|
[19 Oct 2008|04:09pm] |
So, here's the plan for the next few months:
We're going to be flying out of Taylor Ranch on Halloween (cat in tow) and will drive home to Seattle, likely stopping on the way to visit friends. We'll spend a couple of weeks in Seattle. Then we will fly out of Seattle on November 15th, leaving the car and the Pan-cat (still trying to find a kittysitter).
We will spend two weeks in Los Alamos with Tyler's family. Then we will fly out of Los Alamos on Thanksgiving Day (it was cheaper) and return to Boise, spend a night with his family there, and then fly back into Taylor on November 28th. We will be at Taylor for a month, taking care of the facilities and the animals while one of the directors is getting his hip replaced (and recovering from it).
Around December 20th, we will fly out of Taylor, get a ride down to Boise, and probably fly home to Seattle. We'll be reunited with Pan-cat and have Christmas at home, and then have the next two months off, returning to Taylor in early March 2009.
Ta da!
|
|
|
[09 Oct 2008|04:10pm] |
Just spent the last hour frantically working to extinguish a grass fire behind one of the cabins, started by an escaped ember from a burn pile.
Everything and everyone is totally fine.
|
|
|
[04 Oct 2008|04:08pm] |
Wow, I haven't updated my journal in a bit.
So, when last I updated, I was getting ready to head to New Mexico for a conference. I was a bit of a wreck before I left, because it was a work thing and I was sure I'd forget something important, like a computer cable or my plane ticket. Luckily, it went fine. I was picked up at the airport by one of the delegates to the Wilderness conference that was here in May, one-half of the couple that hosted me for the few days of the conference in their lovely adobe home somewhere in south Albuquerque.
The conference was a little dull, but still informative. I spent all day Wednesday and Thursday at the conference, learning about sensor networks and quality control and trying to look nice and sound professional. I'd eat dinner with the couple, who helped put the conference on, then go home and socialize with them in the evening. Then I spent one whole day after the conference in the LTER offices (Long Term Ecological Research), interviewing people about the specific data needs of our station, and the best ways to address them given the experience I have. That part went really well, and was definitely more valuable than the conference itself.
While it was a great networking opportunity, I had to be on my toes the whole time. So, it was nice on the evening of the last day when I got dropped off at Winnings (a coffee shop) and I was able to take a few deep breaths in comfortable solitude, then got picked up by my mother-in-law for a a trip to Los Alamos and a few days of relaxing and hanging with family.
I only had three days there, but it was really nice. I ate tons of green chile (and bought 8 containers to pack home to Idaho) and drove around town with Mike. I hung out with Jeni and played with the 1-and-a-half-year-old Taylor-niece, who's got all sorts of strong opinions about things now (one-word opinions, admittedly). I made a couple of flower fairies. I spent a day in Santa Fe with Mike, which was both fun and productive...we walked into a shop where the proprietor was crazy to get rid of the items on her sale table, and I walked out with four gorgeous Chinese parasols, totally free.
Somewhere along the trip, I started feeling better. I've had some sort of nameless lethargy and depression weighing on me for a while, but I think I've started feeling better. I think part of it was reading Eat, Pray, Love throughout the trip, which is probably the most (personally) important book I've read in the last few years, and definitely felt as though it was speaking directly to me. Part of it was probably just the safe environment, the long walks and car trips with Mike, and just having some fun in a no-stress environment. I think it can be a little hard to live in your workplace, so it was good to get away for a few days.
I didn't have any trouble getting the green chile on the plane (I took a small cooler as checked luggage), and nobody raised an eyebrow at the parasols sticking out of my backpack. We flew RIGHT over the Valle and Los Alamos on the way to the Denver hub, and I could even see Tyler's house. I got back to Boise and did some grocery shopping, and made it back to Taylor the next day, albeit late, due to an alarm clock accident. Sigh.
But it was a good trip. I had lunch with my friend Schulyer in Albuquerque (twice) and discovered the joys of Frontier. I got to go to a fantastic bookstore. I got to stock up on some of my favorite foods. I got to hang out with people I love and sleep late. I got to play "Heart-Shaped Box" on Guitar Hero and see the aspens starting to change color on Pajarito. It was good times.
|
|
|
[28 Sep 2008|03:48pm] |
So it's Sunday, Tyler's off on a hike with Jim, and I have a leisurely morning ahead of me, so I decide to take the time to have a nice, non-cold cereal breakfast...hot oatmeal with lots of honey. I warm the milk on the stove, cook the oats, pour it in the bowl, stir in the honey, and sit down on the bed with my book.
Meanwhile, Pan is in a hyper mood, and before I have even taken one bite of my breakfast, he comes flying up from behind the bed and in one Superman-like leap, lands squarely IN my bowl of oatmeal. Half of my hot, sticky oatmeal slops onto the bed and soaks through the top three blankets, some goes on my brand-new book (Penny Arcade 5: The Case of the Mummy's Gold), and Pan streaks across the bed and pillows with oatmeal paws and disappears into the bathroom.
So I spend the rest of the morning doing three loads of laundry (I needed to do at least one anyway), sweeping the floor, mopping the floor, and cleaning the rest of the cabin while I'm at it.
