Yellowstone, Finally

So, Yellowstone. While the area is huge and beautiful, most of it is inaccessible by car. Hiking is one way to get a more in depth interaction with the area, but since I had a day to cover as much as I could, I decided to do the touristy car loop. It's very difficult to write about the experience, because Yellowstone is all about the experience. It's about standing in a spot and being surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells and feels of a very special place. When you're looking down into a bubbling, rainbow pool of sulfuric water, and the cool breeze is mingling with the hot steam against your skin, and you can taste the sulfur on your tongue, and a buffalo is rolling in the dirt nearby, and the vents are growling with the sound of thermal energy straining against the rock, you realize there's no medium that can really do justice to it all. But I'll try a little.

Old Faithful may be the most famous geyser in the park, but that's probably just because it's the most predictable and has a short enough interval for people to guarantee a sighting. There are other, nicer geysers that you can get closer to. I preferred Solitary Geyser myself, for a number of reasons. For one, it takes a bit of hike up a hillside to get to, which means instead of being one of a hundred people on Independence Day weekend crowding around the more popular geysers I found myself alone in a very nice outcropping. I also saw a pika on my way up.

This isn't my photo. The pika I saw moved too fast for me to get a shot of, but I doubt I will see one of these critters again. They only live in high elevation, and to be honest, I'm not sure if what I saw was a pika. I got a good look at it, and it certainly wasn't a rodent I had ever seen before, but there might be some cousin I'm unfamiliar with or something. It looked a lot like the little guy above though.

 You can also get much closer to Solitary Geyser. I'm pretty sure this is it, but all these pools and geysers tend to look the same after the first dozen or so. It eruption is puny in comparison to its siblings, only four feet or so, but it erupts every 10 minutes with an angry little burble. It also has managed to kill most of the forest down hill from it, which is an impressive feat imo.

The other nice thing about Solitary Geyser is that just to the left of where this picture is taken you have a bird's eye view of most of the geysers in the area. I got to watch another geyser, one with a very impressive height, go off in the distance, whereas you can't see all that much once you climb back down to the boardwalk.

Everywhere there are signs warning you to stay on the path, not to drop things into the features, and so on and so forth. I found it interesting that the warning signs were in eight different languages, all western save for Japanese, and yet hands down the most common language I heard while I was at the park was Mandarin. Sometimes I heard more Mandarin than English. If I were to list the languages I heard in their order of frequency, it would go: Mandarin, some South Asian Language (not familiar enough with India to pin point it), French, and then Texan. At times I understood more Mandarin than Texan.

And yet there's no literature in Mandarin or Punjabi or whatever. Obviously all the signage was created prior to the huge wave of Chinese tourism that we're now experiencing. I'd say that a quarter of the people in some of the areas I visited at least were Chinese or of direct Chinese decent. 

Anyway, back to the tour. There was wildlife of course. At one point a large herd of elk was spotted traveling across a plains area, which caused quite a traffic buildup as everyone veered off the road to watch, but most of the time the rockstars of the large mammal world were the buffalo. 

Here we have a buffalo standing around, doing nothing more than holding up traffic forever. He wasn't moving, or really bothering to care about the cars trying to get around him. He just stood there and seemed pleased with himself. The rest of his herd was being more reasonable on either side of the road. People are, in general, really stupid when it comes to their tourism. There were cars that would stop right at his face and someone would hang out the window to take a picture. The white car you see stopped behind him had gotten around, stopped, and the lady in the passenger seat got out and started shooting. It took quite a while for the cars on the other side of the road to decide it was time to let me through, and even when I was trying to get around the stupid white car in front of me insisted on taking more pictures before moving on. 

This was the closest I came to any buffalo, but it wasn't the most interesting encounter. There's a patch of road a few miles before you even hit the park where a herd likes to hang out in the mornings. I've passed them twice now, and both times you slow to a crawl as you navigate around these beasts going back and forth from the street. The cool part about that herd are the baby calves they have right now. They're only about the size of a large dog, and are caramel colored and nothing but leg. I didn't see any calves in the park, only outside of it.

On occasion there were buffalo at the springs. I don't think the rangers appreciate this much, because when you're trying to tell people that stepping off the board walk will result in falling through a weak crust to your boiling doom, having a ton of animal chilling right next to the water does not properly illustrate that concept.

