Since 2009, Dave Tucker has run the blog Northwest Geology Field Trips to document fascinating natural history and trip destinations in our backyard here in Whatcom County. This website draws upon his experience as a research associate at Western Washington University and a community member interested in teaching others.
“It came to be because I was running a set of field trips for the general public as a fundraiser for a Mount Baker research nonprofit I used to run,” says Tucker. “I realized how much I enjoyed teaching geology to the public and writing about it, so I decided I would start up the Northwest Geology Field Trips website as a means of providing people with a way to do self-guided geology field trips.”
The blog’s “Field Trips” page links to geology posts by destination across the state, most popularly here in Whatcom County.
“There was a landslide there in 2009 in the Chuckanut formation that revealed a lot of 50-million-year-old plant fossils that are fairly easy for people to get to, and they can go hike around up there and pick up fossils,” says Tucker. “People also really like web pages I put up about glacial erratics in the area, big rocks that have been carried down from Canada during the last big glacial advance about 15,000 years ago. People really like to know about those because they’re so anomalous. There are these big boulders and a variety of different rock types, and I think they amaze people that these big rocks have been carried from somewhere else.”
Exploring Northwest Formations
Northwest Geology Field Trips record the Pacific Northwest’s distinctive geological identity.
“It’s a huge range of different types of geology that people could see, everything from volcanic stuff at Mount Baker to glacial stuff, flood deposits, shoreline exposures,” says Tucker. “People like those Ice Age deposits, the erratics, as well as beach cliffs. Then there’s the local bedrock, the Chuckanut, which is pretty unusual and quite popular.”
Posts on the Chuckanut formation have discussed phenomena such as honeycomb weathering, Racehorse Creek fossils, and the Mount Baker Theater rock. Other posts cover the Washington coast and mountains.
“The downside, of course, is the jungle that covers so much of our surface between the brush and the trees, and buildings,” says Tucker. “It makes it difficult to see and challenging without going out of your way to look.”
Practicing Citizen Geology
Dave Tucker has written the book “Geology Underfoot in Western Washington” as a companion to the website.
“It is a series of chapters that focus on a specific location in western Washington with a geologic description oriented towards the general public,” says Tucker. “People are curious about geology, but not necessarily with any sort of formal training in the subject. It gets people to a location, out of their cars and walking around to look at what is exposed there.”
The term “citizen geology” describes how curious readers can visit field trip sites to learn for themselves.
“It is not folks who have formal training or professional experience in geology but who are just interested in what’s going on in their backyard,” says Tucker. “What underlies where they live, or what makes the mountains look like they do, or why is the sea coast like this. Some people are just curious about the topic and want to know and those are the folks that are subscribers to my website. A lot of people read the website, and they write back to me with questions about things, clarifications or ideas of other places that I should look at and write about. They send me photographs and invite me to join them on little field trips to look at some interesting geologic outcrop that appeals to them and that they want to know more about, and quite often those end up on my website.”
Digging Deeper With Dave Tucker
Tucker’s blog provides further reading with sidebar links to Dan McShane’s Reading the Washington Landscape, John Scurlock’s aerial photography, WWU and CWU geology programs, and more.
“My website takes people to some beach exposures where they can see either marine or glacial deposits,” says Tucker. “I have a few field trips that go up the Nooksack River toward Mount Baker to look at our mountain geology. I’ve got field trips up into the Vancouver area and down as far as Cape Disappointment out of the mouth of the Columbia River.”
Readers can learn “geo basics” through resources linked on the site.
“That’s what the whole thing is oriented toward, people have a thirst for knowledge and information,” says Tucker. “I think it’s important to help them understand the natural world that we live in. The most rewarding part is coming up with places to go see for myself, and to look at the geology exposed in a road cut or along a shoreline and to figure it out for myself. What is it I’m seeing here, and am I able to explain that to people who are not geologists? I think when I successfully do that, that’s very rewarding for me.”
You can learn more and become a citizen geologist by subscribing to email updates on the newest posts on Tucker’s website.
