Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Magnetic
Clocks
The malevolent California sun stabbed through swarms of insects that late
afternoon in the typically hot summer of 1980, its fangs gradually releasing
their grip on day. My new graduate student Jim Haggatt and I sat in a cool
pool, watching amphibious insects bobbing merrily in the rushing creek, and
trying not to notice the cheerful skinny dippers several hundred yards down-
stream. As we lazed, resting stretched muscles, our ears still rang from a day
spent drilling and coring Cretaceous-aged rocks. We were distant from any
town, far up a canyon carved deeply into the Sierra Nevada, trespassing like
the locals on private land held in trust by a California hunting club—land
purchased so that its absentee landlords could slaughter the local deer in
