No other news other than that I am enjoying teaching food, agricultural, and environmental law as well as persuasive legal writing at the Monterey College of Law located on California’s Central Coast. In discussing various toxic tort cases, such as the talc and ovarian cancer litigation, or Superfund sites in California, such as the New Idria Mercury Mine, I show a picture of the mineral at issue, talc and mercury, respectively, in the lectures. The topic is serious of course but teaching is fun.

A few things have happened for me – it has been a while since I communicated with the CC Geology department. I am still consulting in San Antonio in oil & gas and some groundwater projects, also researching and writing on various aspects of regional geology. 

A have had the honor of receiving few awards in the last 5 years: AAPG - Honorary Membership in 2021, AAPG - Berg Research Award in 2023 (to be awarded in August), and the GCAGS (Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies) - D.R. Boyd Medal for Excellence in Gulf Coast Geology in 2018.

I am also directing a couple of German choirs in San Antonio.

David Williams - '87

In October 2023, the University of Washington Press published Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State. I was the co-author with Elizabeth Nesbitt, curator emerita at the Burke Museum in Seattle. The book includes 24 profiles of a unique plant, animal, or environment and covers the 500 million years of fossil history found in the state. 

Meadow Koslen '96

Is now teaching Earth and Space Science at Wakatipu High School in Queenstown, New Zealand trying to nurture future geologists, environmental scientists and a few astronomers as well.  Drop me a line on mkoslenridd@wakatipu.school.nz if you are heading down under.  I will be bringing a group of students to Aspen, Colorado next year as part of a sister city exchange program in January and hope to stop into CC if time allows.

Hi all! I love reading the Precambrian Basement every year and hearing what everyone is up to! I’ve been working as a Petroleum Geologist for the past 7+ years at SM Energy in Denver. I’m currently working on the Reservoir Characterization Team, making 3D geocellular models of the Permian basin. I also recently became the Technical Development Supervisor and manage college recruiting, the intern program, and the new hire program for SM Energy. I enjoy volunteering in the Denver geologic community, and I am currently serving on the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists (RMAG) Board and the AAPG Rocky Mountain Section Board. I live in Evergreen with my husband and our two dogs and spend my free time mountain biking, hunting, doing CrossFit, and going up to Wyoming every chance I get! I hope everyone is well!

In 2019, I left my geologic mapping job and moved home to Paonia, CO to found Peony Lane, a Natural Winery. I grow the highest elevation Pinot Noir in North America. All of my wines are Natural Wine’s meaning that I procure sustainably grown grapes, ferment them with the wild yeast from my Pinot Noir Vineyard and take a hands off approach in the winemaking process. I ship wine all over the country. Order via PeonyLaneWine.com

Jackson Kohn

Since graduation, I completed a Witter Family internship all the way down undah in New South Wales, Australia at the Permaculture Research Institute on Zaytuna Farm. I was there for a total of 12 weeks – the first two earning my Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) and the following 10 working on the 66-acre farm. I worked under direct tutelage from Geoff Lawton, the foremost living authority on permaculture, and other knowledgeable workers on the farm.

During the working portion of my time on Zaytuna Farm, I became very circadian. Rising before the sun to manually turn compost, maintain the kitchen garden, and feed chickens, goats, horses, and cows. In order to feed the goats, another worker and I would ‘chop and drop’ legume trees called ice cream bean with a chainsaw and then drag the leafy branches to the goats with the atv. Definitely a good way to get the blood pumping on colder mornings when we had to climb into a nook of the tree to make a clean cut. One cool thing that I learned while cutting the ice cream bean branches was that a proportional amount of the tree’s root would die and decompose, returning nutrients to the soil from beneath the ground as we cut the upper branches. And because we were working with legume trees in a subtropical climate, the pollards that we created would quickly spout new branches from the place where we made the cut.

I was also responsible for maintaining several productive food forests. Food forests mimic natural forests in the sense that they have canopy trees, understory plants, vines, and groundcover, but most of the plants are non-natives that Geoff selected because of their unique or productive properties. The food forests were usually planted on contoured swales to increase their water-holding capacity and contained a huge diversity of fruit trees and supporting legumes (to fix nitrogen) and palms (to fix phosphate). Some of the fruits that are grown on the farm are mangos, bananas, guavas, Brazil cherries, loquats, jackfruits, mulberries, passion fruits, coffee, dragon fruit, lemons, oranges, and avocados. To maintain these food forests, we had to pollard legume trees to allow light to pass through to the productive fruit trees and apply a bit of compost to some of the more nutrient-intensive trees, like mango and avocado.

