SADDLEBACK BUTTE STATE PARK VISITOR’S CENTER GEOLOGY DISPLAY RENOVATION

Saddleback Butte State Park, in the Mojave Desert near Lancaster, California, offers a variety of unique geologic formations as well as wildlife and plants endemic to the high Mojave desert. The one-room Visitor’s Center at the park showcases local geology, biology, and mining history in and around the park, but some of the displays were dated and misleading (e.g. displaying minerals not found in or around the park). After spending the summer as an interpreter at a Northern California campground, my advisor and I worked with Saddleback Butte State Park personnel and volunteers to renovate the geology exhibit to reflect current outreach and educational trends.

We described a simplified geologic history of the park on a storyboard, adding hands-on examples of local minerals, rocks, and weathering products. We also included an introduction to basic concepts of geology such as how many rocks are an aggregate of minerals. We focused mainly on aspects of geology that casual park visitors could observe: for instance, the primarily granitic buttes contain numerous pegmatitic dikes, and weathering processes (including spheroidal weathering) have altered the outcrops. Here we present a summary of the new geology exhibit, which is now on display in the park’s Visitor’s Center.

We hope that the visitors will have an enhanced understanding of the geological processes active in the park. We also hope the exhibit will draw more people to the park and increase their enjoyment of this underutilized and underappreciated California treasure. My goal is that a visitor to the park will experience the exhibit and the park and be excited to share his or her new geological knowledge with friends, family or K-12 students.