Burst their balloon, GeoGirls will find a workaround

MOUNT ST. HELENS — Call it a poor woman’s drone.

At Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, a group of teenage girls stood around a 5-foot red balloon destined to soar above the Hummocks Trail. A camera, jury-rigged into a plastic bottle with rubber bands, would shoot a photo every minute, surveying the trail below.

Until, that is, the balloon popped, the girls squealed and, minutes later, a new plan was made.

It was an apt metaphor for this crowd, members of this year’s class of GeoGirls at Mount St. Helens, and an appropriate learning experience for a group of teenagers who hope to pursue careers in fields where they, as a function their gender, are likely to be underrepresented in their field at best, and undermined at worst.

In the face of obstacles, the only thing to do is hurdle over them.

GeoGirls is an annual camp for middle school girls in Washington and Oregon, free for those accepted into the program. For five days, these students joined high school student mentors, college students, U.S. Geological Survey researchers and other scientists — all of them women — in the field to study the land surrounding the Northwest’s most famous volcano.

“Programs like this are really eye-opening” for young women, said Angie Diefenbach, a U.S. Geological Survey geologist stationed at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver. She was a GeoGirls instructor for the week, and an expert on volcanoes to boot. Diefenbach’s day job at the moment? Helping monitor the eruption of the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii via drone. The real thing — not balloons.

“The idea is to show different people at different stages of their careers,” said Liz Westby, also a USGS geologist overseeing the camp.

On Wednesday, the girls went into the field, collecting soil and water samples, mapping the landscape, studying thin slices of rocks under a microscope and analyzing earthquake data from seismometers. The week also featured a hike through the Ape Caves, lava tubes just south of the mountain, and camping under the stars.

Megan Martin, a 14-year-old who will start her freshman year at Prairie High School this month, hunched over a Geotech Geopump Peristaltic Pump — a device used to suck groundwater samples out of a tube in the ground.

“Ooh, look at all this fancy stuff,” Megan said, examining the numbers on the screen. Moments before, she and her group had finished digging a 5-foot well near Hummocks Pond, collecting soil samples as they dug.

Megan said she’s always had a reputation as being that kid who knew way too much about science, and she hopes that propels her into being an advocate for women in the field. There aren’t enough mentors for women pursuing careers in science, she said, so having the chance to surround herself for a few days with female scientists was “incredible” for the Vancouver teenager.

“If only a few girls could make a breakthrough, it would change everything,” she said.

Vancouver 13-year-old Norah Skogen’s eyes widened as she talked about seeing a ground-penetrating radar, a tool that uses radio waves to survey the subsurface. The Vancouver iTech Preparatory School eighth-grader dreams of becoming an astronaut someday, and that, she said, will definitely help in the future.

“Since we’re trying to colonize Mars,” she said.

There are more than twice as many boys as girls at iTech Prep, a Vancouver Public Schools science and technology magnet school, Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction data show. So to be surrounded by like-minded girls her age was a welcome break for Norah.

“I find it amazing,” she said. “We empower each other to learn more.”