Yellowstone

June is going by fast...

I'm in Yellowstone now, and am enjoying my first weekend off after my first week of work. My schedule is pretty cool, we work 9 hours days but then get every other Friday off, so I'm looking forward to having all that time to explore the park. I've spent my evenings so far pouring over maps and 12 weekends isn't even going to make a very large dent in the amount of things one can do here. This place is huge.

I'll write more about my job when I actually know what I'm doing, I'm still getting introduced and feeling out my projects. I did get to go on a couple field assignments this past week, which was fun. We were mapping some lake and stream features with a GPS, though the tourists kept asking us if we were tracking wolves. This park was set aside for the thermal features, but has really become much more of a wildlife park I feel. And the wildlife doesn't disappoint either. In my first week here I've seen Moose, Bison, Elk, Black Bear, Coyote, Badger, Osprey, Big Horn Sheep, and Sand Hill Cranes.

I had a great drive to get up here too. Stopped by a couple NPS sites in OK and NE and otherwise got accustomed to driving my new Subaru. More posts to come as I get more settled, this is going to be a great summer.

The Jeep is Dead. Long live The Jeep.

I knew this day would come. I knew it was getting closer and closer with every mile I drove, but the inevitability of the Jeep's demise did nothing to stop me from becoming more and more attached each time I loaded it up, ready to set off on our next adventure. If it is possible to love an inanimate object, I loved The Jeep. That vehicle was as much a part of my college experience as any building at Dartmouth, or any dorm or apartment I've ever lived in. It was the perfect car at the perfect time, and I will miss it dearly.

This past winter the Jeep had a terrible time starting in the cold and altitude of Colorado. There's a chance I might be in Colorado this coming winter, and I knew the Jeep didn't have another cold season in it. The Jeep would not see 2010. This put the cost of repairs for it on a very short leash. This past week at its latest oil change the inspection turned up $500 worth of fluid flushes and leak fixes, and that was enough. The Blue Book value on the Jeep is about $800. I took it for a drive on Wednesday to get it over 190,000 miles, and then my mom and I traded it in for a new Subaru Forester. The Jeep was 15 years, 8 months old. Old enough to drive itself under adult supervision.

The Jeep was born in Colorado in 1993. It had an exciting early life with numerous trips to ski areas, off-roading in the Great Sand Dunes, and road trips to the Dakotas and Pacific Northwest. It spent the years 1994-2003 primarily in Oklahoma as a commuter vehicle, escaping briefly a few times a year on road trips to Colorado and New Mexico. In 2001 I learned how to drive in it. In 2002 I became the primary driver of the Jeep, and drove it to school every day of my Junior and Senior years of high school. It allowed me to commute to the other high school in town to take a class not offered at my school, and was often taken to lunch since it could hold 5 people a lot more comfortably than my best friend's Civic.

The Jeep surpassed 100,000 miles in September 2003 as my Mom and I drove up for my freshman year at Dartmouth. Sophomore year I took sole possession of the Jeep. The Jeep almost met its end in April 2005, but I convinced my mom to fix the transmission for 3 grand as opposed to buying me a new car. My sophomore, junior, and senior year at Dartmouth the Jeep attended nearly every tournament with Dartmouth Ultimate. It went on spring break. It hauled a pong table. It moved nearly the entire capacity of 311 Mid Mass in one trip. It drove between Oklahoma and Dartmouth 10 times while I was an undergrad. It carried me through snow covered roads on the way to Killington, Stowe, and the Dartmouth Skiway. It took me down to Boston to visit Tyke God only knows how many times. The Jeep could hold all the food, cones, and other supplies necessary to host a frisbee tournament for 30 teams. I'm willing to bet 4 out of 5 people who see this post have ridden in the Jeep for at least a few hours.

The Jeep moved with me to Wisconsin. It went over 150,000 miles in Madison in June 2007, and quickly became legend amongst the Pimpdags, especially those who spent 2 hours in it sitting in the parking lot of a porn shop in the middle of nowhere when the serpentine belt broke on Spring Break. It did the most serious off-roading of its life on the Como Road in August 2008 in Colorado. The Jeep spent its last weeks residing in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, before embarking on its last road trip ever to bring me back to Oklahoma.

In its life the Jeep made it to 43 of the states in this country, and reached the highest point in 6 of them. And the Jeep's life is not necessarily over. The Subaru dealer will sell it to a smaller auto shop, where it will be either scrapped for parts or sold to a new owner. My hope is that someone sees the Jeep as I have seen it, and it gets to live out the rest of its days on a ranch, or helping a teenager learn how to drive and maintain a car, or I can only hope, somewhere, anywhere, where it can face the west, the orange light of sunset glinting of its red hood, and imagine the mountains that must lie just past the horizon.

