Friday, February 29, 2008

Family strata

This evening as I was reviewing new geocaches, I was pleasantly surprised to see a photo of a rock that I immediately recognized. (OK, I can hear you snickering out there. Yes, it's true. I recognized a rock.) It's called the Gwynne Rock and it's located on the Iowa State campus. It's actually a boulder, and it is featured in a new geocache placed by called LCC 50th--Hitaga Sand Prairie Big Rock (GC19KX7) , a cache by Linn County Conservation and jimmygps. I have several "connections" with this rock. First of all, I'm an ISU alum and I walked and rode past that rock hundreds of times. Secondly, the rock is named after the late Dr. Charles Gwynne, a former professor of geology at ISU and my great uncle. Thirdly, several years after my graduation from ISU, I lived in Marion for seven years and one of my favorite places to go hiking, biking and cross-country skiing was Squaw Creek Park, where the rock was discovered before being moved to the Iowa State campus. Read more about Dr. Gywnne and the rock here.

3 comments:

Iowa Tom said...

Neat erratic! We have a smaller version of that here in Waterloo.

I imagine that was hard to pick up w/o marking it up.

juliecache said...

very cool stories about the rock. As an ISU alum, I feel more compelled to visit now. and I'm taking the kids along!

LiquidAdventuring said...

Hello, it's me IowaAdmin. It's been a long time since I looked at this blog page but I just discovered something I want to correct. I posted that the Gwynne Rock originally came from Squaw Creek Park in Linn County but I was mistaken. It came from Squaw Creek Park in Ames, not far from where it now stands.