The majority of the spots carved out for tourists were around hotsprings and 'paint pots.' I couldn't figure out how to take pictures of the paint pots to give a really good sense of them, because a large part of their charm is the fact that they are boiling mud, and I didn't manage to get a good shot of any bubbles bursting, so all it looks like is interesting colored mud. The spectrum of color represented in the paint pots is impressive though. They go from red, to blue, from black to white. The photo above isn't a paint pot. It's a hot spring. I think it's abyss hotspring but I don't quite remember. The colors were much more vivid in person, but you get some sense of what the stiller waters looked like.

On the return loop I ended up encountering snow. There were some large drifts about 3 feet deep on the sides of some of the larger hills, and this pile was blocking the path to this waterfall...

In order to get to it you had to clime up the drift into the forested area and then back down once things cleared up. I ended up with snow in my sneakers in July.

That's pretty much it. I left at 6AM and didn't get back home until 10pm. After I was done with the park I drove to Signal Mountain, where I was told one could get the best view of the sunset over the Tetons. This was true, but here is where my most ridiculous encounter with mosquitoes until this morning happened. I got to the top about an hour before sunset, assuming that there would be no parking and it would be crammed with people, but when I stopped there was almost no one, and the people who were there were leaving. I didn't realize what was going on until I was making my way to the over look and passed a guy who was wildly waving his hands in front of his face. Even though Signal Mountain give one amazing view across all of Jackson hole and Teton National Park, the mosquitoes up there are vicious. I tried hiding in the car but couldn't get in fast enough to prevent a few dozen mosquitoes from following me. It was the top of a mountain, so there wasn't anywhere to flee from them either.

I was determined that I'd wait it out though. A number of people came, got to the overlook, and then retreated, but by the time the sun set only about ten people had maintained the will for the payoff, though the photographers were complaining that there were so many mosquitoes that their shots were being ruined.

I managed to kill two mosquitoes at once just by slapping at a random place on my leg. They were really nasty. But I did see a nice sunset.

Interlude

I was planning on talking about how Saturday night included one of my most ridiculous mosquito encounters ever, but I went out hiking this morning and that no longer holds true. Until today I had been relatively peaceful towards the mosquitoes, even though they were growing in number and their incessant buzzing has been keeping me up at night. As long as they didn't land on me and start sucking, they could live. And the mosquitoes in my room have been good about that, generally.

Today I left in the early morning hours to hike the Two Ocean and Emma Matilda lake paths. Around each lake is about 6 miles, and combined they're about 10 or so. It was supposed to be a good area for animal sightings, including bears, so I had this can of bear spray with me that looked something like a miniature fire extinguisher.

The good news was I didn't get attacked by a bear. The bad news was I didn't even see a bear, or anything else for that matter, beyond a few grouse, which were pretty cool.What I did end up running into were mosquitoes. The entire hike was so utterly infested with them I don't doubt that was why there were no animals in sight. They had all be driven away by these blood suckers, and I was the only stupid mammal that didn't turn right around and leave when I noticed there were so many of them.

The scenery around the hike was nice, there was some cloud cover keeping things from getting too hot, and the hike was very docile, with only some mild inclines. Thank God, because I shot through it all as fast as my legs could carry me. I was too stubborn to turn back until there was no point in not just finishing the loop, but I couldn't stop without getting engulfed by insects. Even as it was I was almost eaten alive. If I hadn't had my sweater things would have been much, much worse. As it was, the only parts of me that were exposed were my face, my throat, and my knuckles, all of which were attacked so consistently my hands were bloody and black from retaliation by the time I made it out. In the beginning I kept feeling them coming down on the top of my head, so I had to put my hood up. I made the mistake of checking my shoulders a few times, only to get a little creeped out by the sheer number of mosquitoes trying vainly to get through my sleeves. I learned pretty fast to not worry about it and just charge through. Even the sound of the many streams feeding into the lake were drowned out by the insane buzzing. It all reminded me of those stupid swarms in Diablo II, only instead of zapping my stamina these mosquitoes actually enhanced it by driving me forward.

