we journey into the uncharted wilderness of Tibet hundreds of miles from its capital city

of Lhasa and thousands of feet above sea level where the air is thin and oxygen is
scarce it is a journey I never imagined I would take and one that changed my life forever
and I owe it all to the death of my father it happened when I was 19 years old I was
home from college for the summer and for the first time since my parents divorced when
I was seven years old I was gonna get to live with my dad and I was really excited my
father and I had a special bond he was a musician a guitarist and a songwriter and he
raised me with a love of music we sang together a lot that was part of our special bond
he was always singing and telling jokes and so so full of joy that I never
thought about the fact that he was also very ill you see he lost the function of his one
good kidney in his 20s the same year that he would marry my mom and she was just 19
at the time and the doctors told them that even with a kidney transplant he would have a
maximum of three years to live well in 1972 he was lucky enough to get that kidney
transplant and 21 years later his only child was headed home to live with him for the
summer within 12 hours of giving to his house he was being rushed off in an ambulance
in congestive heart failure and he would never make it home again he died in early
August I was there with him and he smiled at me that day as if to convey that everything
was going to be okay even as he lay dying in front of me when it was over I stood at the
foot of his hospital bed and I stared at him I stopped staring at this man who had been
my best friend my biggest supporter and so full of life that I never once considered his
death he was just 50 years old in the weeks leading up to his death he lost his voice he
had a cancerous tumor growing deep in his knack it was inoperable and rather than die
due to suffocation he made the gut-wrenching decision to go off of his dialysis
treatments and so he died of sepsis but the tumor took his voice and pretty soon all he
could do was whisper and one of the last things he whispered to me was honey having
education now I was already in college and he was over the moon about this because
he never went to college but something about those words uttered to me from the bed in
which he would soon die meant so much more they lodged deep into my brain and took
hold just two days after putting him in the ground I
was headed back to school I was an English major at Syracuse University hoping to be
a writer or a journalist one day school had come easily to me I had a 3.8 GPA and I was
on track to cruise through my four years of college with flying colors but suddenly I was
grieving I was broken and I started to feel profoundly dissatisfied with my life it just so
happened that I was taking an introductory geology course that semester not because I
wanted to but because as a non science major I had to fulfill a science requirement
some of you probably know what this feels like I was not at all scientifically inclined I
had been afraid of math since high school and I was 100% convinced that science was
too hard for me that I couldn't do it but something started to happen in that geology
class that I didn't expect I was intrigued the things that I were seeing on the screen
during class the tallest mountains on earth and layers of rocks and red and gold the
color of a sunset I was captivated and this curiosity started welling up inside of me that
I'd never felt before and I had to know more against every instinct I was falling for
geology I fought it hard for a while but by the end of that semester I had declared
geology as my major and I started down the difficult path of becoming a scientist and
not just a scientist but a woman scientist and not just a woman scientist but a woman
scientist in a field that encourages if not expects you to go out into the field and
commune with the earth I was not an outdoorsy girl I was not raised going camping or
hiking the most down and dirty I ever got in nature was baiting my own hook when my
father and I would go fishing in Lake Ontario geology was going to require me to do
things that I was pretty certain I could not do physics chemistry calculus and yes even
getting down and dirty with nature my GPA started to plummet I got my first C and then
my first ever D and I cried a lot some of that was missing my dad and having the
realization that he would never know me as a scientist and some of it was feeling what it
felt like to fail but I made it through my bachelor's degree and I even went on to get a
masters degree where I was exposed to some field work in Southern Nevada where we
stayed in designated campgrounds with running water bathrooms and showers and
general stores and I was really damn proud of myself for surviving that level of roughing
it and overtime geology the passion for geology seeped deep into my bones and I made
the radical decision to go after a PhD and it was that decision that brought to me the
ultimate opportunity of my life the chance to spend more than three months in the
interior of Tibet doing research for my dissertation what was being offered to me was
wild the expedition would be rough there would be no running water there would be
unpredictable weather my only shelter a tent there would be no communication with
home or the outside world there would be Rock hammers and backpacks full of rocks
and heavy-duty boots and elevations of on average 15,000 feet there would be one
woman going on the expedition me and there would be one person going on the
expedition who was not a seasoned outdoors person that was also me we would drive
into the middle of Tibet Pierce the interior a Wildlife Refuge that was closed off to
foreigners it would be the farthest from home and the farthest from me I had ever been
my gut said no everything I knew about myself my capabilities and my limitations my
strengths and my weaknesses told me Jeff this is not for you this is well beyond what
you're able to do honey get an education and so on a balmy Los Angeles day in the
office of my UCLA advisor the scariest chance of a lifetime set squarely in my lap and I
said yes it was made very clear to me that in choosing to go I was going there would be
