Update
Since I haven't updated in more two months, here goes:
Vacation pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/chrisxaustin
It was AMAZING. There was wildlife all over, so much so that we quickly learned to always have a camera and binoculars on hand even when just driving around. Chris and I flew out to whirlin_dervish's place and picked her up for the trip to Yellowstone. We stayed at Bridge Bay campground in the South Eastern section of the park, near some of the best wildlife habitat in the place. The first day we got out late after finishing camp set up. We tried to drive up to a hike, got caught in a bison jam (a traffic jam caused by a herd of bison in the middle of the road), and had to forgo our hike due to the time it would need to complete. We instead decided to drive around the northern part of the park just to see what was there. On the way, we saw a herd of elk from a distance, stopped at Tower falls, and saw through binoculars, a baby osprey trying to fledge from his nest. We got to Mammoth Hot Springs just as the sun was setting. The bacterial colors were cool, and the steam made everything seem like an alien planet. Chris put his tripod good use, and we got some amazing photos. (Coincidentally, Mammoth was the only spot where I had any decent photos come out, as my camera had been unknowingly been set for low fluorescent light. Only low light pics came out well, and everything has a bit of a blue cast. See pics above)
The second day, we went for a hike in Pelican Valley and saw our first bear on the way to the trail head. She passed right in front of the car and walked down to the lake to take a drink. We passed the trail head twice before spotting it, as a small herd of bison were standing in front of it as well as causing a bison jam. We did another short local hike while waiting for the bison to move off, and then set out on the trail to Pelican Valley creek. This being some of the richest bear country in the park, we made it a point to clap randomly and make plenty of noise so as not to run into a nasty surprise. Part of the trail was burned out, giving the surrounding trees a skeletal look and causing an eerie moan when the wind blew through the woods. We had gotten about 3 miles in when it started blowing into a storm (Yellowstone has short afternoon thunder storms) so we speed hiked all three miles back through the snags to the car just as the storm broke. We then drove up to Hayden valley to look for a pack of wolves who are supposed to hang out up there.
The third day we devoted to geothermal sights, arriving at Old Faithful 2 minutes before it went off. After getting the time when it was expected to erupt, we decided to hike out 2 miles to Lonestar Geyser, a cone geyser out away from the crowds. We got there just in time to see it erupt twice, (Lonestar erupts every 3 hours, first a minor 20 ft eruption followed by a 40 ft major eruption) We spent the rest of the day visiting Grand Prismatic Spring, the Geyser loop narrowly missing Great fountain Geyser, and the Artist's Paint Pots, a collection of mud springs and geysers where we were lucky enough to catch one of the non-periodic geysers Clepsydra erupt.
The fourth day we headed up to the Canyon area of Yellowstone, saw Mud Volcano ( horrendously stinky sulfuric set of hot springs formations), the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and Upper Yellowstone falls and tons of stupid people. After lunch, we hiked up Mount Washburn to the summit, which is at ~10,000 ft. Once we got to the top, we found a herd of bighorn sheep not 10 feet off the trail. They even had lambs! We also saw tons of ground squirrels and a pika (little tailless rabbit-like creature which may go extinct soon thanks to global warming). On the way back, we again staked out the valley in hopes of seeing some wolves, and finally saw them at around 8pm. They were so far away that even through my binoculars they looked like just like moving dots, through whirlin's binoculars they looked like dots with legs, and to Chris's camera at 48x zoom you could barely make out a canid outline. We also saw two grizzlies fighting over a dead bison. Overall, we saw in our visit all the large animals endemic to the park except for black bear, moose, and pronghorn antelope.
The fifth day we headed back to Missoula, got ripped off at the state fair, and crashed at whirlin_dervish's. We picked up her guy and departed the next day for Glacier.
Driving through Glacier is unnerving. We took the Going to the Sun Road, which basically goes through the center of the park and up on the sides of the Mountains. The road was a very narrow 2 lane, with a shear drop right out the window. We stayed at Rising Sun campground. Within moments of unloading the car, a ground squirrel attacked our food box, ripping a hole in our 2lb trail mix bag. This being haunta country, we had to toss out the entire bag. We spent the rest of the night going down to a store to replace the mix, skipping rocks at St Mary's lake, and playing card games and drinking beer (Alas, there was no camp fire due to park regs).
Friday was hiked around St Mary's lake, and saw a bunch of waterfalls. The lakes in Glacier are vividly colored due to "glacial flour," rock which has been ground by the active glaciers into a fine powder. I wanted to swim in the falls, but we had unfortunately neglected to bring suits.
