Field Camp is over now. I took the class in 2002, and I've TA'd it for the past three years. I will probably/hopefully be graduated by the time next summer comes around, so I should not be teaching a fourth year. This has got me thinking about my legacy with Field Camp. What improvements have I made to the class that will last and make it better?

For one, I've redrawn most of the sector boundaries. The purpose of this was first to make them smaller and more manageable and second to include/exclude parts. For example, I got rid of the "snork" on the sector with Access Ridge and Doubtful Canyon because it was a big time waster. Besides, that sector was very hard to map as it was. This summer I mapped the sector south of Camp Tontozona, and ended up reducing its size by about 1/3. The geology isn't all that complicated, but it takes 1-2 hours just to get back there, so students have less time to map. My only regret was that I wasn't able to map every sector to redraw them all. There are two extra large sectors to the west now that I've convinced Tom to split into three in the future when the highway construction is finished out there.

Secondly, I've convinced all the instructors that mapping on a double-scale map is helpful for making a key. I take the topo map the students use, scan it, and double the size. Then you can map more carefully and fit more on it, like small quartz veins and bits of travertine. This also makes us map more carefully and get the geology right. By having these more accurate double-scale map keys, we can get rid of most of those old student maps we've been using for keys, which may not even be right.

That's about all I can think of right now. Maybe there's other little things I've done to make Field Camp better.