OUTSTANDING IN HIS FIELD: A FAMILY PERSPECTIVE ON THE EVOLUTION AND HIGHLIGHTS OF KEN PIERCE’S CAREER

Ken Pierce’s career extends from the faults of Appalachia to the glaciated mountains of Montana. Ken is a classic field geologist. For Ken’s family, this meant loading up the family station wagon with tents, dogs, augers, and children, and heading off to parts unknown. In the mid 1960’s, Ken began what was to be a long career in the Yellowstone region. He spent his summers mapping (on horseback) the Pinedale and Bull Lake glacial extents; the resulting publication won Ken the Kirk Bryan Award in 1982. For his wife, Linda, and two young boys, summers in Yellowstone were a wild mixture of grizzly bears, trout fishing, and mosquitos. From Yellowstone, Ken moved on to Idaho, where with Steve Colman and Irving Friedman, he developed the weathering rind dating technique and mapped and dated Quaternary loess, gravel and glacial deposits. (For his young daughter Jennifer the moraines of McCall held more allure than the loess of the Snake River Plain.) Then came the 1983 Borah Peak Earthquake. The quake, combined with Ken’s work in the region, lit a fire—later to be defined as a ‘hot spot’—in Ken’s research career. Ken teamed up with Lisa Morgan to produce his pivotal work on the faulting, volcanism and uplift associated with the Yellowstone hotspot. During this time, his research became truly interdisciplinary; Ken spent many late nights at the office learning about everything from mantle plume dynamics to the mechanics of basalt flows. In the late 1980’s, Ken’s research shifted to Jackson Hole where (with John Good) he mapped and described the geologic history of the region, publishing widely-read books on the geology of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. In the late 1990’s and 2000’s, Ken collaborated with Joe Licciardi to date the moraines he mapped during his career, and with Cathy Whitlock to establish chronologies of climate variability in the Yellowstone region. In 2012 he earned the Distinguished Career Award. Ken’s keen observational skills and inquisitiveness, combined with his single-minded perseverance have made him a legend in the field. As recently as a few years ago, he put a group of researchers and students to shame in the Lost River Range when he was the only one who wanted to keep mapping at 7 pm in a snowstorm. Ken leads by example; his inexhaustible love of geology, his work ethic, and his generosity are an inspiration.