Saturday we took a boat ride and nine mile guided hike with a park naturalist up to Grinnell Glacier, one of the only glaciers accessible by trail and the only one accessible in a day hike. The way up was pretty cool, albeit a bit crowded with the guide pointing out cool stuff along the way about the geology and ecology. Up by the glacier she showed us some fossil stromatolites, or fossilized bacteria colonies which we bio geeks were pretty excited about. The I found the glacier itself to be very depressing, as you could clearly see the amount of melt. On the way up the guide pointed out the location of the glacier at different times in history, starting from the 50s on. To give a bit of perspective, to get from Grinnell edge in the 50s to the edge of its melt pool (the lake that most of it has recently turned into, about a hundred yards from the edge of the living glacier) took a half hour - 45 minute hike, approximately a mile and a half away. The melt pool was about the size of a football field and full of iceburgs, while the glacier itself was much less vast. You could see on the cliff wall a good 40ft drop from Salamander Glacier, which had once been part of Grinnell, to the Grinnell ice. The ranger said that scientists had found that Grinnell has lost ~10 % of its mass in the last two years, which indicates that the melting might be speeding up. As we took off our shoes to dip our feet in the pool, we all thought about how different the next hike up here would be.
On the trail back, we again met up with the ranger, and we asked her where a good place to see moose would be. She recommended we try Fishercap Lake, a .1 mile trail from a near by campground. We got there at sunset, just in time to see two moose, a mother and her calf, standing about 60 ft away from us. We watched for a while, when the calf suddenly broke from the mom and started running straight at Whirlin-dervish and I. We had just stepped back, in fear of mama (moose can be mean) when the baby pivoted, and raced back to mom and began nursing. It was intense. Driving back, we saw 6 grizzlies and a black bear. (Glacier has the highest grizzly bear density anywhere in the lower 48 states)
The last day we broke camp early, and again headed up the Going-to-the-Sun Road to Logan pass. Here we took the Hidden Lake trail, which winds through an alpine meadow and has a wooden board walk to prevent people from stepping on the fragile soil. We saw mountain goats, including a mother and baby, marmots, ptarmigen( quail like birds who turn pure white in winter) and more bighorn sheep. We also ran into plenty of jackasses, who completely ignored the the signs and trampled over the fragile plant life without caring that each plant they squashed took longer to grow then they had been alive. Especially the people trying to use their cell phones as cameras. (By the way, every picture we took was either taken from on a trail, or a roadside. We did not have to leave the trail for these shots) One guy even tried to climb up to a bighorn ram, despite the bighorn pawing the dirt and tossing his horns around. (I was praying that he'd get gored) It was pretty disgusting what the crowds were going to the mountain. After finishing the hike, we drove back to Missoula, and flew home the next morning.
We also set up a fish tank. We had originally set up a 55 gallon tank we'd gotten from my uncle, but hadn't had it up for a week when we noticed that it was sloping, meaning the stand had some sort of weakness, causing the acrylic tank to bow out weirdly. This forced us to transfer the fish to a smaller tank so they wouldn't die and drain the big one. It looks like we will be replacing the stand, and need to get the tank looked by an expert at to see if it is too stressed to hold safely hold 55 gallons of water. For the meantime however, the fish are happy and no longer in danger of sucking carpet fibers. We currently have 6 platies (small colorful minnow like fish) and 4 upside-down catfish (They constantly swim upside down). If the big tank can be fixed, we want to add a pleco, 2 angels, 2 dwarf gouramis, and 2 kribensis (feisty but small cichlids).
Work is going fine. I'm in a bit of a PCR rush right now, barely able to keep on top of all the orders being thrown at me, but at least I'm not bored. My mice are fucking retards (they are not breeding well, get it?) but it seems like all but one line is going to be ok. I love my IPod and NPR podcasts, they really make the time fly faster.
I am not yet applying to grad school, as I still don't know what to study. I found a really neat exotic vet whom I will be shadowing on Saturdays and after work to help me decide on whether that is a career course I want to pursue.
I'm gonna be going to England and Scotland in October! Chris' work is sending him over, so I will be tagging along and we'll make a vacation of it. His airfare and 4 nights in a hotel in either Oxford or Reading are being covered by his work, so we decided to fly out into Edinburgh on the 10th, kick around Scotland for a few days before heading down to England for Chris' work thing on the 15th. There, I can explore by myself during the day and meet up with him after work. I'll get to meet his coworkers as well. The one problem I have is that the passport I applied for 3 months ago has the wrong birthday on it, so I will have to go down to the center in Boston to get it fixed before we leave. Apparently they can fix it the same day and free of charge if the government made a mistake (Though how someone can get the birthday wrong with a copy of the birth certificate attached is beyond me) It'll be my first time off the continent and in another country (Canada doesn't really count).
Chris is still amazing, even when he says I laugh like a monkey.
