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.

Coyote Puppies!

My goodness they are cute. They are getting braver and venturing further and further from their dens. Watch out for the wolves!

Lion Lake

We hiked up beyond the view of the road in search of a fabled lake as told by a photographer, where "the animals just come to you." We walked through grasslands and sagebrush, and amongst trembling aspen that stood in quiet isolated stands like self-contained nations in seas of grass. We reached a peak where small yellow and purple flowers proliferated in the spaces between beds of weathering rock that cracked and came off in shards, littering the ground with loose debris like bone fragments. And when we could not find the lake and turned around to head back to the car, we came upon another lake, which when we came around, emitted a gutteral and continuous growling from its vicinity. We were creeped out by the eerie noise, which was unlike anything we had heard before and would not stop. It was deep and seemed un-animal, like the noise of a straw that has reached the bottom of the cup, but much, much deeper. In amongst the trees behind the lake, we saw a black bear, but it didn't seem to be the source of the rumbling growls. There seemed to be two sources producing the noise. We decided it was mountain lions, angry at the intrusion by the bear, perhaps because of a nearby den. We named the lake Lion Lake.