Devils’s Tower. Huge, amazing, and people actually climb to the top!
One of those sub-par photos of a very gorgeous natural water feature in Yellowstone.
Oh you know, just a pic from my view driving home. #wyo
My family and friends worry sometimes…I wonder why!
At the moment, my fellow intern and I are getting ready to go the Bighorns for a week to help a forester in Casper with field work. Last night I went a little crazy making food and packing. I mean, I have enough food for two weeks. I’d say I won’t go hungry for these 4.5 days just a short drive from Buffalo. Oh well-never hurts to come prepared!
I recently took a bit of a vacation to Yellowstone and found that my iPhone is a pitiful camera for such occasions. It was amazing and beautiful, of course. But I came back telling everyone that I think the places I work everyday are better than Yellowstone. In fact, the drive back to Newcastle, via Cooke City and highway 296, had the most spectacular switchbacks and views. Even walking in the National Forest behind my cabin is gorgeous and I can go whenever I want. I hope everyone is finding beauty in all the mundane -yet fleeting things during their internships. I’ve been trying to remind myself to take the time to smell the roses, so to speak.
Our inventory projects are going very well. I think we finally have the hang of a proper field day. However, there was one time that neither of us brought the data sheets. Have you ever done that, where each of you thought the other person had grabbed something only to find that neither of you did. That would have been fine, as we could simply recreate the data sheet on normal paper right? Wrong. We had NO scrap paper. So what do enterprising young ladies do? We record all the data on the iPhone in the notes section and copy and paste it into an email at the end of the day and have it on our computers to use! There is something to be said for this technology stuff!
Also, we were assigned another project that included driving all over a huge piece of land and digitizing major vegetation types and later doing timber inventories for a fuels analysis. Except 85% of the roads on the map we had were ATV Trails! In short, we got a little stuck in certain places and had to hoof it in some STEEP areas. But when it’s steep, there are almost always good views. I hope we plan a little camping for work there, because there is this one camp site that has a 300 foot drop 20 feet away from it, overlooking a view to die for. A very desolate view, but hey, that’s Wyoming for you.
I hope everyone is doing once-in-a-lifetime type things!
Andee