A Sense of Place

By ROBERT HILL
Strive to interpret what really exists. - Louis Agassiz
Modern life presents the eager student with an intractable difficulty - some things you just can't look up on the Internet. Afterall, Cyberspace is not a place. The cracked earth of Colorado is a place.
And this aromatic, gold-veined, piņon-dotted, cloud-swept, ice-bound, water-shot, wind-wracked, petrified landscape of Colorado has been the elemental laboratory of Colorado College's curriculum since before Frank Loud mounted meteorological instruments atop Hagerman Hall in the 1890s and set students to record reality's vagaries for the United States Weather Bureau.

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Driving south along the floor of the San Luis Valley, the sunlight is pale as milk in the middle distance. The wrinkled backs of the Sangre de Cristos are a duochrome of black and pearl; across the valley, 15 miles distant, La Garitas under snow seem suspended above the autumn haze. Bill Fischer, professor emeritus of geology, and Joe Gordon, professor emeritus of English, are busing a Southwest Studies class down to the Baca campus near Crestone for a geological field trip, then on to Taos for some anthropology and cultural studies. As the bus rumbles along the valley floor, Fischer points out geological highlights over a fuzzy public address system - old mine sites, strange outcrops, a boulder in a pasture, a sudden flash of azure water among the reeds in a prairie lot. The students look, chatter together, address questions to "Joe" or "Bill." They are headed into the heart of the Southwest.

Harold the driver pulls the college bus off the road in North Crestone Canyon and everyone piles into the roadway. Fischer stands on a boulder and asks, "Now what's different about these rocks from what we saw earlier today? What hits you like a ton of bricks?" Diffident responses, a few invariably take the bait. Fischer smiles and begins to spin the geological history of more than a billion and a half years just underfoot, about the upheaval that threw up the Sangre de Cristos, about the great leisurely rift that slid the valley floor (graben) off the craggy montane shoulders (horst), about crustal extension and crested compression. "These rocks can all tell a story if you learn how to read it," he admonishes kindly, and instances the rock he is standing upon which bears the tell-tale green cast of gold deposits. He has surely stood on that rock before now and told its story.

Gordon chips in with some history and botany, but his turn will come tomorrow at Taos Pueblo. Walking along the gravel road at 8,000 feet, Fischer pauses in a ditch and scrambles back bearing a segmented whip of reed, asks for identification, and supplies the name Equisetum, horsetail. Its ancestor, Calamites, he notes, is found fossilized in coal deposits at 13,000 feet along the range just eastward of our backs. The uplift carried the fossils skyward 300 million years ago in the Paleozoic. Fischer has plucked this humble object lesson from the roadside; he knows the region as an immense slice of time and as a cross-section a mile deep. It is an aerial photograph in his imagination, and he knows the flora passably well. He speaks in warm sforzando of the Rio Grande Rift ("I can't think of a more exciting place in North America"), of the Uncompagre Uplift and "Crestone conglomerate" - this is home territory.

By the time the bus wends to the deserted Independence Mine, the sun is setting behind the volcanic snowcones of La Garitas. Fischer pauses the group and directs its gaze to the shimmering peaks across the tableland in a moment of nonpedagogical appreciation.

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If geology is an epic saga, Fischer is its raconteur and bard, never missing a cue, each minor tale properly placed, each pause perfectly weighted. For Christine Smith Siddoway, Southwestern geology is self-indulgence. "I can't divorce the description of the rocks, the type of rocks, from my enthusiasm for them," she confesses.

