Low-Impact Geologizing

Geology, whether it's a hobby or a profession, is an activity that exploits wild lands. Sooner or later everyone sees damage that someone else has done, even if it's only a legitimate sample drillhole. But there's always a first time that the damage feels bad. For me it was during a field trip when we visited a small, unusual outcrop in a back corner of a nearby college campus, and some of the more amateur members of the party unsheathed their rock hammers and started whaling away at it, spraying bystanders with flying grit for no good reason. A few years of that treatment would turn the locality into a pile of ugly and uninformative rubble. A senior geologist did it the right way, picking up a piece from the ground and breaking that into hand specimens of amphibole schist.

Certainly an old quarry, alpine stream bed or typical roadcut doesn't need kid-gloves treatment. But geologizing is an aesthetic as well as scientific experience, and if we care about rocks we try to damage them as little as possible, if only so future geologists can enjoy them too. It isn't officially part of geologic field etiquette or professional codes of conduct, but that's only because it should go without saying.

Less and less these days do I bring home backpacks full of rocks, helpless to leave an attractive stone alone. More and more I pick things up, photograph them and put them back—catch-and-release rockhounding. That's especially important in parks, all parts of which are protected from abuse, including their rocks.
_{Sample holes in a lava flow — Geology Guide photo}