Caltech put aside astrophysics and supercomputer technology Friday for an earthier and more pungent obsession: harvesting from campus olive trees and turning the crop into golden oil.
Across the Pasadena school, students, faculty and staff climbed 16-foot-high ladders and rode a couple of cherry-pickers to grab the black and green fruit from about 70 trees and dump it into buckets.
What was billed as Caltech's first Olive Harvest Festival squeezed a healthy condiment from the landscape and provided a respite from the school's infamous academic pressure.
"It's not really just about the olives. It's about everyone working together," said freshman Tim Black, a math major from Wisconsin, who was in a crew using a ladder and rakes at one of the trees lining the lawn in front of Beckman Auditorium.
Festival organizers said they harvested about a ton of olives from the iconic trees, which are about 80 years old and 45 feet high. They anticipated a yield of 40 gallons to 50 gallons of oil -- enough to fill roughly 1,200 bottles of varying sizes. The oil will be sold at the campus bookstore to benefit scholarships, student activities and staff bonuses.
The festival, which attracted more than 500 pickers, grew out of a prank and a dare.
Last year, two Caltech undergraduates looking for some fun started to pick olives from the trees without formal permission. The school's new French-born president, Jean-Lou Chameau, spotted them and promised a home-cooked meal if they produced a batch of olive oil.
Biology major Ricky Jones and physics major Dvin Adalian took up the challenge with unusual methods. They used blenders, concrete blocks, window screens and a centrifuge to coax oil out of the hard fruit. Their unlikely success garnered national publicity and approval for Friday's campus-funded festival. Most of Friday's olive crop will be professionally pressed, purified and bottled by the Santa Barbara Olive Co. However, Jones, 22, and Adalian, 20, showed how far their own olive oil scheming had advanced.
The students designed and helped build a human-powered crusher that employs two large metal wheels -- each weighing a ton -- that roll over unpitted olives and turn them into a pulpy mass. After that, students wrap the olive mush in a cloth and place it inside an ingenious press, in which metal and plastic plates are screwed down tightly, squeezing the thick oil into a bin.