Zaytuna Farm is totally off-grid, so they use solar for electricity and rainwater catchment for drinking and irrigation water. The solar was not usually an issue thanks to the intense Australian sun, but the water was occasionally problematic due to the complexity of the kilometers-long piping system around the farm. Multiple times, there were huge leaks that led to over 120,000 liters of irrigation water being lost to the ultra-absorptive soil in various parts of the farm. This led to days of tracking down leaks, replacing damaged pipes, and lots of trial and error figuring out just how that much water escaped almost unnoticed. For one of the leaks, the entire 40,000-liter irrigation tank at the top of the property emptied overnight. We thought we fixed the leak and allowed the tank to fill (via solar pump from one of the 28 ponds on the property) and then opened all of the taps and proceeded with our day as normal. The following day, we realized that the tank had emptied again! Luckily, one of my coworkers found the leak by mistake and figured out that one of the horses had stepped on the pipe after we had rotated them into a new paddock and one of the swales had absorbed all the water.

Other tasks around the farm included general construction of different buildings, cleaning gutters, planting new food forests, taking care of nursery plants, rotating seasonal vegetable crops in kitchen gardens, making compost, and ample amounts of shoveling manure. My time on the farm was extremely fulfilling and I feel like I learned a lot about what it means to be sustainable and how to employ an ethic of permaculture on a daily basis. I am extremely grateful for my experience and will look back on it fondly for the rest of my life.  Here are some fun farm photos for my fellow geo-people!

Now that I’m back in the states, I’m going on a rock climbing nomadic road trip from the southeast across the south and then back up and over through the west. My plan is to find the climate where I want to be and then (hopefully) find a soil-based job in that location.

this past summer, Alum Charlie Sulfrian '73 and Professor Michelle Gevedon had a grand ‘ol time digging for Amazonite and Smoky Quartz in the Colorado mountains.

Victoria “Vikki” Crystal (’14) has been very busy over the last several years. After receiving her master’s degree in Geological Science from CU Boulder, Vikki spent a summer as a visiting instructor at CC teaching Geology of the Pike’s Peak Region. Vikki then moved to Omaha, Nebraska where she worked for the University of Nebraska Omaha as an adjunct instructor teaching Sedimentary Geology, Physical Geology, and Environmental Geology during the pandemic. She adapted her teaching strategies for a virtual classroom and even designed some virtual field trips for her students!

Early in 2020, Vikki created a podcast called Ask A Scientist, where she asks scientists questions written by elementary and middle school students. Several CC alumni have been guests on the podcast!

Vikki is now a curator and museum specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geological Materials Repository (GMR). The GMR is a centralized repository for the USGS that houses scientific working collections in a warehouse facility within the Denver Federal Center. Vikki enjoys spending her days surrounded by ~80,000 square feet of rock storage and driving around forklifts full of literally a ton of rock!

Gabi Rossetto Harris '15

Successfully completed her dissertation in Geosciences at Penn State University with a focus on Eocene-Oligocene fossil floras in Argentine Patagonia, with two kids in tow, Ruby, 3 years, and Calvin, 10 months. Beginning in January 2024, I start an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, hosted between the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the Field Museum (Chicago), to investigate the rainforest affinities of the Paleocene Castle Rock, Colorado flora. 

Hi all! Time flies. Yada, yada. My wife Becki and I were recently married in July 2022 in Larkspur, Colorado. We met studying geology abroad at the University of Canterbury in 2017 and reconnected the following year since she grew up 20 minutes from Yale (thanks Paul!). I turned in my lab coat for a pickaxe in 2019 and haven’t looked back since. We are approaching four years at the behemoth Morenci copper mine in Arizona where Becki works in modeling and I’m coordinating our drilling campaigns. Thanks to my newfound Covid-era hobby—genealogy—I’ve since learned I am the sixth generation of ‘White’ in the mining industry, so it’s all quite fitting. We eventually plan on moving to the East Coast, but we’ll be enjoying the mild, sunny winters until then! In other news, we honeymooned in Curacao, are headed to Hawaii this spring and are halfway through our quest of visiting all the National Parks. One must constantly travel to avoid going stir crazy in a tiny company town three hours outside of Tucson! Hopefully everyone is in good health and spirit. Very much looking forward to attending our 5-year reunion this October!

Lille Haecker '19

Hi all! I am currently completing the Impact MBA with a graduate certificate in carbon management from CSU. I never would have thought how applicable my geology knowledge is in the sustainability space! Here is a picture of me presenting my aluminum value-chain risk assessment project at a showcase in September 2023! I worked for Ball Aerospace this summer researching the different climate risks associated with their upstream supply chain. If anyone is interested in pursuing the Impact MBA or wants to talk about graduate school, please feel free to reach out: lille.w.haecker@gmail.com ;) 

Grace King ’23 

After graduating in May 2023, I moved to Denver to work at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in the earth sciences department as a Noblett-Witter Intern. I helped with many different projects, including making outcrop maps in GIS, participating in field work in North Dakota, and hanging out with other awesome interns, including four other Witters. I am grateful that my internship has since been extended through the fall and into the spring. In December, I also had the opportunity to present my thesis at AGU in San Francisco and connect with many CC alums. Hope everyone is well!

_{Posing with the K-Pg boundary outside of Marmarth, ND with other summer 2023 DMNS Witter interns, clockwise from top: Charlie Hite ’25, myself, Baxter Waltermire ’24, Katya Nicolayevsky ’24, and Taylor Jenkins ’26}

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