Speaker Mike Collins, mountaineering and geology enthusiast, will present “Time Travel Tales from the Yellowstone Hotspot and Great Basin Geological Province.” 

Speaker Mike Collins worked in manufacturing and administration since he graduated from Portland State University in 1964. For many years his primary hobby was mountaineering, which led to a serious interest in the geology of the western United States. His first geological research quest was to find out the story of the flood basalts. He has found in his research that there are some amazing stories buried in geological literature that would capture the imagination of the general reader if written in plain language and story form. 

The presentation is based on a manuscript he wrote several years ago but has not published. This story originally focused on explaining the emergence of the Yellowstone hotspot in S.E. Oregon and how it sculpted the Northwestern states. But in investigating how the hotspot might have influenced the Northwest, he investigated other interesting geological zones such as the Colorado Plateau, the Rio Grande Rift, the Nevada Rift, the Walker Lane in Eastern California, and the subduction of the Pacific plate below the North /American continent.