thin top part, there'll be a little groove, uh a curve, and then there'll be two L-shaped brackets on the bottom and two L-shaped brackets on the top.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: And so the panel sort of rests in there.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: And basically what they did on that building is they probably put the panels in a little tight.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: And as the building, the freeze thaw cycle, as you can imagine in Chicago, quite a bit greater than the freeze thaw cycle in say Rome, um, it the panels started to freeze.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: And they noticed like within a few years, they started to bow off the buildings.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: I forget if they went concave or convex, but they started to do that.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: And after a little bit, two panels fell off.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, from pretty high up.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: And they, you know, these are panels that what a couple feet wide and a couple feet tall.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's a couple hundred pounds.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, no one was either injured or killed from it.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: And they realized, aka the lawyers realized we got to do something about this.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: So they took every single panel off the building.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, that's crazy.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: 40,000 panels, and they replaced them with uh granite from um Mount Erie granite from North Carolina.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: They then took the 40,000 Carrara marble blocks or panels, crushed up almost all of them, and used them as uh landscaping at the standard at a standard oil refinery.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: They did take a little some of the panels, crush them up and put them on a camp.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it's University of Champagne, Illinois Champaign campus.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: They lined up a um pond with it, and a bunch of fish died.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: They thought that that the Carrara marble did it.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: But I years later, I mean, I tracked down someone who had done the research on it, and he sent me a piece of that Carrara marble.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: So I actually have a chunk of Carrara marble from the standard oil facility, and they supposedly made clocks and bookends, like a little bookends out of it.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: I've never been able to find them.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: I looked online, it's been a long time.
27:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but oh, that's super interesting.
27:02
SPEAKER_02: So I I I have a uh a kind of okay, a comment and then a question.
27:06
SPEAKER_02: I was really shocked at the the lack of research on the stone kind of structure, the the physical ramifications, or just the the realization that, yeah, marble will deform with heat soft heat thaw cycles, and it probably shouldn't be used as paneling.
27:21
SPEAKER_02: That seemed, and you you said that the you know a research professor got looped in and started studying the panels and kind of when they're evaluating these things.
27:29
SPEAKER_02: And it reminded me of my PhD supervisor when I was a grad student.
27:33
SPEAKER_02: There was, I'm gonna forget the details of the story, but in um curling, you know, the ice uh ice curling sport, the stones that they throw are a really particular granite from somewhere.
27:45
SPEAKER_02: I can't remember where they're cord from, but the core was kind of running out, and they have this really particular like series of physical things down to like the electrical conductivity of them matters for so it's like they're really, really expensive, really like hard, and they keep they break a bunch and that the they're running off each other all the time in the sport.
28:03
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, my PhD students were like thinking about the electrical conductivity of the stone because it's so useful and so unique, the characteristics of it.
28:12
SPEAKER_02: And it reminded me of that story.
28:13
SPEAKER_02: But my question for you is how did you gain a really deep appreciation for both architecture and structural engineering or these the physical properties, or what you know, what the you said the architects don't think about the geology, but like did you learn a lot about architecture in this?
28:28
SPEAKER_02: And what did you what did you appreciate about this, I don't know, stylistically or something like that, about about what why they chose the rocks they chose, I guess.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good quote.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: Good point.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've long been interested in architecture, and I guess I had never thought about it as what you know, stone does convey a message.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: I mean, go, I mean, again, I was just out today and it we're minded again today, leading a tour.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: You look at older banks, and they're all they're so often made of granite.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: They're trying to convey a message.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: Your your money is safe, it's in a stone building, it's not made of wood or some crap like that.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, or go to like, you know, corporate boardrooms.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: They're marble.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: They're trying to convey a message that this is we can afford the best.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: We have the stone of Michelangelo, the Taj Mahal.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: So stone carries a message.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: So that has, I still, whenever I, you know, I see buildings, I think about that.
29:24
SPEAKER_00: What are they trying to convey with it?
29:26
SPEAKER_00: And then I also sort of notice a lot more just some of the detail, you know, which which rocks are doing well and which ones aren't.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: What's eroding?
29:33
SPEAKER_00: What isn't eroding?
29:34
SPEAKER_00: How does that convey?