I'm off to play Starcraft
Vacation pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/chrisxaustin
It was AMAZING. There was wildlife all over, so much so that we quickly learned to always have a camera and binoculars on hand even when just driving around. Chris and I flew out to whirlin_dervish's place and picked her up for the trip to Yellowstone. We stayed at Bridge Bay campground in the South Eastern section of the park, near some of the best wildlife habitat in the place. The first day we got out late after finishing camp set up. We tried to drive up to a hike, got caught in a bison jam (a traffic jam caused by a herd of bison in the middle of the road), and had to forgo our hike due to the time it would need to complete. We instead decided to drive around the northern part of the park just to see what was there. On the way, we saw a herd of elk from a distance, stopped at Tower falls, and saw through binoculars, a baby osprey trying to fledge from his nest. We got to Mammoth Hot Springs just as the sun was setting. The bacterial colors were cool, and the steam made everything seem like an alien planet. Chris put his tripod good use, and we got some amazing photos. (Coincidentally, Mammoth was the only spot where I had any decent photos come out, as my camera had been unknowingly been set for low fluorescent light. Only low light pics came out well, and everything has a bit of a blue cast. See pics above)
The second day, we went for a hike in Pelican Valley and saw our first bear on the way to the trail head. She passed right in front of the car and walked down to the lake to take a drink. We passed the trail head twice before spotting it, as a small herd of bison were standing in front of it as well as causing a bison jam. We did another short local hike while waiting for the bison to move off, and then set out on the trail to Pelican Valley creek. This being some of the richest bear country in the park, we made it a point to clap randomly and make plenty of noise so as not to run into a nasty surprise. Part of the trail was burned out, giving the surrounding trees a skeletal look and causing an eerie moan when the wind blew through the woods. We had gotten about 3 miles in when it started blowing into a storm (Yellowstone has short afternoon thunder storms) so we speed hiked all three miles back through the snags to the car just as the storm broke. We then drove up to Hayden valley to look for a pack of wolves who are supposed to hang out up there.
The third day we devoted to geothermal sights, arriving at Old Faithful 2 minutes before it went off. After getting the time when it was expected to erupt, we decided to hike out 2 miles to Lonestar Geyser, a cone geyser out away from the crowds. We got there just in time to see it erupt twice, (Lonestar erupts every 3 hours, first a minor 20 ft eruption followed by a 40 ft major eruption) We spent the rest of the day visiting Grand Prismatic Spring, the Geyser loop narrowly missing Great fountain Geyser, and the Artist's Paint Pots, a collection of mud springs and geysers where we were lucky enough to catch one of the non-periodic geysers Clepsydra erupt.
The fourth day we headed up to the Canyon area of Yellowstone, saw Mud Volcano ( horrendously stinky sulfuric set of hot springs formations), the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and Upper Yellowstone falls and tons of stupid people. After lunch, we hiked up Mount Washburn to the summit, which is at ~10,000 ft. Once we got to the top, we found a herd of bighorn sheep not 10 feet off the trail. They even had lambs! We also saw tons of ground squirrels and a pika (little tailless rabbit-like creature which may go extinct soon thanks to global warming). On the way back, we again staked out the valley in hopes of seeing some wolves, and finally saw them at around 8pm. They were so far away that even through my binoculars they looked like just like moving dots, through whirlin's binoculars they looked like dots with legs, and to Chris's camera at 48x zoom you could barely make out a canid outline. We also saw two grizzlies fighting over a dead bison. Overall, we saw in our visit all the large animals endemic to the park except for black bear, moose, and pronghorn antelope.
The fifth day we headed back to Missoula, got ripped off at the state fair, and crashed at whirlin_dervish's. We picked up her guy and departed the next day for Glacier.
Driving through Glacier is unnerving. We took the Going to the Sun Road, which basically goes through the center of the park and up on the sides of the Mountains. The road was a very narrow 2 lane, with a shear drop right out the window. We stayed at Rising Sun campground. Within moments of unloading the car, a ground squirrel attacked our food box, ripping a hole in our 2lb trail mix bag. This being haunta country, we had to toss out the entire bag. We spent the rest of the night going down to a store to replace the mix, skipping rocks at St Mary's lake, and playing card games and drinking beer (Alas, there was no camp fire due to park regs).
Friday was hiked around St Mary's lake, and saw a bunch of waterfalls. The lakes in Glacier are vividly colored due to "glacial flour," rock which has been ground by the active glaciers into a fine powder. I wanted to swim in the falls, but we had unfortunately neglected to bring suits.
