June 16, 2009

I’m travelling with my favourite geologist and the last couple of days I have been accompanying her and her field assistant while they do fieldwork in the valleys of the Monte Rose, which at 4600m is the highest mountain on the Italian side of the Alps. While they did fieldwork I either watched and asked questions, or gave them some peace by heading off to explore little villages nearby. This is how I found myself driving on the right hand side of the road for the first time ever, up a winding road that slowly got narrower and narrower, past herds of goats with bells, and to the incredibly beautiful and picturesque village of Rimella.

Compared to Australia, things are close together here. Villages have signs announcing the end of the village so that you know when you have crossed into the next one. There are many dialects – Rimella for example is in the German derived Walser speaking area, which has not only a different language (although Italian is spoken as well) but a different architecture. I really enjoyed just wandering through the towns and marvelling at the age of the buildings and the gorgeous streets.

I rejoined the geologists, who were carefully hunting down specific rock samples. It is a painstaking process. Papers have to be read to determine where other scientists have found the right minerals, GPS coordinates are followed, and on the scene the exact rock to sample is found using magnifying glasses and intuition, and then chipped out with hammer and sweat. Next to a river, Marco and I started throwing rocks in the river to make a splash. We picked up bigger and bigger stones to throw, until Marco picked up a massive rock and threw it in. It made such a wonderful splash that we both congratulated each other just on being awesome. A minute passed and suddenly he realised: Marco had thrown the precious rock sample in the river. The scene that followed would have been amusing for someone who happened upon us – we waded and searched, and eventually found the rock sitting in a pool of water so much deeper than it appeared that to get the sample rock back required getting completely wet. The splash it made was the best of the day, though.