29:36
SPEAKER_00: And then it also then, if you look at the older buildings in cities, you often get an insight into what is the local geology, because they all start with the local building material, then they expand as they get richer, tastes change, they go further and further afield.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: And Seattle is a perfect example.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: We don't have any good building stone in the Seattle area, but there's quarries around, and all the older buildings are from those quarries.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: And then at a certain point, the city's wealthy enough, and boom, it's from all over the world.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, gotcha.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: So Jesse, what he never answered the question.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: We got to get this answer.
30:12
SPEAKER_01: So, David, what is what's your favorite building stone or fact, you know, or a combination between the rock itself and the cultural history that goes behind it aspect of your book?
30:27
SPEAKER_01: What's your favorite?
30:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's as you can imagine, so many.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I had such a fun time doing it.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: Um I guess, I mean, uh, two of them are ones that there's a single building.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, one of my favorite buildings is the home of the poet Robinson Jeffers in Carmel, California.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: And I've gone down there many times for family reasons.
30:51
SPEAKER_00: So I've seen this just wonderful building, but he wrote just so evocatively of place and of the geology and this building.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: He built it by hand out of the boulders that he pulled up off the beach below his house.
31:04
SPEAKER_00: And I just I love that story.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: And then I love the story of the little gas station in Lamar in eastern Colorado in Lamar, Colorado, made of petrified wood.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: And when I first started, I I forget exactly how I even found out about it, but I ended up sending a um oh, taking out an ad in the newspaper, something like that, and saying, Hey, I'm just interested in the the gas station.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: Do you have any stories about the gas station?
31:34
SPEAKER_00: And the first person who got hold of me, I think it was by email, guy, I think in his 80s named Elmer Sniff.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: What a great name.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, he was a vet of um veterinary medicine, and he had this great story.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Oh, yeah, I remember when I was a kid, my mom told us never to take any building, never to take any of the petrified wood because it's on private land.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: And clearly, you know, the guy who built that building, he didn't listen, and we did never like that.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: And just it was just a great story.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, going there and researching it, this beautiful little building.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: It's now it's now can literally be practically be hidden behind an R V.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: It's that small a building.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: So they use all the the petrified wood, and there are um seams, the mortar is was uh colored green, so it looks like there's vines winding up through the buildings between the building blocks.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: And somehow I figured out that the guy who actually built it, not who paid for it and stole the rock, but the guy who actually built it was the guy who invented Pop Rock's candy.
32:42
SPEAKER_02: No kidding.
32:43
SPEAKER_02: So wow, that I thought was okay.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: How random fact is that?
32:49
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
32:50
SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
32:51
SPEAKER_02: That's such a good one.
32:52
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the thing you describe about is the okay, all right.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, go go go ahead.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: Jesse, well, just a personal story.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember you and I in downtown Custer, South Dakota?
33:07
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of these buildings are made out of this beautiful garnet schist.
33:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's awesome stuff.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: And we went into this store, and on the inside, he had this fabric of garnet schist all over the walls.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: It was the the whole building was made out of this stuff, and it was intermingled with that tufa.
33:24
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember that?
33:25
SPEAKER_02: Yes, I do remember that.
33:26
SPEAKER_02: Okay, yeah.
33:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, that's what turned us on to tufa.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're like, we we have to go find this.
33:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
33:35
SPEAKER_02: You were like, where did that come from?
33:36
SPEAKER_02: Must be nearby because there's garnet schist from right nearby on the walls here.
33:40
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
33:41
SPEAKER_02: It's spectacular.
33:42
SPEAKER_01: But that that I I was just gonna say that, David, your book, like I constantly found myself thinking of my own experiences in these strange places, that not necessarily big cities like downtown DC or Chicago or something like that, but in places like Custer or Hill City, South Dakota.
34:02
SPEAKER_01: And you're right, you know, the they start with the building material that's local and then they'll expand out from there.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: And it's just I I I just found myself thinking about my own personal experiences, often, oftentimes with Jesse over here, and it just uh brought me down memory lane, and I I really, really appreciated that aspect of it.
34:22
SPEAKER_02: But there is something, David, you mentioned the you know, the I don't know, the value of place, and I uh experiences personally in Pennsylvania now.