Saturday we took a boat ride and nine mile guided hike with a park naturalist up to Grinnell Glacier, one of the only glaciers accessible by trail and the only one accessible in a day hike. The way up was pretty cool, albeit a bit crowded with the guide pointing out cool stuff along the way about the geology and ecology. Up by the glacier she showed us some fossil stromatolites, or fossilized bacteria colonies which we bio geeks were pretty excited about. The I found the glacier itself to be very depressing, as you could clearly see the amount of melt. On the way up the guide pointed out the location of the glacier at different times in history, starting from the 50s on. To give a bit of perspective, to get from Grinnell edge in the 50s to the edge of its melt pool (the lake that most of it has recently turned into, about a hundred yards from the edge of the living glacier) took a half hour - 45 minute hike, approximately a mile and a half away. The melt pool was about the size of a football field and full of iceburgs, while the glacier itself was much less vast. You could see on the cliff wall a good 40ft drop from Salamander Glacier, which had once been part of Grinnell, to the Grinnell ice. The ranger said that scientists had found that Grinnell has lost ~10 % of its mass in the last two years, which indicates that the melting might be speeding up. As we took off our shoes to dip our feet in the pool, we all thought about how different the next hike up here would be.
On the trail back, we again met up with the ranger, and we asked her where a good place to see moose would be. She recommended we try Fishercap Lake, a .1 mile trail from a near by campground. We got there at sunset, just in time to see two moose, a mother and her calf, standing about 60 ft away from us. We watched for a while, when the calf suddenly broke from the mom and started running straight at Whirlin-dervish and I. We had just stepped back, in fear of mama (moose can be mean) when the baby pivoted, and raced back to mom and began nursing. It was intense. Driving back, we saw 6 grizzlies and a black bear. (Glacier has the highest grizzly bear density anywhere in the lower 48 states)
The last day we broke camp early, and again headed up the Going-to-the-Sun Road to Logan pass. Here we took the Hidden Lake trail, which winds through an alpine meadow and has a wooden board walk to prevent people from stepping on the fragile soil. We saw mountain goats, including a mother and baby, marmots, ptarmigen( quail like birds who turn pure white in winter) and more bighorn sheep. We also ran into plenty of jackasses, who completely ignored the the signs and trampled over the fragile plant life without caring that each plant they squashed took longer to grow then they had been alive. Especially the people trying to use their cell phones as cameras. (By the way, every picture we took was either taken from on a trail, or a roadside. We did not have to leave the trail for these shots) One guy even tried to climb up to a bighorn ram, despite the bighorn pawing the dirt and tossing his horns around. (I was praying that he'd get gored) It was pretty disgusting what the crowds were going to the mountain. After finishing the hike, we drove back to Missoula, and flew home the next morning.
We also set up a fish tank. We had originally set up a 55 gallon tank we'd gotten from my uncle, but hadn't had it up for a week when we noticed that it was sloping, meaning the stand had some sort of weakness, causing the acrylic tank to bow out weirdly. This forced us to transfer the fish to a smaller tank so they wouldn't die and drain the big one. It looks like we will be replacing the stand, and need to get the tank looked by an expert at to see if it is too stressed to hold safely hold 55 gallons of water. For the meantime however, the fish are happy and no longer in danger of sucking carpet fibers. We currently have 6 platies (small colorful minnow like fish) and 4 upside-down catfish (They constantly swim upside down). If the big tank can be fixed, we want to add a pleco, 2 angels, 2 dwarf gouramis, and 2 kribensis (feisty but small cichlids).
Work is going fine. I'm in a bit of a PCR rush right now, barely able to keep on top of all the orders being thrown at me, but at least I'm not bored. My mice are fucking retards (they are not breeding well, get it?) but it seems like all but one line is going to be ok. I love my IPod and NPR podcasts, they really make the time fly faster.
I am not yet applying to grad school, as I still don't know what to study. I found a really neat exotic vet whom I will be shadowing on Saturdays and after work to help me decide on whether that is a career course I want to pursue.
I'm gonna be going to England and Scotland in October! Chris' work is sending him over, so I will be tagging along and we'll make a vacation of it. His airfare and 4 nights in a hotel in either Oxford or Reading are being covered by his work, so we decided to fly out into Edinburgh on the 10th, kick around Scotland for a few days before heading down to England for Chris' work thing on the 15th. There, I can explore by myself during the day and meet up with him after work. I'll get to meet his coworkers as well. The one problem I have is that the passport I applied for 3 months ago has the wrong birthday on it, so I will have to go down to the center in Boston to get it fixed before we leave. Apparently they can fix it the same day and free of charge if the government made a mistake (Though how someone can get the birthday wrong with a copy of the birth certificate attached is beyond me) It'll be my first time off the continent and in another country (Canada doesn't really count).
Chris is still amazing, even when he says I laugh like a monkey.
I'm off to play Starcraft