Jackson Ultimate

This past weekend I played in my second ultimate tournament of the year, in Jackson, WY. Being on the move and working in remote places like I have been this year has really limited my tournament attendance. By this time last year I had already played in 12. But what I'm lacking in quantity this year I'm making up for in quality.

My first tournament was Poultry Days back in June in between working at Guadalupe Mountains and Yellowstone. Tyke got me onto a Madison team and it was simply awesome. Great food, camping at the fields, watching team USA vs. team Canada, and as always throwing numerous hucks to Tyke that appear to be ill advised but almost always work because we know each other that well. The over-arching highlight of the weekend was the realization that I am a good ultimate player. I hadn't played competitive ultimate since club regionals last October, but I more than held my own playing on a good team against good competition. I know I'm not elite open club good, but I'm good enough to know I can play, and play relatively well, at about any other level, which is nice.

The Jackson tournament was my introduction into yet another regional ultimate culture, this time ultimate in the Rockies. The tournament was attended by teams from Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and Idaho and was a mix of competitive mixed teams trying to make nationals and teams formed by local pick up scenes that wanted to attend a tournament. From what I can tell the attitude at mountainous tourney locations such as this is much more about traveling to a sweet place, hanging out, and partying than playing serious ultimate, which is fine. All I wanted to do was have fun anyway.

The team I was playing with, a combo group out of Bozeman and Missoula, fully embraced this attitude and went all out with a hippie theme complete with giving everyone on the team hippie names such as Dandelion Dream, Lunar Moon Unit, Sundried Tomato, Prius Herbgarden, River Sprout, Morning Glory, and Cord of Wood, among others. Mar, who had come up to visit for the weekend, and I were initially skeptical of this theme and it reinforcing stereotypes, especially after the team played it's first few point barefoot. Soon after that though everyone cleated up and we realized they were all pretty good. A few of them had even won mixed nationals last year playing for the Flycoons out of Missoula.

Despite this tournament being less competitive than Poultry Days, I had a much harder time padding the stat sheet here than I did there, which I attribute to the style of play. Poultry Days I played with Madison guys and we were all on the same page offensively, at Jackson I didn't know their system and Mar and I both were constantly being looked off on under cuts, double cutting, or cutting when the thrower wasn't working. It was frustrating at times. The Montana group liked to run a vert stack with 3 handlers and basically handler weave until someone opened up deep. Cuts were called on the line like "we're looking for so and so deep followed by so and so deep", so mention of in cuts or breakside or anything. This made getting the disc rather hard for someone who specializes in in-cuts and breakside flow cuts such myself. Still, I made it work, and by Sunday I was opening my deep game and made some plays. It was also great to play with Mar again, though as always we need to work on our connection. I was 0 for 2 on hucks to her during the weekend. At Poultry Days I was probably 8 for 10 or something when looking to Tyke deep.

Best part of the tournament was probably the party. It was outside at a mexican restaurant/bar and started right after games were over and ran until long after Mar and I left at 10:30. Copious amounts of mexican food, good local beer, a good local band, and good weather. Couldn't really ask for more.

Oh, and we went 3-3 on the weekend.

July

July is going by fast too...

As opposed to my time in Guadalupe, my time here is rather structured and doesn't lend itself as easily to themes for posts. I'm going to wait a little longer before I write a 'living in Yellowstone' post, but in the meantime here are the highlights from the past few weeks.

-I am now fully involved in two different projects here, one using GIS and ENVI and another using matlab and infrared imagery. Both are interesting topics and actually have the potential to be journal articles, or at least GSA abstracts, according to my supervisors.

-Work is very reminiscent of grad school. I share a small, windowless office with 2 other geocorps volunteers and spend most of my days indoors working on my projects. It's a little frustrating being stuck inside all week when I'm working at Yellowstone, but I still have the weekends and occasional side projects to get outside and see the park.

-My parents visited two weekends ago and we had amazing luck viewing animals: wolf, coyote, elk, bison, and grizzly bear all in one day. I also enjoyed the 4 evenings of free good meals

-This past weekend I went to Maine for Zargham's wedding. It was great to be back in New England and see a bunch of my friends. I also got to hang out in Boston for two nights and see other friends who weren't at the wedding. Every time I go back I always get homesick to a degree, I realize how lucky I am to have such an amazing group of friends and I wish I could spend more time with them out east. But soon enough I'll remember I live in Yellowstone and realize life isn't so bad out here. Especially I can convince some people to visit.

Coming up in the next few weeks I'm looking forward to continuing my exploration of the park towards the canyon and west thumb areas. There's still so much I haven't see here, I'm beginning to think I may not even complete even my short list of 'must do's'.

Enjoying the Simple Things

Two weeks into living at Yellowstone and I'm already a bit jaded.

"It's just a *(&^*!$ buffalo! There's no reason to park your car in the middle of &*^! the road on a &*^!@# holiday weekend so your wife can get that perfect photo! You're going to see 100 more of the $%^!&* things today!"

So while I the above quote is a very common thought as I drive through the park, I am making special note of the little things that make me very happy, and make me realize that I am lucky to be able to live and work here. Things such as:

-getting out on the trails and being the only person to see a mother elk prodding her calf up a hill into the cover of the forest.

-driving in the rain through the mountains. Especially I have Michael Franti playing on my iPod.

-Barreling downhill on my mountain bike, going 2.6 miles in 15 minutes, to emerge at the trail head 50 feet from my house and getting inside just before the daily thunderstorm hits.

-Getting to wear chest-high waders and play in a lake for an afternoon and call it 'field work'.

-The fact that when you're doing field work near sulfur vents, you can fart as much as you want and no one will notice.

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.