Colin Wilson on Wes Hildreth

It is a little hard to write anything about Wes’s passing without falling into maudlin or hyperbole, such was his impact on our profession and my own career development. I first encountered Wes as a visitor to Menlo Park in October 1979 (yes, that long ago) when I was a wandering English PhD student returning from fieldwork in New Zealand to London. John Wright (of Cas and Wright textbook fame) had invited me to give a talk at a Pacific Northwestern AGU meeting at Bachelor Butte (near Bend). In that meeting, I first met up with USGS folks (slept on the floor of Dick Pike’s apartment), then was invited by Dick and Julie Donnelly-Nolan to come down to Menlo Park for a block of time. They very kindly arranged accommodation at the Mermaid Inn for a number of weeks and I was given the run of the Menlo Park campus and library. I met Wes and David Johnston among many others at that time, and Wes invited me to go over to Long Valley and view the Bishop Tuff; however, an early snowfall closed Tioga Pass and so the trip did not happen. 

Wes and I corresponded over the intervening years, and the notion of a collaboration on the Bishop Tuff was mooted, but started only in 1990 at the same time as work on the 1912 Novarupta eruption deposits (with Bruce Houghton and Judy Fierstein). Distracted by many other commitments for both of us, both projects absorbed a lot of field time and took a while to come to fruition, but both have come to represent benchmark studies in a world now consumed by modelling and theories. Wes and I had very different philosophies of doing fieldwork: he would assemble all his data and observations, then come to the conclusions; I would have a vision of what might be going on, and would be then testing and modifying that vision as the work progressed. We got there in the end, though. We learned a lot from each other.

One of the many pleasures of interacting with Wes was in writing and putting together manuscripts. He had, to English eyes, a rather curiously archaic mode of expression at times (the word ‘atop’ gave endless amusement to me and Bruce Houghton, and we were working on ways to get ‘abottom’ into one of the Novarupta manuscripts at one stage). I could envisage him, especially with his Harvard background, being in the room with the Founding Fathers debating over the wording of the Articles of the Constitution. A triumph was finding a word (incunabulum) that he hadn’t come across before and forcing him to resort to a dictionary. Writing, to both of us, was rewarding in finding the right combination of wording to not just convey the science, but also paint images that made the messages stick in the reader’s mind.

Another rewarding thing, following after the collaborative fieldwork had finished, was to call in during my traverses through Menlo Park, whether on fieldwork or ion probing at Stanford, and catch up with Wes (and many other good friends there). Unless away in the field himself, the office door would be ajar, and one could drop in and see him (and, for several years, Maddie the Pembrokeshire Terrier, to whom he was devoted and who he hid under the desk from the security guards). Good times, indeed, even as the Menlo Park campus shrank and the (rather dreaded) move to Moffett Field loomed on the horizon.

Suffice to say, I will very much miss Wes and his immense erudition and considered views.

Colin Wilson