Hi Mike:

Just wanted to comment on your field trip. That four day trip to the Eastern Sierra and Yosemite is a zinger! I did it twice with Santa Barbara City College many years ago and adored almost every second of it (the cold night at Mono Lake wasn't all that much fun.) Later came back and mapped areas outside of Big Pine and much later Mt. Rose near Lake Tahoe.

That said---my intro? I'm an wife of 35 years, a mom to two, a grandma of 4. I hold college degrees in Sociology (very old one!) and 2 in Geology. We just moved to my dream spot--Mt. Shasta, California. Every day I sit and gaze at that glorious monster about ten miles from my house. If it exploded, I might just pull a Harry Truman?? Dunno.

I've been active as a Planning Commissioner and Prez of the League of Women Voters, plus worked in the hospital for years with our beloved Golden Retriever, Nikki. Nikki is also retired with us, sorta has problems getting up, but loving her new surroundings. I'm married to a former Army Ranger who served in Vietnam, survived, and became a successful businessman. He's now retired. I adore him, enuff said. I now live in volcanic wonderland, and just wish tht my right knee was about 15 years younger. So much remains to be done up here and looks like I ain't gonna be the one to do it! Darn.

I have had the very great pleasure of knowing some truly great geologists and geophysicists, and grubbing around in the field with them. They have all been open minded, intelligent and very, very curious people. They adore new ideas and theories (well, almost all of them under the age of 65 or so!), and would absolutely love to find a prediction method. But it must WORK on a reliable basis. Place (within a few kilometers), Time (within a few months) and Size (within a moment magnitude?) are necessary.

I hang about here because there are some very, very wonderful folks here who genuinely (I think) want to explore prediction methods. I don't want to be too negative, but I haven't seen anything that works on a human time scale. We know in general WHERE quakes will strike, but surprises still come. The WHEN and HOW BIG are still problematic. Earthquake "storms" in Turkey shows promise, as do the recurrence of such areas a Parkfield (yeah, it does recur, just not on a very regular basis.)

I don't buy the ear tones, but maybe that is because my ears have been a problem for most of my life. I can't see how these could connect to any Earth movements but then again I could be wrong. The cloud theory is of interest, but given that I see fabulous "flying saucer" clouds up here quite often, I can't buy it. Electromagnetic stuff shows promise if we can do more research.

I dearly wish that somebody could come up with a good method to predict quakes. Who knows? Scientific knowledge is not much valued in today's society (not where more than half of our populations belives in creationism), but I will never forget people in history who have tried to keep the lights on even in the darkest days of cultural idiiocy!

Hope Don in Hollister is feeling better---don't give up Don!

cheers, PennyB