I had brought lunch with me, which I had sealed tight to prevent the smell from attracting bears, but I couldn't stop to eat it without being thoroughly eaten in turn, so I was starving by the time I got back to the car. Instead of looping around both lakes as I had intended, I ended up cutting my losses and marching down the middle of them.

All in all, it was a real disappointment. The first of the summer, to be honest. I would have loved to have taken my time and enjoyed the solitude of the place, but it just wasn't going to happen.

So after I got home, took a nice long shower, and finally had my lunch, I decided I was done playing nice with the mosquitoes, and whatever foolish insect crossed my sight or caught my ears was going to die. I've been hunting them almost four hours straight now. The floor of my cabin is littered with corpses, and still they keep coming. I had thought there were only a couple in here, but apparently I was wrong. Either that or for every bug that falls, three more take its place. No wonder the buzzing was keeping me up at night. I had brought some nice earphones with me, and keeping them on and the volume up is the only thing keeping me sane right now, to be honest. If I hear one more stupid whizzing noise behind my head I might just snap.

So I think I'm done with hiking, or at least next time I run into so many mosquitoes in one place, I am going to turn around and find a nice place to hang around.

There are no photos of any of this because getting the camera out and holding it still was too much of an invitation to the swarm.

Wild Archival - Day 31

After a straight week of warm, dry weather, the skies opened up thirty minutes ago and pelted rain down on us hard enough that it sounded like the timbers were cracking.It all ended as quickly as it began, and now I'm sitting comfy in bed, enjoying the cool air the little storm brought with it and trying to get my thoughts in line.

This week has been a particularly eventful one, and it's hard to figure out where to begin. There was the last few days, which I spent meeting a number of very interesting people and discovering a number of very interesting things, and then there was yesterday, which I spent driving a loop around Yellowstone National Park.

I'm going to try to be concise here, but I don't think it'll happen.

So Monday I happened to run into a gentleman at the Center whom Steve introduced to me as Harvey Locke, and his wife Marie. I think her full name was Mariezef, but I'm not quite sure about that. They were French Canadians, come down to give a talk at the visitor's center, which Harvey invited me down to see.

It was an excuse to stay out of the studio, which has been hard to stay lurking in since the weather has improved, so I made the trek down and watched. Apparently this Harvey Locke is a forerunner of Canadian conservation and a major spokesperson for the Yellowstone the Yukon initiative, which was the group that had the Murie Center's artist in residence Dwayne Harty paint some of the most remote areas of the Canadian West.

So there was that connection. Anyway, the Lockes turned out to be hands down wonderful people. They invited me to join them at a dinner gathering at the center, and I ended up spending the evening chatting with ten or so people about every little thing but mostly conservation and Jackson, was eaten raw by mosquitoes and had some of the most delicious fruit salad ever. There was mint in it.

After dinner we retreated to the camp fire and continued our conversation, which had drifted to the cultural differences between Canada and the US in terms of guns. By twilight there were only a few of us left, still chatting away and roasting a few marshmallows I had pilfered from the back. At one point a moose and her calf stepped out of the forest line. All we could really see was their silhouettes down the path, but they were quite close. By the end it was just me and Dirk, kicking around embers and listening to the moose bugling out in the distance. At one point we heard an owl too.

Dirk is an awesome guy. Everyone here is awesome, but Dirk is like Minnesota's answer to Steve Irwin. He has such genuine enthusiasm for absolutely everything, and when he talks about all the random critters we come across out here it's not hard to believe that those experiences are the best anyone could ever have. He ended up telling me that night that the strange sounds I had heard a while back ago were most likely coyotes.

About two weeks ago I was lying in bed, getting to sleep, when I hear what sounded like hyenas yipping somewhere close by. The sounds kept getting closer and closer, and lasted for a good 15 minutes, until I was pretty sure they were somewhere right on the property. It's pitch black outside. There is no light, so opening a window would have done no good in identifying the sound. Besides, I didn't want to draw attention to myself. Then, when we were at the fire this Monday dirk was talking about coyotes coming so close to his cabin he would have stepped on them if he had gone out. He assured me that they were harmless, but all the same I think I will try to keep a wall between us if they do come by again.