34:30
SPEAKER_02: We're in this ridge and valley, and we just we our house has um you know it was built in 1980 or something, and it has this big stone wall in it.
34:38
SPEAKER_02: That's all built with sandstone locally, and you walk around our property and there's like sandstone kind of everywhere just jutting up out of the soil, and it's really cool.
34:45
SPEAKER_02: It feels it feels really cool to have that and to be like, oh, that stuff came from here or right nearby here, right?
34:53
SPEAKER_02: I mean that there's something I don't know what it is, there's something it triggers in the heartstrings, I think.
34:57
SPEAKER_02: That that near uh the the words local, I guess.
35:01
SPEAKER_02: Um there's something to that.
35:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, so anyway, I I appreciated that about these stories, especially the brownstone thing.
35:06
SPEAKER_02: That was kind of uh kind of a you uh a cool story too.
35:09
SPEAKER_02: And you talked in the brownstone chapter about how the the how things come in and out of popularity.
35:13
SPEAKER_02: What's popular now?
35:15
SPEAKER_02: Ooh, that's the thing.
35:15
SPEAKER_02: And the building stones.
35:16
SPEAKER_02: Are you seeing in new buildings, you know, when you give these tours, is there something new that's popular and weird, maybe?
35:23
SPEAKER_00: Or I mean you see it where I think the popularity in weird is more in uh kitchen countertops where it's smaller quantities.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: We were down at a house, uh, someone we know, and they had this countertop that was, you know, I mean, it was six feet wide and 15 feet long.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this was an amazing house.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: And just it was a it was some sort of metamorphic rock.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: I I think it was from Brazil, but I think you know, it was just completely unusual.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's you know, that the having the the billet, the money to do that, get really unusual small quantities of rock.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: For a while, Finnish rock was really in.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: The the rap, if you know the rap Kivi granites, oh yeah, those were in, and they still are, you see them a lot.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: You see, there's one called gold.
36:16
SPEAKER_01: Can you describe that?
36:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so what's it look like?
36:18
SPEAKER_00: Rapakivi granites are ones where we'll there'll be a feldspar with then a and I can't remember which ones, with then a rim of another feldspar around it.
36:28
SPEAKER_00: They're generally about a often the ones that I've counted are about a billion plus years old, and quite a few have come out of Scandinavia.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: And Rapikivi means weathered granite, which you wouldn't think would work well as a building stone, but um yeah.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: It's they're really pretty lots of pinks, and and there's ones there are lots of reds, and then there's ones that have this Baltic brown with it.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: It's a brown sort of felds, brownish feldspar with a greenish rim around it.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: It's really a lovely rock.
36:57
SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's beautiful.
36:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's super, super interesting.
37:00
SPEAKER_02: All right, I I'm curious to move on, Chris, but do you have anything about the the about the book you want to tidy up?
37:05
SPEAKER_02: Or well, I I want to just ask Building Stones.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, kind of about what you just talked about, David.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: Have you incorporated any of this into your own house?
37:15
SPEAKER_01: Whether that be countertops or uh landscape material, you know, what is it?
37:21
SPEAKER_00: So in two ways.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: So one is oddly enough, I don't like granite countertops because they're too busy.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: Um we have one of those quartz site ones.
37:31
SPEAKER_00: It's it's basically a quartz that's bonded together, a quartzite that's been bonded, so it's really nice.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: But what I do have is uh we have a book case that we had custom made from the house, and in it is a blackboard from where I went to high school.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: So when they so my high school, when they replaced all of the blackboards with whiteboards, they had the blackboards for sale at some second use type place.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't able to get the one that I mentioned in the book, which is from my elementary school, but I was able to get the one from my high school.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: So I have I have the blackboard from my high school, like a oh, about 18 inches by you know, 45, 50 inches tall.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: So I use it every day.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I write out the you know, it's our uh I yeah, it's where my wife and I write notes to each other about you know, did this, do that.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: So that's I do have that.
38:22
SPEAKER_00: And and I do have um, I actually well speaking of the one thing we're talking to talking about, talking about, I do have a cairn, most of a I basically have a small cairn in our front yard from boulders I've collected just to make a a cairn.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, and like any geologist, there are rocks all over the damn house.
38:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I collected it all pourings I went to.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: So I have Morton Nice, I have a piece of Carrara marble from Carrara, I've got you know, Slate, I've got the coquina from St.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: Augustine.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: So everything I think I always collected where I could.
38:57
SPEAKER_02: That that's very cool.
38:58
SPEAKER_02: Okay, you brought up Kairens, so I want to talk about Kairns because you have another book on Cairns, and I I have not read it, but I've you know, working up in Northwest Territories and Nunavut of Canada, I've I've seen Kairns around and as hiking you do.
39:09
SPEAKER_02: What's the I don't know, what's the elevator pitch for the book?
39:12
SPEAKER_02: What's the stories?
39:13
SPEAKER_02: What what provoked you to write a book on cairns?
39:15
SPEAKER_00: Well I was actually asked to do it by the publisher.
39:18
SPEAKER_00: She said, I've been trying to get people interested in writing a book about cairns, and no one's been interested.
39:22
SPEAKER_00: And I said, What do you mean?
39:24
SPEAKER_00: That sounds totally cool.
39:25
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I left on it.
39:27
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, I mean, it's basically everything you never thought to think about about cairns.
39:34
SPEAKER_00: So I have chapters on a bunch of you know ones from different expeditions, I have a bunch of cultural aspects about how people used cairns from around the world.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the subtitle of the book is Messengers in Stone.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: So I'm basically making this point that people have been using cairns for thousands of years as a way to convey a message to others.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: And whether it is, hey, I went this way, or I want to honor my relative or avoid this, or people also use cairns as a way to transfer energy where if they're they would, you know, there's several cultures that came across where people would, if they're tired, they'd sort of rub a rock on themselves and then put that on the pile as a way to transfer their their weakness, their tiredness to the rock.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: And it's also just a way for people to connect to each other.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: And you know, they like, oh, you know, Thoreau.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: There's a there's a cairn at several cairns at thr at Walden Pond, and people would bring rocks and you know, make that connection.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: So okay.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: David, it seems that recently at least, like in the backpacking and hiking community, that it's cairns are very polarizing.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: Have you have you dealt with that at all?
40:58
SPEAKER_01: In did you do that in your book?
41:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
41:01
SPEAKER_00: I don't as much I mean I do and I don't.
41:03
SPEAKER_00: In the book, I start out, I think I think it starts, but I know the section where I talk about being a ranger and regularly destroying cairns.
41:12
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so why because I don't know this.
41:14
SPEAKER_02: What's polarized?
41:15
SPEAKER_00: Well, so there's a couple aspects of it.
41:17
SPEAKER_00: The the main polarization, well, two parts.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: One is that, particularly in national parks, cairns leading people off trail and either taking people, the potential to an area that is beyond their ability or over a fragile ecosystem, particularly when I was in the desert and it's you know, lots of fragile soils out there.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: So that was one aspect of it.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: The other aspect of it is that you get what are these sort of cairn, these villages of cairns.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: And and and I wouldn't even call them terns, I call them stack stones, and there'll be a hundred of these stacks.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: And there's the aesthetic problem, and then there's the ecological problem that when you take rocks that have been sitting in, particularly in in alpine ecosystems, you remove the rock that you know something is growing around it, you know, you kill it.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: So those are where the controversy okay, fair enough.
42:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so just too many people making too many cairns unnecessarily is the idea of the colour.
42:15
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
42:16
SPEAKER_01: Creates two groups of people then.
42:18
SPEAKER_01: You have the cairn builders and the cairn destroyers.
42:20
SPEAKER_01: And you know, that's yeah, yeah, it's a thing.
42:23
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
42:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it is.
42:25
SPEAKER_02: That's really interesting.
42:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, so you mentioned uh Park Ranger.
42:29
SPEAKER_02: I was really curious about this.
42:30
SPEAKER_02: How did that your time, you how many you were at Arches?
42:32
SPEAKER_00: Is that I was at Arches for three years or three seasons.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I mean, that really set me on the path to being a writer in the sense that people, one thing that struck me is as a ranger, people are always asking questions.
42:46
SPEAKER_00: What are the rocks?
42:47
SPEAKER_00: What are the plants?
