AZ Scientific LLC

Landscapes / Field Guide to Canyonlands and Arches National Park

As a backcountry field-guide to Arches and Canyonlands National Park, I love seeing the beauty and diversity of the geologic landscape and sharing this with my guests. In addition to watercolors like the ones below, I also enjoy collecting different mineral specimens and doing research on mineral structures.

Research: Visualizing Chemical Structures using Mineral Crystals

My fascination with minerology began while volunteering as a sketching facilitator at the Harvard Natural History Museum in Boston, MA. Although inspired by the immense diversity in form, color, texture, and quality: I also found mineral crystals fascinating because they are chemically homogenous: or the same structure throughout!

However, I found that visualizing those chemical structures could be quite challenging using traditional “ball and stick” models. Out of curiosity, I attempted a new way to visualize the same information using the Periodic Spiral of Elements. That graph, originally published in 1964, offered a natural coordination of elements organized by electron “shells”, and helped to generalize chemical structures without as much visual complexity.

Through several years of research and experimentation, I refined the method and graphed hundreds of different compounds onto the Periodic Spiral. My goal with this work is to help make chemical information pertaining to mineral crystals more accessible to a general audience. Preliminary studies have shown that these graphs can also be used as an identification tool- to specify different unknown mineral crystals. This research is currently under revision at the American Chemical Society Journal of Chemical Education. (April 2026)

Below are a few examples: for the PSE method of chemical visualization:

2025: Moab Museum U92 Exhibit

Illustrations of different uranium bearing minerals were created for the Moab Museum, shown on display alongside physical specimens. This exhibit was open from Jan 2025- approx. April 2026.

A Field Guide (Book!) to Mineral Structures using the PSE

After graphing numerous different mineral crystals, I found that the method I developed worked well to generalize the chemical structure and overall geometry of different specimens. Following this, I compiled many of these samples into an illustrated field guide, which I hope to offer as a tool for fellow rock and mineral enthusiasts.

Ultimately, I love rocks and minerals and am constantly amazed by the diversity of their form. As a backcountry field guide to Arches and Canyonlands National Park, the complexity of geologic landscapes never ceases to amaze me. Similar to the paradox of drawing a landscape on a 4x 6 square piece of paper, however, chemistry offers an amazing tool to visualize these forms and structures.