Tim and I returned from our "field trip" on Monday afternoon. The Mojave Desert was much cooler this time- the high was around 98 degree's. We finished putting a grid on the mini bench and photographed it. The nailed event horizons were written on to trench logs, for me to decipher next week. I looked at the fault I will be reconstructing next week. It is very complex and has been re-broken numerous times, so it has a lovely webbed look. How nice it would be if faults would only break in one place! But then, that would be too easy.
    The rest of the week I finished making a photo mosaic for the reconstruction's. The photos are all different, in the brightness levels and shades of color. I have to attempt to fix this, so it will look like all 40 photos are exactly the same color, brightness, etc. Well, mission was accomplished- and I will be able to start reconstruction's on Monday as planned. It is tricky though getting those little photos to all look alike- esp. when they have all been developed differently.
    Today Tim showed me the basics on how to do the reconstruction's. He will be gone all next week so I am worried I will get stuck, or have problems running the program. Hopefully all will go well and I can complete the reconstruction by the end of the week. I am going to work my way through the mosaic one event at a time, taking off the horizontally continuos layers and back slipping the fault region. I think the hardest part will be reconstructing the multiple fractures along the fault. It will be difficult to see which earthquake rupture the various sections.
    I also finished reading Tom Rockwell (my mentor) and Sally McGill's 1996 report on the Garlock fault. The report was written on the same site I am currently working on. However, their trench was not nearly as deep, wide, [or confusing :-) ] as the one we have open now. The report did help me understand some of the earthquakes in the upper benches I will be reconstructing. I still want to read a report on the general geology of the area, and I have had trouble finding one.
I am glad to be home from the field, and curious to see what happens when I begin the reconstruction's by myself!