42:48
SPEAKER_00: What's this?
42:49
SPEAKER_00: And I would try and give them answers.
42:51
SPEAKER_00: But I as I noticed people doing this more and more, I really tried to encourage them to ask those same questions when they got home.
42:58
SPEAKER_00: Because the answer is going to be just as interesting.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: And so when my wife and I left Moab and moved to Boston, that's what I started doing was trying to ask the questions about it.
43:08
SPEAKER_00: And the one that was most obvious as a question was to understand the geology.
43:13
SPEAKER_00: And that's really what led me into Building Stone.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's direct, I I see a very direct line between Park Ranger and Building Stone.
43:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
43:22
SPEAKER_02: Do what would do you see a direct line between park ranger and science communicator and and teacher in a way too?
43:29
SPEAKER_02: Because uh that seems it seems like a good place to hone those those explanatory um teaching skills that you clearly have and and you write really well.
43:38
SPEAKER_02: Was it a was it a a honing experience for you too, as well as an inspirational?
43:42
SPEAKER_00: It was more of an inspirational, I think, experience of not having in college.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: I hadn't done any teaching.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: And when I was the job I had before the park service, I worked for a little nonprofit educational field school and taught programs.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: And I realized I really liked to share that information.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: With people and found that people enjoyed learning.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: And so yeah, I've just, it's been honed over the last 20 plus years of more and more continuously doing that.
44:10
SPEAKER_02: I because I think the Park Ranger, I mean, we, you know, Chris and I have a have a deep appreciation, especially for those southwest United States parks, do an exceptional job of education, whether it's just via the billboards and the placement or rangers.
44:22
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the National Park Service does an incredible job of education in most parks, I think.
44:28
SPEAKER_02: And it's been a while since I've been to Arches, but I remember it being pretty good.
44:32
SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's been over a decade since I've been there.
44:36
SPEAKER_02: Uh so anyway, we have an appreciation for that.
44:37
SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of people visit parks and are like, oh, the park ranger, that seems like a cool gig.
44:41
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
44:42
SPEAKER_02: Um, is it a cool gig?
44:44
SPEAKER_00: For me, it was great.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I had two, I was at, I was at, I went from Arches to Boston to work at the Frederick Law all National Historic Site, so a two-acre site.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: But I, yeah, I when I graduated from college, my mom said to me, David, you know, you never I looked at all your report cards, you never shut up in school.
45:01
SPEAKER_00: You always were disturbing the other children.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: So I've just continued that life of talking to blabbering away about stuff that I find interesting.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: And fortunately, in a part, other people seem to find it interesting too.
45:12
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, oh, that's great.
45:14
SPEAKER_02: That's great.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, so David, back to the book.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: I have a question for you that I really I'm really interested in in how you answer this.
45:24
SPEAKER_01: So because you encourage just general lay people to become urban geologists, um, what does that look like?
45:31
SPEAKER_01: How does that happen when someone has very little experience?
45:37
SPEAKER_01: How do they know what they're looking at?
45:39
SPEAKER_01: What kind of tools can they utilize?
45:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, how do you start that kind of mentality of looking at the city differently?
45:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think with stone, I mean, one of the great things about building stone is it's usually very obvious that it's you know, it's either a sandstone or a granite or a marble.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: There's often because it's polished, it's beautiful.
46:06
SPEAKER_00: Uh there, so I think in the sense of having like a field guide or having you know a guide to geology, you can start looking and start sort of getting some sort of ideas that way.
46:18
SPEAKER_00: Um there's a hand, again, there's a handful of guides out there.
46:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think that I think people more people notice it than we realize, and particularly I think people who are geologists, and so being we reaching out to them, particularly ones where there's fossils, you know, and that really helps because that you know, that's obviously such an engaging part of the story.
46:39
SPEAKER_02: Oh, sure.
46:40
SPEAKER_02: In the stone itself on the buildings.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in the stone on the buildings.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, from a bigger picture point of view, geology gets in the news so much, you know, that when people are when that when those you know, the two timescales intersect, when the human timescale and the geologic timescale intersect, it's you know, being aware of you know the volcanoes or tsunamis.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean, unfortunately, it's often during bad news.
