About
Allen grew up in Southern California, which provided many early opportunities for studies in sedimentology and coastal processes. He knew by third grade that he wanted to be a teacher and scientist.
Geology in a bucket at Redondo Pier
At Upland High School, Allen split time between academic pursuits and the track team. Honors English classes were outstanding and he got lots of experience writing with teachers Cal French and Alan Rhodes, but his first love was chemistry, taught by Ken Johnson, who had an M.S. in geology.
Running the 180-yard low hurdles.
One of his teammates was a correspondent for a local afternoon newspaper, and Allen apprenticed with him and wrote his first story for the paper at age 15. He learned to collect and tabulate all the game statistics, write stories in his head, and type them out in one draft on a manual typewriter late at night in the sports room, under deadline, in a miasma of cigarette smoke and newspaper ink fumes.
On Cucamonga Peak in 1971, with friend and future geologist Allen Stork, above really, really soupy smog.
Allen matriculated at Pomona College (go Sagehens!). He decided on the first day of classes to major in geology, a discipline that combines his love of chemistry with his love of the mountains and desert. At Pomona he also: 1. learned that being on the Sagehen track team and passing German were not compatible; 2. had many fun summer jobs including planting geophones and surveying creep along the San Andreas fault, and 3. met his future spouse, Mary Olney.
There are few summer jobs more fun than going to Michigan in 1974 to slog through mud while wiring dynamite and blasting caps together, and then drilling holes and shoving the dynamite down into them. Allen read Principles of Physical Geology by Arthur Holmes and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand that summer. Guess which stuck.
Arthur Holmes (left) invented U-Pb dating for his undergraduate thesis project and later proposed mantle convection as the underlying cause of continental drift. His student Donald McIntyre (right) was Allen’s undergraduate mentor at Pomona College, and thus Holmes is Allen’s academic grandfather. McIntyre’s classes were glorious counterexamples to the belief that a good class needs a good syllabus. He came in and talked about whatever was interesting that day—commonly something about plate tectonics that he’d read in the latest issue of Nature.
Plate tectonics was only just gaining acceptance in the early 1970s, and Allen undertook a study of volcanic rocks in the Mojave Desert and their possible subduction origin for his senior thesis. After graduating from Pomona in 1976 he began graduate studies at UCLA, where he continued studies of magmatism and plate tectonics for his dissertation. UCLA was a great place to be then, full of brilliant graduate students and faculty and with abundant field trip opportunities and geochemical facilities. He earned a Ph.D. in 1981 and started a faculty position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that summer.
With teaching responsibilities in petrology, field classes, and introductory geology, Allen was promoted to Associate Professor in 1988 and full Professor in 1993. He served as Department Chair from 2008-2013 and was appointed the Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham Distinguished Chair in Geology in 2009.
After backpacking field work around Taboose Pass in 1993, Allen and Tom Frost of the USGS hired a plane to get an aerial view of the High Sierra. That convinced Allen to get his pilot’s license. He soloed in June of 1994, earned his private pilot license later that year, and earned his instrument license in 1997 after many enjoyable and challenging hours of instruction by Jim Yankaskas. Flying mostly Cessna 152s and Piper Cherokee Warriors, his favorite route was a loop from Bishop to Furnace Creek, Lone Pine, and back to Bishop. He intended to, but never did, play 9 holes of golf at each of those locations during such a trip.
Lined up on final approach in a Warrior at Sanford (TTA)
Allen retired in 2019 to devote more time to field work, writing, and traveling. Along with continuing research, he now focuses on making geology accessible to the public. He has written several Geology Underfoot books about areas in California, and is a sought-after public speaker on the geology of eastern California, Yosemite, and Death Valley. He also regularly gives talks about his research on magma, granite, and plate tectonics. Allen serves as an expert on Smithsonian Journeys tours, with a current focus on the Grand Canyon-Bryce-Zion area and Alaska. He and Mary, who continues her medical career, live in Chapel Hill.
Glorious scenery along Bishop High Sierra 50K course, May 2010
After raising young children and getting tenure, Allen took up running again in the 1990s and worked his way up to road marathons before learning the pleasures of trail ultramarathons and abandoning road races. Running ended with an injury in 2013, and he now is an avid cyclist and the proud owner of two Trek bikes, Violet and Almandine.
High point of the 106-mile Triple Bypass Ride from Evergreen to Vail, Colorado, 21 August 2021.
In alternate universes, Allen may be a fighter pilot, journalist, or fashion photographer.