I, Riley Brinkerhoff, was born in the desert of eastern Utah, and came by my love of rocks and mountains because bare rocks and bare mountains are pretty much all we had. It’s very much naked geology out there without that pesky biotic covering that obscures the geology of greener places. I earned a bachelors and masters of geology at BYU in Utah; my thesis involved seismically imaging karst features in eastern Oklahoma and how they relate to thickening of the overlying Woodford Shale. Sometime later I earned an MBA at the University of Utah. I began my career at BP in Houston and left shortly before the Macondo explosion for Questar in Utah. In both places I worked tight sands in foreland basins. About three years ago I came to Billings Montana to work for SM Energy where I have worked to put together exploration plays throughout the Rockies. Currently I am working in the Williston Basin trying to tie various geochemical and stratigraphic features of the Bakken petroleum system to production trends.