47:04
SPEAKER_00: Um but to me, it's just getting out there and looking and trying to pay attention and trying to ask questions.
47:09
SPEAKER_00: Like, why what do I why why are there hills here?
47:13
SPEAKER_00: You know, ask the basic questions.
47:15
SPEAKER_00: Why are there hills here?
47:16
SPEAKER_00: Why is there water?
47:17
SPEAKER_00: Why is there a creek there?
47:18
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's weird.
47:19
SPEAKER_00: That tree is growing there.
47:21
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make sense.
47:21
SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's water spilling out of the sidewalk.
47:24
SPEAKER_00: What's going on there?
47:25
SPEAKER_00: It's just it's it's paying attention and asking questions, I guess.
47:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: Which is what geology is all about.
47:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's right.
47:32
SPEAKER_02: It's exactly right.
47:33
SPEAKER_02: Just just look around, observe, and be curious.
47:36
SPEAKER_02: And and I guess, um, do you find uh I find great value in the local rock and gem club kind of thing that these are massive resources of knowledge?
47:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, just local local people who there's actually no online forum for it.
47:53
SPEAKER_02: It's just like you gotta find your local meetup and go.
47:56
SPEAKER_02: Is that the case for Building Stones too?
47:59
SPEAKER_02: Do you think do do big cities, you've lived in several, do they have strong building stone kind of communities or or less so it's it's individuals who have who have been like me, a little bit dorky.
48:12
SPEAKER_00: And you know, I've tracked down ones in you know, GSA guy, you know, when there's a GSA meeting, sometimes there'll be one.
48:21
SPEAKER_00: There's a variety, you know, variety of state agencies, state geological surveys have published guides to it.
48:28
SPEAKER_00: So it's just there's a handful of, and then and the thing is a lot of times of okay, I look at a I look at the Morton Nice or the Salem limestone or uh Crow Marble, those are found all over the place.
48:42
SPEAKER_00: So once you start picking out one or two, you realize, you know, the Verde Antique, the different slate, you start seeing them everywhere.
48:50
SPEAKER_00: And so that's there's an advantage of that that you can take your knowledge and transfer it and carry it with you.
48:56
SPEAKER_02: I I I you know you should you should have a little um uh what would you call it?
49:02
SPEAKER_02: You should have a little consulting business for people who want to remodel their kitchen and they want to find the coolest geological, you know, kitchen countertop or something and call you up and you know, you help them figure it out.
49:12
SPEAKER_02: That'd be pretty good.
49:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've thought of doing that of just going to buildings in downtown Seattle and saying, hey, would you like me to write up something about and I just the energy level is a million other things I'm also doing?
49:24
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, really.
49:25
SPEAKER_00: No, yeah, yeah.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: It'd be sort of fun to do.
49:28
SPEAKER_02: Has the has the geocaching world, you know, uh is there geocaching locations or sort of um you know, what are they called?
49:38
SPEAKER_02: Um the hunts you can kind of go and you gotta check all the boxes and like a scavenger hunt, yeah.
49:44
SPEAKER_00: A scavenger hunt, kind of a scavenger hunt for building stone type things is I've not come across, and you know, and I have um I've occasionally like with kids' groups, sort of tried to create a little something like that, and it certainly would be easy to come up with you know a dozen questions and find that.
50:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:02
SPEAKER_02: So you you lead walking tours, right?
50:04
SPEAKER_02: You just led one this morning, right?
50:05
SPEAKER_02: And what so what does that look like?
50:07
SPEAKER_02: What does that look like?
50:08
SPEAKER_02: How many people, what are you talking about, where are you going?
50:10
SPEAKER_02: How variable is it, you know, trip to trip?
50:12
SPEAKER_02: Uh how you get access to this.
50:15
SPEAKER_00: I do it for a variety of different groups, and the the one I do in Seattle, uh today's there were six or seven people on it.
50:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh, a woman bought it as a gift for her husband.
50:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, so and took some friends.
50:28
SPEAKER_00: So we this one starts out looking at the Great Fire in Seattle in 1889, which transfers changes Seattle from a build, uh city build of wood to a city build of brick and stone.
50:40
SPEAKER_00: So stuff starts to come in.