The Jeep is dead. Long live the Jeep. R.I.P. October 1993 - June 2009.

The Five Coolest Things I Saw in the Guadalupe Mountains

My internship at GUMO is now over. I departed in glorious fashion, giving my geology patio talk to 4 people at the visitor center in my last half hour work. One of the interp rangers asked me as I was leaving that day if it felt anticlimactic, but actually, thanks to that presentation, and how smoothly it went compared to the first time I gave it, my end felt quite climactic and conclusive.

I have some time at home now, so I'll write a couple wrap-up posts before heading off to Yellowstone next week. Today, the subject is the coolest things I saw, by which I mean singular moments, not certain sights.

#5: On my 17 mile hike of Bush Mountain I stumbled upon 2 Barbary Sheep. Barbary Sheep are similar to Big Horn Sheep, but are actually from Africa and were imported for hunting in the early 20th century after the native Big Horn went extinct in this region. The on-alert pose for a Barbary Sheep is a classic, majestic, thrusting out of the chest with the head held high, but I couldn't get a picture of it because they quickly dashed off into the oak thickets near Bush Mountain before I could get my camera out.

#4: While hiking the Bowl one weekend I saw my first and so far only rattlesnake, a black-tailed rattlesnake to be exact. It was sitting on a stump next to the trail and saw me first and started rattling. I had never heard that sound before, but anyone would know that sound when they heard it. I jumped a couple feet in the air and quickly backed off to a safe distance. The snake still thought I was too close though, and kept rattling and sitting a striking posture, allowing me to get a great picture from about 10 feet away.

#3: One day the park fire crew decided to do a prescribed burn in the park along the ridge next to the highway. I was off that day and was returning from Carlsbad at night when I saw the mountains glowing with flame in the darkness. It was an eirie sight to see the park on fire as I stood outside my house. Apparently the burn took a little longer to put out than was predicted. My friend in the fire crew said she worked 16 hours straight that day.

#2: On the night of the full moon in May one of the park employees had her annual mother's day bash at her ranch house near Dell City, TX. I stayed there until 1 am and ate 4 plates of the best BBQ brisket ever while meeting the locals and watching the moon rise over the western escarpment cliffs. I got back to the park at 2:30 and managed to sustain the will power to take a one hour nap before getting up and setting off on the Guadalupe Peak trail at 4am under the full moon. I summitted just before 6 am, in time to see the run rise from the highest point in Texas. I took about 40 pictures in 15 minutes before taking a 2 hour nap. All in all I had the top to myself for 4 hours.

#1: In mid May we had an abnormal amount of rain for 3 days straight. That was enough to flood McKittrick canyon for 2 days. The waters washed away entirely one of the steam crossings on the canyon trail, which was closed for 3 days. It was spectacular seeing the stream full of water after hiking it when it was dry so many times. Talking to the rangers who have been in the park for a decade or more, flooding of this extent only happens once every 3-4 years.

White Sands

The rapidly decreasing length of my internship (only 2 1/2 more weeks!) has encouraged me to focus on checking off the cool sites near here that I want to see before I leave. Granted, this 'weekend' (i.e. today and tomorrow, my days off) I'm hanging around GUMO and Carlsbad and catching up on sleep, but last weekend I went on a mini overnight adventure to White Sands National Monument.

I started my weekend on Wednesday, leaving GUMO around 9 and stopping in Carlsbad to replace my Camelbak mouthpiece (a mouse has chewed through my old one a week earlier). After that it was on to Cloudcroft, NM and the Sacramento Ranger District of the Lincoln National Forest. This was a really cool place. The forest here is higher than at Guadalupe and much thicker and larger, with no remnants of desert plants like Yucca or Agava like you see in the Bowl at GUMO. It was also about 15 degrees cooler than the desert, which was nice. I stopped by the Bluff Springs waterfall, Sunspot Observatory, Osha Trail, and discovered the Trestle Rec Area at dusk, which was unfortunate because that was probably the coolest place I found, and I didn't have near enough time to explore it. I ended up running the 2.5 mile trail to see the old railroad trestle to beat the darkness and catch sunset at the overlook near the parking area.

After that I had a great dinner and proceded to a national forest campground to spend my first ever night camping by myself. It could've gone better probably. Given my wild imagination I quickly spooked myself in the darkness and spent maybe 30 minutes sitting next to the Jeep drinking a beer before diving into my tent and falling asleep as quickly as I could. Hearing Elk snorting nearby didn't help my situation, as I quickly tried to think of what mood a bear would have to be in to make that sound. My stupid mind settled on 'starving'.

