Friday, March 7, 2008

Friday Field Foto: I Saw the Sign...

And totally ignored it, because I'm a geologist and warning signs shall not deter me from my goals (however life-threatening they might be).

After seeing Julian's photo of the Unsafe Rock Area sign (which I want), and Geotripper's collection of geology-related warning signs, I thought a good topic for today's Field Fotos would be some warning signs of my own. Most of them are from the Big Island of Hawaii (although I don't have any of the fault zone warnings, unfortunately), but my favorite is from the mainland. Here we go:

We did not actually see any vehicles attempting to drive into the Halema'uma'u crater, but if that sign is there, chances are it means someone, at some point, did.

This is the jungle trail from the Fern Forest neighborhood into the Kahauale'a Natural Area Reserve, which we hiked to get to Pu'u O'o. It was closed because of the new flank eruption, so naturally we all took pictures with the sign and gleefully vaulted over the red tape. (With permission and USGS scientists along...I'm not that stick-it-to-the-man.)

Further along the trail. Unfortunately, I didn't quite frame this right...

My favorite sign in Volcanoes NP, at the end of Chain of Craters Road. I highly suspect the park rangers dumped it into a fresh lava flow at some point just to freak people out, but you never know.

And this is one of my all-time favorites, taken just outside Big Bend NP, Texas. If you trespass, someone might come after you with a pump-action shotgun and send you home in multiple boxes, but at least they'll feel bad about it. (Just kidding. We only ever saw handguns while we were there, and that was mostly in the grocery stores.)

5 comments:

Julian said...

One of the other grad students here is doing her PhD work on Kilauea. She has some awesome pictures, including one of a stop sign buried up to the bottom of the sign itself in lava, and another one of a NO PARKING sign with a huge lava field beyond it. I can ask her if she'd be willing to put these someplace public.

Callan Bentley said...

A nice series. You've inspired me to put up one of my own.

Jessica Ball said...

I've got a few of that NO PARKING sign myself - it's great for the irony - but I wasn't able to find the stop sign. I know where she found them, though!

Cool photo, Callan! It's kind of fun to ignore signs like that (when you know you're not going to get in serious trouble, anyway).

Ron Schott said...

Here's another to complete the Hawaiian set: Deep Earth Cracks

Silver Fox said...

I love signs, and I really love these signs. I'll have to start digitizing my photo collection - I went digital kind of late, not until 2006 (mostly road signs, not danger signs).