50:42
SPEAKER_00: So we basically do about a mile and a half walk and stop and look at different buildings.
50:48
SPEAKER_00: So we look at the built one of the buildings that has a wonderful example of the local stone.
50:53
SPEAKER_00: There's another one we look at the brick, there's this gorgeous brick building that is designed to look like a mountain.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: We go look at terracotta, we then continue down the block and look at um um Indiana limestone, and then we look at Travertine, then uh Morton Knights.
51:11
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's just it's a bunch of different and so in each location I talk about the geology and then I talk about some human story that connects to it and why it is in Seattle.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's cool.
51:25
SPEAKER_00: How often do you do these?
51:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh infrequently.
51:27
SPEAKER_00: I just people just I people contact me about it, or there's a there's a couple of organizations like I've done it for various museums, architecture associations, so it's real random, but real fun.
51:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it sounds like fun.
51:42
SPEAKER_01: You can just see j little Jesse and I tagging along with the yeah.
51:46
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
51:47
SPEAKER_02: Make it out to Seattle after that would be super fun.
51:51
SPEAKER_02: I would love that.
51:52
SPEAKER_02: I'd be I mean, go and learn about a place, a new place or a place that's home that gives you new, new, um, you know, a new filter with which to see the world.
52:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah.
52:02
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I always tell people when at the conclusion of the talk, I say there's three reasons I do this.
52:06
SPEAKER_00: One is we're often told that nature is out there somewhere, and yet we can find these amazing natural history stories.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: Stone means something.
52:15
SPEAKER_00: Again, the whole idea of the uh marble or granite.
52:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then the third one is you know, there's just a lot of bad architecture out there, and you can bypass the bad architecture, like, oh, look at that.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: That's a really cool rock.
52:27
SPEAKER_00: That building's hideous, but the rock is really cool.
52:30
SPEAKER_02: The rock is awesome.
52:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
52:31
SPEAKER_02: So bad design, but they picked a good rock.
52:34
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
52:36
SPEAKER_01: David, before we wrap up with our last question, I do have uh another burning question, kind of as a side tangent.
52:42
SPEAKER_01: If I'm in downtown Chicago and I'm thinking of this this building that that has just beautiful, nice uh these nice panels along the base of it.
52:50
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how high up they go.
52:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, how would one?
52:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm a geologist, I can look at that and recognize it for what it is, but how would I know the story behind that?
53:00
SPEAKER_01: Is that how would somebody go ahead and find out where that rock was sourced?
53:04
SPEAKER_01: Is there revenue for that?
53:07
SPEAKER_00: That's a great question.
53:09
SPEAKER_00: It is really hard because if you ask, like if you reach out, say to the architect, the architect may have a clue, but more often than not, they don't.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: It'll and they they'll think, oh, it's Italian marble.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: Or we had that made specially for us.
53:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, people literally said that to me.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: Um so what I what they invented the rock out of thin air for you came from somewhere.
53:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh what I started doing was I again started collecting what guide books I could that other people did, and then started piecing together the stories.
53:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh and yeah, it's a lot of work.
53:45
SPEAKER_00: And or I would try and track down, okay, when's the building built?
53:48
SPEAKER_00: And you know, so every once in a while the news.
53:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because of the fads, that's right.
53:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:53
SPEAKER_00: They would say, but often it's it's granite.
53:55
SPEAKER_00: And we know that most of the building stone that is granite is not granite.
54:01
SPEAKER_00: And most of the building stone that's marble is not marble.
54:05
SPEAKER_00: So it's tough, it's really tough.
54:07
SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to build.
54:09
SPEAKER_01: When it's not locally sourced, that's easy.
54:11
SPEAKER_01: Right.
54:11
SPEAKER_01: If it's locally sourced, that's easy.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, okay.
54:13
SPEAKER_02: How okay.
54:14
SPEAKER_02: This is a question I had for you as well to follow up on that, Chris.
54:17
SPEAKER_02: Sorry for distracting here.
54:19
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, how how finely tuned is your eye, do you think, David?
54:22
SPEAKER_02: Now can you walk into like a showroom for mu for countertops or whatever, and can you like pick out and name you know where the a lot of these things come from, or are there just way too many varieties?
