My first experience with field work consisted of an expedition I organized to visit the Columbia River Basalt Group.  This consists of a huge plateau, covering half of Washington state, and spilling into Oregon and Idaho, which is made up of hundreds upon hundreds of lava flows, piled one on top of each other.  My scientific goal here was to look at scaling relationships of the columns, in order to determine how the lavas cooled, and how the cracks formed.  By the end of the trip, I had become avidly interested in field work, and was able to tell what time of the night it was just by looking up at the stars.  It’s nice to occasionally be connected to nature like that.