Grad School in Wyoming

I ended up in grad school in geology at the University of Wyoming seemingly by chance encounter. My Kenyan school had a three-month-on/one-month-off schedule, and during my time off, I traveled—game parks with rhinos, elephants, and lions, and the lakes of the Rift Valley—Naivasha, Nukuru, Begoria, Turkana, and Baringo. At the latter, a 45-minute boat ride took me to Island Camp, where thatched-roof buildings, a swimming pool and bar, and tent accommodations awaited. It was one of the few places I visited more than once.

During my second year in Kenya, I decided that I would study water resources when I returned to the U.S. I had decided clean water is important. Duh! While visiting Island Camp, I went for a stroll. An old couple sat in front of their tent looking at the lake. I chatted for perhaps 20 minutes, but that brief encounter shaped all that came afterward.

The old guy was Don Blackstone, a retired and emeritus geology professor from the University of Wyoming, vacationing in Kenya. I told him what I was interested in, and he replied, “Why don’t you consider coming to Wyoming?”“

At the time, geology was one of the hottest fields for employment in the world, driven by sky-high oil prices. When I applied, I was unaware that I was among 800 applicants for perhaps 30 slots. If I’d known, I might have been intimidated. But unlike many geologists, I am good at math, plus I wasn’t trying for one of the oil-related positions. Thus, I stood out enough to get accepted. When I returned home from Kenya, I got in my old wrecked-and-rebuilt Ford Pinto, my first and only car to that point, and drove more than 1600 miles to Laramie, Wyoming, to start graduate school.

The author in the Snowy Range
outside Laramie, Wyoming,
in the mid-1980s.

In grad school, your most important relationship is with your adviser. I had applied from Africa in the days before the internet, so I knew little about my adviser except for his name, Peter Huntoon. However, I took a class with him that first semester, and he soon took us on an overnight field trip to northern Wyoming. By then it was late September, and it snowed a foot. My hiking boots were still coming back from Africa, so I bought some lined cowboy books with high-traction soles. They performed well enough but fit terribly, eating through my socks and into my heels, as I and the other students hurried and failed to keep up with Huntoon’s hiking to spots he wanted to show us.

On our return drive, we stopped in at the Thermopolis Hot Springs. Soaking in the 105-degree water was a blessed relief. However, I found no relief for my seeming inability to please Dr. Huntoon. I got a bit of insight on a later field trip when he said, “I believe in making a student as insecure as possible. That’s when they do their best work.” I didn’t need any help being insecure, thank you. As to students doing their best work, I couldn’t see that it was being done for Huntoon—of the three students who began working with him when I did, one dropped out of school, and the other two changed advisers.

During that first fall, I took a class in mathematical geology because the course I wanted to take didn’t fit in my schedule. I did very well in the course, and the professor, Leon Borgman, needed someone to work on a project for the Environmental Protection Agency. He decided to fund me, and that summer, I changed advisers.

Dr. Borgman’s approach to working with students was quite different from Huntoon’s. Borgman had trained national-level obedience dogs, and he once said to me, “Working with graduate students is a lot like working with dogs—you don’t start kicking them before they know what to do.” Personally, I was like the dog who responded to a pat on his head with a hump on your leg. Anyway, I thrived under his more gentle approach, and in return he was able to turn over to me much of the project work that he didn’t enjoy, such as writing quarterly reports. I even got to write a proposal for continued funding, a great experience for my future career. I ended up staying on for another four years and completing my Ph.D. under Borgman’s direction.

I tell my students about the importance of developing closeness with a few of their professors. “You’ll need some letters of recommendation someday. And when internships or other opportunities come up, we tend to think first of the students we know best.” But these relatively self-serving justifications are really just an attempt to open a door. Friendships are sufficient in and of themselves.

During the spring after I started working for Dr. Borgman, he took me along on a trip to Las Vegas, the location of the EPA lab supporting our research. Las Vegas might seem a strange place for an EPA office, but it’s the closest city to the Nuclear Test Site, where weapons were exploded and observed after World War II. Water is the limiting resource in that part of the world, so funding research on groundwater fit with the office’s mission. During that trip, I met Dr. Dennis Weber, who worked at a research lab associated with the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. The following summer, Dennis opened his home to me as a free place to stay while working with the EPA. For six weeks, Dennis and I spent most of 24 hours per day together, working on research, eating out at the casinos, hiking, and talking in the nearby dough-nut shop. He took me in once again two summers later when I returned to Las Vegas on another project with the EPA. And I just got an email from him a few days ago.

When I finally got close to finishing up at the University of Wyoming, I first needed to form a Ph.D. dissertation committee of five or so professors or experts in the area of research, a committee including Huntoon, Borgman, and Dennis. Another of my committee members was Peter Shive, a geophysicist and Stanford Ph.D. who worked on an associated project funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. During my time in Wyoming, Peter met his present, wonderful wife, Gail, an artist and avid bicyclist. (I wrote an article about her [here].) And they, too, became friends I’ve stayed in touch with since.

I’ve long since returned to Wyoming with my own daughters. Each spent ten days at a wilderness program that included a first repel off the billion-year-old Sherman Granite that I had repelled off 35 years before, except they did it in the dark. They got to see snowfields in July as they hiked through the towering Rocky Mountains, including the appropriately named Snowy Range. And hopefully, they have grown to love the natural world as they’ve hiked through it, run over it, and driven and flown by it.

I wrote this several years before I retired. I had a chance to visit Peter in hospice before he died and visited with his wife, Gail.