no special accommodations for a girl like me there would be no turning back and I
would not slow them down we left in April our first stop was Beijing we spent about a
week there collecting our topographic maps and getting to know the Chinese graduate
student that would accompany us everywhere we went one night over a dinner of
Peking Duck he told me he would never allow his wife to go to Tibet he looked me
straight in the face and he said Tibet is no place for a woman you will be defeated our
next stop was Lhasa the capital city of Tibet that sits at just under 12,000 feet elevation
and we spent a few days there acclimating to the altitude battling nausea and pounding
headaches and gearing up for three months away from civilization and getting to know
the Tibetan men that would be our drivers and deliver us into the heart of Tibet and
hopefully safely out again we bought drums of gasoline and food and metal boxes in
which to store all of our rock samples and oh so much toilet paper and it was there in
the shadow of the potala palace that I started to fall again this time for this exotic place
and its people so unlike me our second day in the field we were hunting these elusive
metamorphic rocks these are rocks that form due to pressure somewhere deep within
the earth we had seen them in the float the little chunks all around your feet as you walk
through the valleys but we wanted to find them in place and put them on our maps
these rocks had caught our attention because they had these beautiful deep red garnets
in them our target was a cirque that's a bolt shaped depression that's carved out of the
side of a mountain by a glacier and this cirque sat at 18,000 feet elevation this was our
second day in the field we started out that morning hiking up this beautiful wide
u-shaped valley it was gorgeous it was so beautiful and so green and I was working so
hard to keep up with my male colleagues and I couldn't do it i huffed and i puffed all day
and i watched as their rear ends receded into the distance as we made our way toward
the cirque and i felt really alone that day but i kept going and eventually i caught up with
them high in that Cirque and I could hear rocks all around me falling clickety-clacking
down the mountainside and crashing into pools of glacial meltwater below it was a really
intense day and at the end of that day I was completely spent physically mentally and
emotionally we got back to our trucks and that Chinese colleague that had told me I
would be defeated he took one look at me and he said geology is hard perhaps you
should find another job we spent many many days after that driving to our ultimate
destination which was the Chong Tong region smack dab in the center of the Tibetan
Plateau we drove over barely visible dirt roads and as we drove the landscape got more
barren and more beautiful nothing but wide-open space as far as the eye could see
which was really interesting when it was time to go to the bathroom we were making our
way deep into the wilderness where wild donkeys and gazelles ran free and humans
were few and far between it was a landscape like I had never seen before so vivid the
colors so beautiful purple mountains in the distance red rocks and orange soil lush
green grass and a sky so blue it was almost painful it reminded me of the sky the day I
had lost my father it was a beautiful perfect sunny day which is a rarity in upstate New
York and I remember that day thinking how strange how wrong it was to be losing my
father on such a perfect day I had lots of days like that in Tibet where it felt strange it felt
wrong like I didn't belong there I found myself on the verge of asking to go home a
thousand times and I struggled to find my confidence among my colleagues both as a
scientist and as a mountaineer and I called upon my father's voice many times to get
me through those three months some of the hardest three months of my life but as the
day's wore on I found my footing I experienced small victories like crossing a frigid River
on foot and not falling in or being offered a cigarette by one of our Tibetan drivers a
clear invitation into the social circle I started to surrender to the experience to let go of
all of my fears and learn to live as one with my environment and I remember one day I
made the decision to work by myself I was in a deeply incised valley of brilliant red sand
stones and after a long day of hiking and mapping I sat at the mouth of that valley and I
took off my boots to air out my blistered and aching feet it was so peaceful and so
beautiful and out of the corner of my eye I could see some movement it was a lone wolf
my heart started racing what do I do do I put on my boots and get ready to run do I dig
in my backpack for my Swiss Army knife and get ready to fight I took a breath and I sat
down and I decided to just sit with that wolf just take her in and see what was to come
that wolf was a harbinger of grace she gave me the gift of laying eyes upon her perhaps
the only human on the planet who ever did and then she went on her way and left me to
continue on my journey you see I had so many experiences like that in Tibet so many
that contributed to the woman that I am today I learned how to start with the big picture
a mountain or a valley or a running river and dig down deep into the geologic history
that was buried in the small pieces of the puzzle a folded Rock layer a stretched mineral
crystal and even invisible isotopes held with an individual grain of sand Tibet lies just
north of the Himalayas the tallest mountains on the planet that formed between two
tectonic plates that are colliding and have been for over 50 million years it is a Grand
Place a coveted geologic playground and one that I did not deserve to set foot upon but
in saying yes to that crazy adventure I unearthed some seriously uncharted territory
inside myself I witnessed some of the most spectacular geology on the planet but more
than that I learned how to understand it and I grew into a true scientist boy did I get an
education I think my father would have been proud in saying yes to geology to Tibet to
science I went down a path that I never would have chosen I took a risk a chance on
myself and it changed my life forever so what can you say yes to thank you