Then, for the rest of the weeks I was doing the fun work of organizing the messiest cabinets in the archive. I had been pampered with how well done everything else in the collection was, but there were a few drawers that were little more than piles of paper dumped in with the barest of labeling and no organization whatsoever, so there was a lot of rearranging, and relabeling, and organizing things back and forth until something that looked like sanity appeared.

I did find some neat stuff along the way.

This was in with a drawer full of awards and metals. I found it interesting for two features.

The mush detail at the top...

And the tag on the inside. According to this the badge was made in Newark, and the interesting historical detail is in the list of unions on the tag. That's something I've never seen before, though I suppose the more I work with material from this era the more it might come up.

And here was the second cool find. Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, by Theodore Roosevelt.

Limited edition, 164 of two hundred, signed by the author. Now, in the world of rare books this is not actually a huge deal. But the guys at work got a kick out of it and you have to admit, it's not many people who have gotten to flip through a book signed by Teddy.

Here's an illustration from the book I found particularly amusing. Cook vs. Bear.

Now that the inventory is pretty much done, the time for playing with materials has passed. Most of the work I'm doing this month will be writing up procedure, starting grant work, and making a report with suggestions on how to proceed from here.

And then, some quick tidbits:
There is a family of bats in the roof of Mardy's porch. Every time I step outside in the evening I can hear them screeching away, but luckily the door is enough to keep that sound out. I haven't seen them yet but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.

Apparently mosquitoes have a period of extreme activity, which is sometime from the beginning of evening until nighttime. Considering how long that window of time is right now, it's a slaughterhouse.

I keep remembering to mention something here and then forgetting when I go to put it down.

Since this post is already long, I'll put Yellowstone in another one.

Wild Archival - Day 24

Last week was the first in which I seriously felt like an Archivist. I just finished the bulk of my folder level inventory, which is basically a list of folders that researchers used to get a beat on what is available in the collection and narrow their search. I wasn't sure if it was any good, because even though I had done my research  a general lack of experience meant that I was asking myself questions constantly. Was I prioritizing the right projects? Was I doing work that's usefulness was appropriate for the time spent on it? Were the results going to be understandable to anyone but me? The folks at the center had been very supportive and enthusiastic about my work, but they weren't really overseeing it.

I ended up reprocessing a large portion of a collection as well. It had been put into our system in more detail than any other part of the archives, but all the material was then thrown into a box and finding any of it was impossible. So I ended up spending a day refoldering things and fixing little errors that cropped up along the way. The whole time I was thinking, am I getting distracted from the more important business at hand? Processing is very time consuming, and there was still a lot of other stuff to be done.

Well, on Friday I had my first researcher come in. He was a nice guy, looking for information on the Muries' collaboration with other scientists in their field. I gave him a quick explanation about the organization of material, suggested a few places for him to start, and printed out my guide while warning him he was the first person to see it. I was sort of steeling myself for harsh criticism. This guy had been to a number of other archives looking for relevant material, including large university archives, so he was obviously familiar with how these things worked. I was half expecting him to go through the guide, look up, and ask, "how is this supposed to help?"

Instead he praised it (maybe cause he really was a nice guy) and then managed to use it to hone in on a pile of material that was rel event to him, which he spent the rest of the day on. The awesome part was the files he ended up pulling were the ones I had refoldered a few days ago because they were in disarray and I couldn't properly record their arrangement until it was fixed.

So my decisions were vindicated and my material was useful. At that moment I stopped feeling like a student pidling around with stuff and started feeling like someone with a little real control and authority. It's a nice feeling, let me tell you.

In non-archival news, a robin has decided the the little overhang under the Homestead porch is a great place to raise a family. This means that she has built her nest about a foot over the heads of anyone who goes into the building through front door and isn't aware that they are coming until they duck under the porch. When I saw the empty next my first thought was that I was going to be dive bombed constantly. I was correct. Three times now I have gone to make lunch or what have you and a robin has dived at me in a flurry of indignant tweeting. I figured after the first time she would realize that she had made a mistake in her planning and move the nest, but no luck. I am now going around to the side door so I'm not responsible for an avian heart attack.

Today I forgot about her and opened the front door to leave. The robin was in her nest and I saw her before pushing in the screen door. We stared at each other. She did not look amused, so I backtracked and went out the side. The neat part is you can easily spy on the nest from inside the cabin. The annoying part is getting attacked while you are lurching to the kitchen for breakfast is not the most relaxing way to start the day.