The next day I got up early and drove out of the mountains down into the Tularosa valley and White Sands National Monument. I met their resident SCA intern and then headed out into the dunes on the 4.6 Alkali Flats trail. If you ever go there, definitely hike this trail, but use sunscreen on all exposed skin. The sunlight reflecting of the white sand makes the sun exposure like skiing without all the protective clothes. I scorched my shins. The Jeep and I also enjoyed driving on the unpaved, compacted sand roads.

My next stop was a spontaneous decision to visit the White Sands Missile Range headquarters. The museum had some cool displays and artifacts, but this place is still and active testing ground so there were some interesting restrictions on taking photos. I could take photos outside, which surprised me actually, but I could only take them of the missiles on display while I was facing West. I kept looking around for the army private who would tackle me if I turned towards the East, but I didn't see him. I also was not allowed to take photos of any part of the base besides the missile park and was especially not allowed to take photos of the entrance.

The adventure continues as I drove down to El Paso, arriving around dusk to explore the roads around and within the Franklin Mountains. I got some pretty good views, and then decided to drive through downtown where I proceeded to get slightly lost and come closer than I wanted to accidentally going to Mexico. Though I breifly considered purposely going to Mexico when I saw a stadium full of red-clad fans watching a soccer game just across the Rio Grande in Juarez. Thoughts of swine flu and the recent drug wars quickly pushed that idea from my mind though.

I spent enough time wandering around El Paso that I drove the 90 minutes back to GUMO in the dark. My sunset views of the western escarpment will have to wait until another day I suppose.

Hey, Where'd Everyone Go?

I'll revisit the community of people I live with this week. It's been nearly a month since I first wrote about my seasonal housing mates and I'm happy to remote that as we got to know each better, initial judgments and prejudices were forgotten. Now I just have to learn not to judge people immediately, and potentially not to judge people until I've talked with them multiple times, I'd expect the same of other people trying to get to know me. The more I talked to people here the more interesting they became. I found out a couple of my 10 person social circle went used one of their days off every week to go to Van Horn and take an EMT class. Others have worked at GUMO for years and have a lot of interesting stories, like the Law Enforcement officer who once caught a Brown Pelican in the park. It had been blown here from California by especially strong winds. I also found out a couple of them lived in Carlsbad most of the time, further shrinking my park housing social network.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got to know everyone better, a wave of people left. And by wave of people I mean 3. But 3 is a lot when you're starting with 10. The most recent 2 to leave were a couple who headed to Montana a couple week ago. The guy was my housemate, so they were always in our house cooking or hanging out. With them gone I pretty much have the place to myself. My other housemate hangs out with a good friend of his the whole time. Their departure felt like more than 2 people though. They had been at GUMO a while, so knew everyone well, and were well liked. People would come over and hang out with them, and social gatherings of 4-6 people were pretty common. With them gone those people don't come over anymore. My group of friends that I could potentially hang out with on a given night is now down to 2, and while its nice to have so much space in my house to myself, it feels lonely sometimes. Also not helping is that when my housemate departed, he took with him his collection of DVDs. Evening entertainment has since been limited to reading, and possibly studying for Yellowstone or writing the journal article on my Dartmouth senior thesis. The satellite TV is still around of course, so maybe I'll become interested in the NBA playoffs at some point soon.

On the other hand, I'm getting to know those 2 remaining people very well, and talk to them most nights for at least an hour or so, which is fun. More people should be arriving this month, but then I'll be leaving soon after that. Things are settling into a routine a little bit, but that's not a bad thing, especially when that routine involves hiking in a national park most days and playing basketball every day after work while the sun sets over the mountains.

The Cave

One of the more interesting things I've slowly been noticing since I arrived here is the relationship between Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns Nationals Park, known to each other in NPS shorthand as GUMO and CAVE (technically NPS shorthand dictates that the first two letters of the first two words in the park name be used, i.e. ROMO for Rocky Mountain, but they made an exception for the caverns, which would've been stuck with CACA, which is ironic given the amount of bat guano in the cave).

The two parks share a non-profit and probably 25-50% of their visitors. While working in the VC at GUMO, I often find myself related cave tour info and opperating hours to visitors stopping in on their way to the caverns, which is the destination park for tourists in the area. People on vacation to the region usually allow a day for each, and come down to GUMO to bag Guadalupe Peak (which I've decided is the most popular trail in the park, surpassing even our .4 mile paved nature trail).