One has the sense that investigating regional geology is, to her, like opening a great book very slowly. "Last year I had two students working in the Garden of the Gods. As it turns out, we found the entire Garden is a fault zone. There's a fault almost every centimeter throughout the Garden," she says from her Palmer Hall office.
She hefts from a shelf a 15-pound red rock the size of a bread loaf to make her point, tracing a pattern of fine striations with a fingernail. "What you can see is a wonderful, delicate grain to this surface. Each one of those surfaces has a little bit of displacement, maybe just a millimeter, maybe the thickness of a hair. But you can tell that there's been movement."
She says the Garden and the sequence of rocks found between Manitou Springs and downtown Colorado Springs serve as a wonderful model for field work. "There is so much geological diversity here. Being in this location in the Rockies sets us up to get a wide regional understanding that I hope our students, who get out in the mountains so much, carry with them."
Some of Siddoway's research is in the Wet Mountains stretching south of Caņon City eastward of the Sangre de Cristo range. "The rock types there were at great depths in the earth during a time of collision. The rock layering is vertical and the rocks are tremendously folded; they have fantastic minerals in them that were formed in hot, dynamic conditions far from the surface realm where we are."
She considers the Southwest the arena to do serious geology and surely the place to teach it. The region is a patchwork of unknown quantities like the Wet Mountains, what she calls "blank spots" begging for extended inquiry. "There's so much that's unknown and much debated. It makes us excited to be here. It makes our investigations important, certainly for geologists in the rest of the region and the rest of the country, in many cases for the rest of the world. There is international interest in the Rocky Mountains. It just boggles the mind to think that we can devise projects that students can look at, make observations, interpret, synthesize the findings.
"Neat, small, well-defined research projects can be done by a class in a couple of days at CC," she points out. "With a simple tool - a geologist's compass - and a lot of measurements taken during one day by 10 students, you can come back to the lab that evening, input the data, and make a plot. Think how rewarding that is for a student. There's no wait."
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The college has always profited from that unique amalgam of place and people, observes Richard Beidleman, professor emeritus of biology. First of all, he notes, "We're the only institution that stands at the gateway to the Southwest. Colorado Springs is the meeting place for both plains and high peaks."
But location entails nothing in the absence of dedicated naturalists and outdoor field observers, whether their focus is science or anthropology or cultural history. "Many of the older faculty were trained as field people," Beidleman says, "and when we got to a place like Colorado Springs and saw that 14,000-foot peak right behind us and noticed the Southwestern piņon-juniper woodland that doesn't occur around Denver or Boulder - we realized what an opportunity was here. We felt just like the early explorers."
Years ago, during the reign of Colorado College President Louis Benezet, Beidleman was pondering simultaneous job offers from institutions in Nebraska. "I sat there in my office and looked out at Pikes Peak," he recalls, "and I thought, 'This is ridiculous. These people are explaining to me the virtues of Omaha and I'm sitting here looking at a 14,000-foot peak.' I wouldn't have taken a job at an institution where I couldn't make use of the surrounding environment."
The peak is the lodestone in the local landscape, but beyond its visual dominance, Beidleman insists, "We have the most intriguing and dynamic outdoor laboratory that anybody could ask for. There's probably no better location for an institution of higher learning from the ecological-geological standpoint than Colorado College. You can start out in country which is very much like northern Mexico and go up to country which is very much like the Arctic. You've got the map of North America in your backyard."
Beidleman's research has focused on a more delicate and transient commodity than the geologist's stock in trade. The ecological mechanism - tinkered with, paved over, unwittingly tainted - requires a degree of careful preservation that the rocky substratum does not. Consequently, his student field projects over the years are a litany of research in the public interest.
There was an extensive project, for example, in Bear Creek Canyon that divided CC ecology students into five groups to study the grassland, brushland, river bottom or riparian ecosystem, south-facing Ponderosa pine forest, and north-facing Douglas fir forest. Each team studied the history of the area and its climatology, while inventorying the plants and animals they found there. Their work was submitted to the county park system and used in the development of the Bear Creek Nature Center.
As another example, Beidleman cites Tejon Marsh on the south end of town. This little county wildlife marsh was set aside because a Colorado College student did a project on the diversified population of birds she found there and presented a preservation proposal to the county.
Beidleman's public interest in Colorado Springs continues, though he now resides in California. A consortium is trying to purchase old Stratton holdings along 21st Street, a plot Beidleman knows intimately, to save it from developers. He has furnished the group a "series of references to published studies carried out by Colorado College students on the ecology, particularly the bird population, of that area. Those were published and the students had their names in the publications when they were still undergraduates."
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A sense of place is not a birthright. And understanding a region is not the same as a sense of place, insists Joe Gordon.
"Knowledge of a place, theoretical or practical, is an essential ingredient. What comes out of that knowledge is an emotional response - a sense of home, connection, relatedness, roots. That sense of roots and relatedness is what we try to get these students to understand."
In an age when families break apart, uproot easily and often, he says, it's a hard thing to impart.
Place is also a complex alchemy of passion, intimate understanding, and wide perceptions, all requiring cultivation. No scientific theory in the world can explain why Christine Siddoway is nearly breathless with amazement at a striated piece of rock; why Richard Beidleman can find an argument for personal stability in the view from his office window; why William Fischer can pause at the sun setting over La Garitas; nor why Joe Gordon occasionally forsakes the glades of regional literature to read up on local mining history.
"Ecology," explains Beidleman, "encompasses not only geology and biology, but human history, climatology, soils - the list goes on. I think most of our problems today are the result of people not having the background to understand the ecological dynamics of the biosphere."
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