Checking In

Yesterday I broke into a car to turn off the headlights. Lots of beeping and blaring ensued, and it took me a good two minutes to find the controls, because they were not standard, but no one paid me any mind.

There was a lot of nice stuff in that car. =s

Anyway, I have been busy with four classes (3 is too much) and will hopefully find time to put my thoughts down beyond some inane observation on the effectiveness of car alarms (useless) in the near future.

Smatterings

• I had my first job interview upon coming back home yesterday, and my first rejection this morning. It was a case of other applicants having more experience specific to the job than I did. 
• I think I should drop some money for a bookshelf, but I don't know how I'd get it back to the apartment. May have to talk to the roommate about this.

This just isn't cutting it anymore.

• I think that this quarter, academically speaking, is going to be awesome. I'm finally taking archival classes for one, and will have an independent study in which I do nothing but study historic book making processes.
• I had my first encounter with with bookless library here on campus yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised at its efficiency. Sure, there is no browsing, but books requested actually do end up on hold within two hours, and I ended up biking home with a book bag so full my back was rather angry at me.
• There is still a lot I have to write about concerning my time at the Murie Center, but it will likely take a while for me to sit down a process. For now, here area few lingering photographs.

 One of my last projects involved assessing the condition of the film in the studio. We had about 16 reels, all in surprisingly good condition.

 Finally got a decent shot of a ground squirrel, since by the end of my time on the ranch they had become fat and lazy, and didn't mind being a foot away.

A box I found in Mardy's cabin turned out to be a portable film projector. It was a lot of fun to disassemble and to figure out what all of the little knobs and such did.

Welp

Today is the day I should have been driving home, but I'm still in Wyoming. Oh well!

Two days ago I woke up to a strange sound in my room that I immediately assumed was the army of mice inside the walls breaking through and preparing for their final offensive. It was this rapid pattering sound that kept whizzing by my head the way you might expect a mosquito buzz to. I could hear it pretty much everywhere, so when I crawled out of bed in the pitch blackness I was prepared to see mice swarming over everything. I'd already found the occasional present left by them, so if the sound of them working away at the walls wasn't enough I had firm evidence of their invasion plans.

But there were no mice when I turned on the light. Instead there was a bat in the room about the size of my hand, fluttering about in confused circles. I have no idea how it got in. None whatsoever. And apparently neither did it, because it certainly had no idea how to get out. It was actually kind of cute, and I didn't have my glasses on so all I really saw was a palm sized fuzz fluttering around, but I'm sure it would have been adorable if it had just stopped flying around like a bat out of... well... and settled down.

I tried the bee trick of turning the light back off and opening the door. It's not like there was much light outside for a bat to be attracted to, but the stars were enough I guess, because after a few more frustrating laps the bat figured it out and escaped to freedom.

I am so glad it wasn't the mice.

Crash!

I have not had a car since I crashed it, two months ago. The hope was that I would have it on time to drive back home, but that's in a week and just the other day I was informed that the shop I left it at is still waiting for a part. I was planning on going to some major events in Denver, one of which I had already paid for, so I was feeling bummed enough to give into my co-worker's constant offers to put the pressure on the shop and get er done.

So my boss gets on the line, makes the lady cry because he's insisting on results and she's going on about a funeral, and then he gets hung up on.

=s

I don't know enough to determine if I'm getting strung along here or if 2 months is a legitimate amount of time to be waiting for parts in the middle of nowhere, but the stress of it all is finally starting to annoy me. I'm finding it easier to just assume my plans are bust and carry on from there than to try to struggle to make shit happen, but everyone around me is insisting that Something Be Done.

All I know is that after all this I am no longer sitting pretty on savings. If I were rich I would take the one hour flight back down to Denver and just throw another 300+ bucks at the problem that way, but I haven't made a monthly profit since I started this little grad school adventure, and now I can feel the walls closing in. It seems like a good time to cut my losses and just enjoy a little extended time here. I donno.

The Good Old Days

While compiling a catalog of the books here in the archives I ran across this interesting excerpt from a book called "Naturalist's South Pacific Expedition: Fiji"

Ordonez and I were about to enter the rest house when Mr. Stanley, who is familiar with the ways of the colony, tactfully suggested I go alone to arrange about our quarters. Blue-eyed, dark-haired Miss Lorna Reay, in charge of the rest house, post office and just about everything for which efficiency and dispatch are required, wished to accommodate me and my Filipino assistant. Yet, because a number of white guests were lodged in the building, she was not sure how they might react to the unprecedented situation of living under the same roof with a colored person. I consulted the highest authority in charge, the "D.C.," about it. He explained that it were best not to start a troublesome precedent, no matter how well educated the Filipino might be. He could not live in the rest house, but he could live in the native servants' quarters, eat his meals in the rest house kitchen, join me in the rest house to help me with my work, but not use the main entrance which was reserved for guests.

And later on, after the author is furious at the terrible treatment provided to his assistant, he rents out a house and he, Ordonez, and Mr. Stanley move in together.

There, the general public would never know that Mr. Stanley, Ordonez and I, all three of us, lived in perfect harmony and actually ate together at table as real human beings. I have always admired Mr. Stanley, a man of education, for waiving a custom prevalent in Fiji as well as in benighted and bigoted sections of the southern United States.

 The year was 1940.

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.