132-1 All of the Sights, None of the Heat: A Virtual Field Trip to the Gould Mine in Saguaro National Park, Tucson Mountain District

Session: Diversifying Geoscience Education Across the Academic Playing Field: Using Creative Methods to Foster the Current and Next Generations of Geoscience Professionals, Part II

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Virtual field trips offer a great way for students, academics, and interested members of the public to see and access sites they would not be able to otherwise, and to do so with informed guidance, allowing them to quickly examine and interpret salient geological features. This can be especially practical in places like Arizona, where the worsening desert heat makes it all-but-impossible to access field areas at certain times of the year. Virtual field trips are growing in popularity, and various venues are available to showcase them which are freely accessible to the public, such as Story Maps via ArcGIS. The purpose of this presentation is to showcase a new virtual field trip, originally designed for Pima Community College but readily available on StoryMaps, which explores the Gould Mine site found in Saguaro National Park, Tucson Mountain District. 

The Gould Mine is not the only focus of the field trip, as in real life the site is accessible by several trails, such as the Gould Mine Trail and King Canyon Trail, among others, which pass by numerous outcrops. These showcase sedimentary geology via the Amole Arkose, igneous geology via Silver Lily dike swarm intrusions and the “walls” of the Tucson Mountain caldera, and metamorphic geology via contact metamorphism and metasomatism altering exposures of the Amole Arkose. These, along with the geoheritage and environmental geology considerations offered by the Gould Mine itself, are organized into a series of 12 stops which allow for a holistic coverage of numerous pertinent areas of geologic interest within a single virtual field trip.  The virtual field trip itself is multimedia in it's structure, including text, photographs, augmented photos, and videos. 

            This presentation also highlights the process of making the virtual field trip from a technical standpoint, and showcases some of the media that didn’t make it into the final product. While nothing may quite match going out in the field, virtual field trips offer vastly increased accessibility to a far larger audience than any in-person field trip could with a minimum of environmental impact. The virtual field trip to the Gould Mine presented here is meant to add to this effort, and serve as inspiration and guide to anyone who might want to design a field trip of their own.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

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