Longtime ISU geology field station director dies

The man after whom the Iowa State University geology field camp near Shell is named has died. 

Carl F. Vondra, distinguished professor emeritus in Iowa State University’s Department of the Earth, Atmosphere, and Climate, passed away March 12, 2025, at the age of 90. 

Over a period of approximately 40 years, from 1964 until 2023, Vondra directed the field camp where he mentored and taught hundreds of national and international undergraduates and graduate students. 

Vondra believed that a student’s education should extend well beyond the classroom and so he was known for bringing in to the department researchers of international standing to engage with students and faculty and leading fieldtrips to study outcrops in Europe, and across the U.S. 

Erik Kvale, who succeeded him and ran the camp for four years, said Vondra and his family spent so many summers in Shell that they became locals, adding that Carl befriended many local business owners at the time.

“It was not unusual to find Carl, often with some of his international colleagues in tow, sipping coffee with the local businessmen in the Big Horn Drug or giving a lecture at the American Legion Hall,” recalled Kvale. 

“For many residents, the unofficial start for summer was the day the ISU vans rolled into Greybull for the first time. In the ‘60s and into the ‘70s, the town of Greybull would host an annual picnic in the park for the ISU students and faculty. In return, Carl would open up the ISU field camp to the local community where the students were given an opportunity to share with the local community what they had been doing in the hills for the summer.”

Kvale received his M.S. and Ph.D. under Vondra’s direction in the 1980s.  Kvale’s work with Vondra took him to exotic places in the Philippines, Europe and the Canary Islands. 

Dan Close, who taught for many years in the Greybull schools, attended the ISU field camp in the early 1980s and took what he learned from Vondra and the other ISU faculty and parlayed it into a first-rate high school research program that many of his Earth Science students benefited from. 

Vondra’s life story began in Seward, Neb., where he was born June 3, 1934, and included earning his master’s and Ph.D. in geology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and working in the petroleum industry in New Orleans and Denver before joining the Iowa State University faculty in 1963.

Vondra’s obituary, which was published April 3, 2025, in the Ames Tribune, lists among his survivors his wife of 69 years, Georgia, along with two daughters, a son and numerous grandsons, granddaughters and great grandsons. A third daughter preceded him in death.

The Shell field station was named in Vondra’s honor in the summer of 2007.  

A reunion will be held there in 2026 and will include a celebration of Vondra’s life.