I'm in Taiwan now!

Thanks everyone for following this blog. I'm sorry I didn't do such a good job. I will do better next time! When is next time? Next time is now! I'm in Taiwan and Here is my blog for that!

The ending

Well, tommorow is our last day. Not even really the last day; today was the last day in the field and I think we're staying in the office tommorow. I know there's been a lack of updates lately, and I'm sorry.

I will be going to Taiwan to work on a bat project in September - perhaps I will do a better job there. I'm not making any promises though.

Last weekend, we hiked up to Republic Pass. We ascended 2000 feet twice to get there. It was an awesome, exhausting hike.

The rocks in Yellowstone

Yellowstone, being a geologically active area, has a lot of cool rocks scattered around. I found this one today - it's like those fatty pork rocks from China. You know, the rocks that look like layers of skin and meat. This is that, in raw form.

Hiking

I am trying to hike more, since I am living in this beautiful country. This is from the Garnett Hill Loop hike. The landscape varied from sagebrush to forest, meadow, and here, marshy grassland. My favorite was a forest whose floor was blanketed with grass. I thought these types of landscapes only existed in fairytales and the imagination.

Welcome to July

As June passes, here is a picture of what I did in this month that I normally would not do - snowboard. Yes, in Montana, you can snowboard in any month, although on this particular day, I did not like the conditions. The snow was all slabby and I kept catching on chunky snow and falling over. After this picture I mostly fell down the mountain. I shouldn't blame the conditions though; I stink at snowboarding. The picture's nice though. Snowboarding in June: Montana.

Ecoli update

We found out we have ecoli in our water on the 22nd. The town tested positive for ecoli on 15. There is a discrepancy between when they found out and when we found out. Hm.

Sorry I haven't been updating lately. We've been really busy lately. I will try to do this: every day I will upload a picture and say a little bit about it.

This is petrified wood. It looks like regular wood, but it's heavy and cold, like ceramic. I was walking up a hill the other day and came upon what looked like a freshly split log. But it was petrified wood. Pretty cool, eh?

Intensive Observation Begins NOW

Intensive observation. It doesn't mean staring extra-hard; it means we have to do observations on certain packs every day, for as long as we can, preferably 3 hours of active obs. a day. Active observation means we have to be actually watching the coyotes, not looking for, but not seeing them. So that's a lot of looking and a lot of luck. Today was windy as windy can be, making it the coldest-feeling day I've had here on the job. It's pretty harsh for 6 in the morning. Speaking of which, we have to leave at 5 tommorow morning (like any other obs. day), so I have to get up around 4:30 or so. So time to sleep!

By the way, our water has e. coli in it, so we can't drink, wash or bathe in it. We just found out today. Who knows how long this has been going on. Apparently, the spring runoff is to blame. Damn those swollen rivers.