In playing ultimate and going on a special employee only cave tour one night I've talked with quite a few people who do my job (interpretation) at the cave, and I've come to the conclusion that I am so glad that I work at GUMO and not the cave. The cave people (ha!) are stuck underground out of the sunlight all day, generally walking the same 3 miles of paved trails through the natural entrance and big room every day over and over again. I still haven't been on half of miles of trail that Guadalupe has, and I bet even the spectacular formations of the cave get stale after a while.

The cave rangers also have to deal with a ton more people. Carlsbad Caverns is rightly a destination national park, offering sights found nowhere else in the world. Compared to the cave, the Guadalupe Mountains are just that, mountains, and there's plenty of those around. I'm glad most of the tourists stick to the cave, I love my job at GUMO, but I couldn't do it at the cave. I can't really see myself leading tours of 50+ people every day. I'm just not that friendly, and frankly, I'm a little weird, I cringe at the thought of knowing that the little jokes I'd try to insert into cave tours to primarily entertain myself would likely bomb horribly, creating terribly awkward situations. I'll stick to talking to 1-4 people at a time on the trails or behind the VC desk at GUMO.

I'm also glad I don't have to deal with the volume of stupid tourist questions that rangers at the cave deal with. The worst I get is the indignant look of frustrated surprise that people give me when I tell them that no, you can't drive to the top of Guadalupe Peak. Some of the ones cave rangers get asked include "what time do you open the gates to let the bats out?", "do you plan on expanding the cave at any point?", and the comment "thanks for air conditioning the cave, it's really hot out today". I think I'd snap having to deal with that.

Of course, the cave rangers do have their perks. The constant 56 degree temperature in the cave makes for comfy work environment during the 100 degree summers here. Come late May I might just have changed my opinion on working in the cave. The rangers there also get to apply for special use permits for the many caves in the park, and they're allowed to invite their friends along. I was lucky enough to be included on one of those tours a couple weeks ago when 7 of us when down the natural entrance at dusk while the bat flew out to go visit Hall of the White Giant. To get to the hall requires about 45 minutes of crawling, squeezing, and climbing through passages that start right off the natural entrance trail, through you wouldn't know it was there. The hall itself contains a 20 foot stalagmite (the White Giant) and a ton of soda straw formations. We couldn't continue on, but if you did, the second largest chamber in the park, the Guadalupe room, is further down some more narrow passages. The park only lets 8 visitors a week sign up for this tour, so I felt lucky to get to see it, especially with park personnel on their off time.

A week ago I went to the cave to take advantage the free entry I receive thanks to my GUMO employment and see the main sights for the first time as a geologist (I had previously visited in 2001). Pictures included below.


The Bashful Elephant, on the Kings Palace tour


The Big Room from the far end


The Hall of Giants

NPS Sports

Despite living in the middle of nowhere I have been able to continue my participation in team sports here. When I arrived I was relieved to see a basketball hoop in the parking lot by the seasonal housing, a way to get some exercise without having to run laps on the access road. I go out there and shoot around pretty much every day, sometimes for up to an hour. Most of the time it's so windy I have to aim 5 feet to the right of the basket to have a prayer of making the shot, but shooting around it more about the time I spend out there than my shooting percentage. It's a great way to relax after a days work, though it's not like I need to de-stress or anything given all I do is hike and talk.

In any case, I was shooting around enough I got my jumper back. I found this out while playing 2v2 against some guys on the fire crew last week. For the first time in 4-5 years I was able to break down a guy off the dribble, and pull up and make a shot. And the fire crew guys were decent too, it's not like I was schooling chumps. Now the fire crew is trying to put together a team to go and challenge the best 5 Carlsbad Caverns has to offer. I'm looking forward to that game.

Speaking of schooling chumps though, I've also found a pick-up frisbee game. It's Park service employees only, and we play once a week in Carlsbad. I'm usually the only one who drives all the way from GUMO, but I've had company a couple times. It's by far the lowest quality pick up I've ever played. There's no stall count, no real understanding of the rules (tons of picks, no calls), and turnovers are so prevalent that playing 4v5 isn't looked at as a disadvantage. No one aside from me has a forehand or has played organized ultimate. I'm like Blake Griffin playing against a highschoolers. Despite all that though, I love it. It makes my week. Something about playing the sport of ultimate just washes away any bad or troubling thoughts and lets me simply run around and have fun. Plus as always the people who play are really cool, and it's great to get to know people outside of my 10 person social network at GUMO. Cave people and the cave itself are all very interesting, but that's the subject of another post.