The Nature of the Blog and the Blogosphere

The Colorado Earth Science Blog started out to coordinate the work of the Lake George Gem and Mineral Club's Alma Study Project in 2010. Through this blog, I can publish short status updates, coordinate team efforts, and provide information on field trips.

The defining feature of a blog (when compared to a webpage) is that it allows readers to leave comments or start a dialogue with the blogger. This is why I created the Colorado Earth Science blog. Through this blog we can exchange new ideas about our project. One of our tasks was to take a unique look at the prospectors, miners, adventurers, fortune seekers, and others who came to this area. By studying these people we can look at human nature for sensitivities that strike a chord in all of us—such as the old woman that died from starvation, alone in her Timberline Town cabin during a frigid and snowy winter in Buckskin Gulch. There are other stories like this in the old newspapers of the period—tales of gunfights, hangings, and rich gold strikes—that will enhance our understanding of what happened here and trigger our curiosity to dig deeper. We really want those who look at our final presentations to get a sense of what it was like and what people experienced.

We have completed the project and successfully mixed the geology, mineralogy, mining, history, and the stories of people together for a solid representation of the Greater Alma District during the mid- to late 1800s.

There were two important deliverables out of this project:
1. The project group presented a slide show of our work at the town hall in September, 2010 and then provided field trips up Buckskin Gulch.  Admission was charged and we were able to raise money for the Alma Foundation and the Mosquito Range Heritage Initiative. The town of Alma was pleased with the results, and they are going to organize a mining heritage program next year around our research.  The town plans to make this an annual event to raise money for the two programs.

2. The results of our work was also presented at the New Mexico Mineral Symposium  held at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology  November 13, 2010. An expanded abstract was written by the group.  All participants were listed as coauthors.  The symposium published all the abstracts and distributed them to all of the attendees.  The expanded abstract will also be published in New Mexico Geology in 2011.

Since the project has been completed, I have used this blog to portray the interesting geology of the Pikes Peak Region, Colorado.  I look forward to sharing this with the blogosphere.