The pre-meeting field trip for PACROFI-IX will be a behind-the-scenes tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History mineral collection. The tour will be led by Sorena Sorensen, the Chair of Smithsonian’s Department of Mineral Sciences, and will include a showing of Ed Roedder’s collection housed at the National Museum of Natural History. In addition to the behind the scene tour of the mineral collection, there will be a guided tour of the public mineral collection as well. The field trip will leave from the USGS National Center in Reston, VA survey in the morning of Monday, June 2nd. The buses will take us downtown to the Museum, and then bring us back to the USGS National Center in time for the conference registration and icebreaker event. The costfor the trip will be $40.00, so sign up for a special opportunity for a behind the scenes look at the Smithsonian’s impressive geology collections.