Wild Archival - Day 20?

I'm losing track of how long I've been here.

Spring has come out full force by now. The grass is growing an inch a day so that I'll be wading through it soon enough, the buttes have exploded in color, and the insects are out in full force.

I opened my door last night to a small army of mosquitoes. Five minutes out there will get you ten bites if you aren't properly covered, and I can't shut my door fast enough to keep one or two of the buggers out. I had just been told a story of a group of monks who had visited the ranch last year, and how they hadn't even swatted at the mosquitoes that probably were gorging themselves on liters of holy blood, and I've been feeling generous, so rather than kill the stray bugs out right I've just been swatting them away.

Until this afternoon, when a small swarm of them had me for lunch. At that point I was annoyed and itchy, and the mosquito population in my room had reached the unacceptable level of three or four, so I ended up killing one. Got blood all over my hands.

Most of my direct encounters with the wilderness have been with bugs. It's a good thing that spiders don't particularly bother me because they have quite the representation up here. You shake anything and a spider falls out of it. I had to trap a noisy, stupid bee in a box and throw it out of the studio one day, and who should fly out of the box when I open it but a spider. I was washing carrots, put them in the sink for a moment to put something away, and when I come back a spider is sitting on the carrot. I pull my curtain open in the morning and a spider falls onto my pillow. I'm much happier with spiders than I am with mosquitoes though, so we've been getting along fine. I just throw them out of the room once in a while.

There were also some sort of moth convention yesterday. Six huge grey moths were hanging along the side of the building and refused to move for anything. I poked one a few times and it didn't even react.

This guy was about the height of my pointer finger.

I took the path behind the center again, and the flooded area was no longer flooded, which I'm taking as a good sign.

Still looks a little unpleasant though. There were hoof tracks in the mud, but alas, no bears.

That shiny white stuff is water. The path wasn't -completely- dried out, so I had to detour through the brush at right.

This lovely little field was at the other end.

One of the many lovely little spots along the trail.

I've also been trying to take a picture of the ground squirrels but they're too timid.. They are everywhere now. When I walk between the cabins they scatter before me, but they move too quick and they stick to the tall grass, so it's hard to get a good view of them. When I got here their holes weren't really finished. They were all shallow and led nowhere, but now there's this huge pile of fresh dirt that is added to daily, even though I never catch the critters adding to it, and you can see evidence of their work everywhere.

 

 I don't get the point of this particular tunnel. Maybe there are other branches somewhere.

One of the more obvious tracks.

Work has hit a level of comfortably boringness. I've almost finished going through every cabinet in the building, and next will be rearrangement, which is always a very delicate matter.

Wild Archival - Day 13

I can't believe it's already been two weeks! Things are going by fast, but work wise the pace has settled into a comfortable tedium. I'm doing folder level inventories at the moment, which means pulling out every folder in the building, taking a quick look at what's in them, and recording the contents with a description that will help people find things, but won't overwhelm with too much information. I missjudged the time this would take by a number of days, but that's why I developed an open schedule.

The great thing about getting down to folder level is that you end up in contact with pretty much every item in the collection. As a result there have been some great finds. I'm holding off on scans until I get posting permission, but I'm going to show off a few of the cooler artifacts that have shown up at the bottom of a drawer or hiding behind paper.

There was a set of four of these. They're old Kodak negative books. The front is a slide index for easy cataloging and retrieval, and the slides are kept in transparent paper to allow for ease of viewing without one needing to remove the negatives from their places, or so the little description on the inside cover crowed. The negatives were the size of the paper you see here, huge.

I'm not sure what this pipe is about, and neither was the archivist I talked to yesterday. She suspects that it may be a family heirloom from Norway. The head can be removed and the whole thing is a little longer than my arm. This photo is crap so I may try for another one later.

This is a galley for one of the many books published by the Muries. I had never seen anything printed in this sort of format.

My photography skills here are pretty bad, but they give you the gist of what I've been turning up. Of course most of the material I'm working with are not artifacts like these but simple paper materials. The majority are letters, speeches, or articles.