54:32
SPEAKER_00: Way too many varieties.
54:33
SPEAKER_00: I I know the handful of building stones.
54:36
SPEAKER_00: I know, but no way.
54:38
SPEAKER_00: It is there's just too too many of them.
54:40
SPEAKER_00: Worldwide stone trade is almost impossible to fathom that they're shipping dead weight all over the world.
54:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't even try.
54:56
SPEAKER_02: Imagine, yeah, yeah, yeah.
54:57
SPEAKER_01: It's just too complicated.
54:59
SPEAKER_01: All right.
55:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think we're at that time, Jesse, right?
55:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's let's let it wrap us up, Chris.
55:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
55:05
SPEAKER_01: So, David, we always ask this.
55:07
SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to hear your answer.
55:09
SPEAKER_01: What has been your best day as a geoscientist?
55:13
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's easy.
55:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, the day I got to go to I was in Iceland and got to go into the Valley of Thingvalier and walk across the plate boundary from North America to Europe.
55:28
SPEAKER_00: That was the coolest.
55:30
SPEAKER_00: That was just mind-blowing for me.
55:32
SPEAKER_00: Then we're going to see the greensand beach in Hawaii that I had seen in college, and finally 25 years later, I got to see this olivine beach.
55:43
SPEAKER_00: Those those are two of the or and then the third one is being on Mount St.
55:47
SPEAKER_00: Helens exactly one week to the day before it's uh started erupting.
55:52
SPEAKER_00: Not night, not the 1980s cycle, but when it started erupting in 2004, we got to the summit, got off the mountain, came home, and found out that that that after the next day they closed the mountain, and literally one week later it erupted.
56:07
SPEAKER_01: No kidding.
56:08
SPEAKER_01: So that was October of 2004, right?
56:11
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, wow.
56:12
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
56:13
SPEAKER_02: That's so Chris was there soon after.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: I went out there soon after, yeah.
56:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
56:18
SPEAKER_01: Soon after that.
56:18
SPEAKER_02: It started erupting.
56:19
SPEAKER_02: Chris went out for a couple days.
56:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
56:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
56:21
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's so interesting.
56:23
SPEAKER_02: Um, well, all right, David, this has been a really great uh discussion.
56:27
SPEAKER_02: And I I really enjoyed the book.
56:28
SPEAKER_02: It's a great book and and you know, opened our eyes to a whole bunch of stuff.
56:32
SPEAKER_02: People can find out more about you at we have a great website, geologywriter.com.
56:36
SPEAKER_02: Pretty simple.
56:36
SPEAKER_02: Good, good, good, yes, exactly.
56:39
SPEAKER_02: Really nice website URL there.
56:41
SPEAKER_02: I appreciate that.
56:41
SPEAKER_02: Um, and there's all sorts of contact links on that on that website.
56:44
SPEAKER_02: People can find out more about you.
56:46
SPEAKER_02: But thank you for spending time with us.
56:48
SPEAKER_02: We really appreciate it.
56:48
SPEAKER_02: It was a pleasure talking to you.
56:49
SPEAKER_02: And when we Chris, when Chris and I make it out to Seattle someday, we'll come on a walking tour.
56:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'd love it.
56:54
SPEAKER_00: Nothing.
56:54
SPEAKER_00: Great.
56:54
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate your enthusiasm and questions.
56:57
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
56:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
56:58
SPEAKER_02: All right, take care, Dave.
57:00
SPEAKER_00: Take care.
57:00
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
57:01
SPEAKER_02: Hey, thanks for listening.
57:02
SPEAKER_02: You find out all about us, planetgeocast.com.
57:05
SPEAKER_02: That's our website.
57:06
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57:07
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57:09
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57:11
SPEAKER_02: There you can get basically the intro level class, intro level college level geoscience class in audiobook form, a whole bunch of other visual podcast series on the Geographic of a National Park, uh, and a bunch of other episodes on Earth's climate, etc.
57:24
SPEAKER_02: Download the first link in your show notes.
57:27
SPEAKER_02: Download first link in your show notes, Camp Geo Mobile app.
57:33
SPEAKER_02: And leave us a rating and review if you're on Spotify or if you're on Spotify or YouTube, come and look.