Camping Students Get a Firsthand Lesson

By a twist of fate, a group of Orange County high school students on a desert field trip to learn about the San Andreas Fault not only got to talk about earthquakes, they experienced a real 7.0-magnitude shaker up close and personal.

Camping in wilderness about 25 miles from the epicenter of the Mojave Desert temblor, 20 Newport Harbor High School students and their chaperons were fast asleep Saturday morning when the earthquake “pulled in like a train,” said Scott Smith, a biology teacher among the group.

“It’s funny, there’s a lot of geology involved in the trip,” he added. “The earthquake sort of just tied it all together. In a sense, we couldn’t have planned it any better.”

The environmental studies club left town Thursday, when they visited Thousand Palms Oasis, crossing the San Andreas Fault and discussing the geology of the region.

On Friday, they drove to Joshua Tree National Park to do some rock-climbing, then headed off to the eastern Mojave Desert to set up camp, Smith said.

Before going to bed, several students gathered around a campfire to look at the stars and talk about the different geological plates they had learned about during the trip. Then one of them mentioned that she had never experienced an earthquake.

An immigrant from Bosnia, Sanja Primer recalled asking the other students what an earthquake felt like, she said in a telephone interview from the camp. Her family had moved to California a few months after the Northridge earthquake, and she had been curious about the phenomenon.

After a while, the campers all went to sleep and someone had brought up “how weird it would be if there was an earthquake” during their trip, said Carrie Dukes, another student on the trip.

“All of a sudden, I heard a roar,” said Primer, awakened by the quake. “I jumped out of my sleeping bag and ran over to the teacher and asked if it was an earthquake.”

While Primer feared for the unknown, others in her camp were more nonchalant. A few even slept through the whole thing, Smith said.

Dukes, 15, of Costa Mesa, said she woke up, but then “rolled over and went back to sleep.”

Sarah Bixler, 15, of Newport Beach, said she and another friend had decided to sleep in the open truck bed of a teacher’s vehicle.

“When the earthquake hit, we just thought it was morning time and they were shaking the truck to wake us up,” said Bixler, a sophomore.

The quake was felt as far as Las Vegas and rattled skyscrapers in Los Angeles. Using cell phones teachers had brought, many of the students called their families in Orange County, who were awakened about the same time.

Today, the group was originally scheduled to go to Mitchell Caverns, which closed due to the earthquake. Instead, they plan to visit the epicenter and see the scene of their overnight rattle first hand.

“We want to see what happened there, and maybe talk to any geologist who might be working there,” said Primer, an Aliso Viejo senior.