There were some really nice days this week so I took advantage of one to walk the "around the world" trail here at the ranch. It's a three mile or so circular trail that begins and ends at the back of our property and runs through some pristine little areas. You lose sight of anything resembling civilization a few turns in, and the trail is only minimally upkept. Sometimes you can see a wear in the ground, sometimes dead wood has been arranged as a sort of curb, and sometimes the only thing indicating the right direction is a little orange tag hanging from a branch. I managed to wander off the trail twice, but the area is safely hedged in by road and water, so I was unconcerned and managed to find my way back easily.

I didn't see many animals during my walk. A chimpmonk and I had ourselves a staring contest, and I certainly found evidence of animal life, mostly in the form of big piles of elk and moose poop, (and some poop that looked a lot more carnivorous, which kept me on my toes.) I don't know if these guys poop so much that there will naturally be a ton landing smack in the middle of the trail, or if they're planting land mines on purpose, but I ended up stepping into one at least once. Luckily it's all dry. Ahem. Sorry for the TMI.

Another ubiquitous sign of animal life was in the ground squirrel tunnels that spread out like veins in the soil. When I got here spring was just grabbing hold and there wasn't must going on on the ground, but now everywhere you go there are holes and little mounds indicating tunnels. On the ranch there's one tunnel that's nothing more than an entrance on the side of the path and an exit on the other side two feet away. You'd think at that distance the little critters would just decide to run it.

While I didn't get a peek at many mammals, I did see a ton of birds, including a predator of some sort. It was probably a little under two feet tall and was perched at the very top of a pine, screeching.

Spring is taking it's damn time getting here, and even now the flowers are only just begging to bloom with any seriousness.

The path was still relatively brown, although at some parts the grass had taken over so much you couldn't see the wood placed down as guides. There were some beautiful little openings in the trees where the Tetons stood as backdrop for a beautiful little creek. The trees themselves were a little less impressive. Some sort of moss seems to be eating up the entire evergreen population, so there's a ton of fallen wood, and the threes that are standing are sort of naked from the bottom up for a good number of feet.

At one point in the path the little branch guide turned left into a marshy area. The path literally disappears into still water that's covered in slime, and the only way through is to walk across this fallen tree. At first I thought I had taken a wrong turn, but the little orange trail marker was hanging over the water like it was no big thing, so I pushed forward. The tree was rotten and barely as wide as my foot so I had to make my way sideways, and the branches that touched the water, along with the land all around the side of the submerged area, was covered in this thick white stuff. When I looked closer it looked like spiderwebs of some sort. So as I'm walking along this log I have the image of an infinite number of water spiders sleeping under the surface, just waiting for me to trip and stick my foot in.

The best part was that this dead tree did not even have the courtesy to be long enough to reach the other end. So once I got to the tip I had to make a leap onto a far bank, and then push through some dense forest before coming out where I was supposed to.

It was worth it though. At the other end was a clearing covered in blooming larkspur. Quite the colorful little reward. And the ranch turned out to be only a few feet away.

I didn't take my camera on my walk as I preferred to just soak things in without thinking about shooting, but when I go again I'll take a few pictures as illustration.

Speaking of pictures, we had a group in this week that spent the last three days getting up at 4AM to shoot in the park, coming  back for lunch, and then leaving at 5 to do it all over again. It one of the many programs the Murie center has, and was led by a professional photographer local to the area.

Turns out when events happen we employees get to enjoy some major perks. We were allowed to go out on the shoot, which I didn't take advantage of because I value my sleep too much, but we also got to eat with the group. This didn't just mean I got to munch on free pizza. They bring in a professional gourmet chef (and awesome guy) who makes delicious food and saves leftovers for the employees. I have been eating like royalty for the last few days, let me tell you. Pumpkin pancakes with orange icing, some of the most tender pork I've ever placed on my tongue, and yesterday night was this:

Buffalo meatloaf stuffed with mozzarella, some sort of green, and pepper. It was soo good. Desert was a lemon cake and chocolate mousse made with kailua creme, and topped with strawberries and whipped cream. There are leftovers in the fridge so I am set for days.

I really should update more, considering how much is going on and all that I'm leaving out for the sake of brevity, but I suppose that's enough for now. I'm going to grab some meat loaf and chill for the night.