Max Dahlquist is a climber. Whenever he gets the chance to get a bird’s eye view he jumps, grapples and shimmies at the opportunity. So, naturally, when Max arrived in Oregon at the beginning of July, he began climbing. He climbed everything from trees to rocks.

“There was one place that we stopped by this lava flow with all this volcanic glass, and we just did a stop and I climbed about 200 feet up this real steep bluff,” Dalquist said. “There were so many good views and places to climb.”

Dalquist, along with 11 other students and three faculty members, took an 11-day trip to southern Oregon and northern California as part of the Geology 390 summer class.

The class, popular with geology majors, split up into two parts. The first part of the class is spent in the classroom learning in depth about the regions they would see during the trip. All the students had to do a research paper on one specific location.

Dalquist said he wrote his paper on the Three Sisters.

“It’s this spectacular area where there are five volcanoes clustered close together in western Oregon,” Dalquist said.

The second half of the class was the trip itself. The class traveled along the coast of Oregon, through the National Sand Dunes Monument, Cape Aargo and tidal pools, Redwood National Park and Smith River, Table Rocks and Rogue River Valley, Callahan and Lover’s Leap, Crater Lake, Garfield Peak, the Lava Cast Forest and Lava River Cave.

The trip was generally fast paced packing up and staying and camping at different locations. The main focus was an in depth look at Crater Lake and the rocks along the coast line. In the past, the class has gone to New Mexico, Hawaii, Canada and the Appalachians.

For faculty members Joseph DiPietro and William Elliott, the location was familiar which aided in the planning of the trip. Elliott, geology department chair, came from the University of Southern Oregon and has ran the field trip in the past a few times from there, and DiPietro earned his Ph.D. at Oregon State and was familiar with the area.

“Just to go back to Oregon was fantastic,” DiPietro said. “The geology is spectacular. There are a lot of different types of geology and is an exciting area geologically.”

The trip is always a great way for students to really get a grasp on geology and experience the art first hand, Elliott said.

“A lot of the students have never seen geology outside of Southern Indiana,” Elliott said. “This trip gives them a chance to get out of their element and experience something new and exciting.”