Now I'm lying on my unmade bed, updating my journal while Pan climbs the laundry rack in the bathroom. It is his jungle gym.
|
|
|
[07 Sep 2008|03:45pm] |
Tomorrow I will fly out of Taylor and spend the afternoon running some errands in Boise. I am really hoping my car doesn't cause any problems.
Tuesday, I fly to Albuquerque to attend a conference on Environmental Information Management. I will do that for the rest of the week, then have the weekend and a few extra days leave to visit family in Los Alamos.
I also plan to check an empty cooler on my flight and fill it up in Albuquerque with frozen green chile. I don't know if I will get hassled about this. I emailed some questions to the airline (Frontier), but didn't hear anything back.
The last few days I have mostly been puppysitting--keeping the newly-arrived 13-week old puppy (Kea) from chewing the furniture, chewing electrical cords, chewing me, etc. The best way to handle her is to give her three long walks a day and wear her out so much that she sleeps in between.
That is all.
|
|
|
[31 Jul 2008|03:38pm] |
Yesterday was mail day in the backcountry.
6 miles upstream at Cabin Creek, a forest service employee got his weekly food delivery, which is always delivered in cardboard boxes. When he finished unpacking the food, he burned the boxes. However, it was a very windy day, and the fire quickly escaped. The bucket of water he had in case of emergency wasn't enough.
At 2:00 yesterday, our rattlesnake researcher radioed down to draw our attention to a smoke plume over the ridge to the north. We called the forest supervisor and learned about the fire origins, and were told that the fire was now at 150 acres. We had an emergency all-hands meeting at 9:30 last night, in which we discussed our situation here, and also had a conference call with the forest supervisor. By that time, the fire had grown to 700 acres.
It is now 9:15 AM. The sky is a murky gray, and the fire has grown to 1,000 acres. Nobody is really worried about the fire coming here, but the Forest Service is sending some equipment and a fire crew to us to help with structure protection if that comes up. I am currently waiting in the front yard for the Forest Service to drop eight smokejumpers on our airstrip. We are also evacuating visitors and stopping all incoming visits. The students are okay; they won't be here for much longer anyway.
That is the news. I will update more as conditions change.
|
|
|
[17 Jul 2008|02:38pm] |
I've had lots of computer error messages, from the Blue Screen of Death to the old Mac Classic image of a tiny bomb. But the one I got this morning ranks highly, I think.
|
|
|
[14 Jul 2008|11:19am] |
I have re-enabled anonymous comments so that people without LJ accounts (like my Mom) can post comments here. Hopefully, the spammers won't take advantage of this. Again.
I'd love to hear from you!
|
|
|
[12 Jul 2008|03:35pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 proud |
] |
I live!
I'm just crawling out of the far side of haying. It engulfed us at the beginning of the month and went for eight straight days, all blended together in a mass. This is the first day off I've had in weeks.
We would get up later than usual and be ready to work at 9:30 rather than 8:00. This was not a concession to the workers, but simply an understanding that the hay needed time for the dew to burn off. We spent several days mowing hay, after a few breakdowns and a mule runaway the first day. This involves one manager driving the mower, and everyone else "bumping" the cut grass...using pitchforks to comb the wet cut grass away from the standing grass at the margins, so it wouldn't clog the blades on the next pass. This took a few days.
As the hay slowly dried (it's arid here, but not quite as hot as usual...mid-eighties), we transitioned into raking. We had to add a step because the hay was slow to dry, which meant walking through the pasture and airstrip and turning the hay by hand, as the top layer would often dry into a thick mat and insulate the wet bottom layer. All the interns and a few additional scholars took turns driving the rake with the mule team, which is great fun. Anyone who wasn't driving walked between the windrows and raked up the loose strands.
Raking the hay into windrows not only condenses the hay, but raises it up off the ground and allows the wind to blow through it, drying it even more. After drying like this for a day, we walked through it with pitchforks and pitched it into shocks, which also took a few days. Finally, we hitched the mules up to the hay cart, pitched the hay into the cart, and brought it back to the barn, where we put it up on the stack with the elaborate mule-powered pulley mechanism I've described before, then thatched it into a perfectly square stack.
It was a moist spring, and so we put up 15 loads of hay this year. That ties the record for most loads, and we also broke the record for most loads in a single day (7.5). We would work until lunch, then take a break in the heat of the day until about 2 or 3. Then we'd work until dinner, stop to eat, and then go back and make hay until dark. Whenever we weren't working or eating, I just laid on the bed and let the heat and exhaustion bleed out of my body. I slept badly.
But we did a great job. And the haying is done. Now we enter the second half of the summer.
|
|
| Training the horses |
[29 Jun 2008|03:30pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 accomplished |
] |
I got to have some interesting interactions with the stock this week.
For one, last weekend the interns went for a ride up to the wolf den, and on the way back, the most skittish of the horses jumped a creek into some bushes, tearing a big gash on one front leg above the knee. It was too big to leave alone, and there was no way we could fly a vet in for a few days, so we ended up having to stitch the thing closed ourselves.
The horse, as previously stated, is skittish, and especially hates anything messing with her legs, so this promised to be a real picnic. It ended up involving twelve of us, with several holding her halter and one holding the twitch (which pinches her nose and releases endorphins), two actually doing the stitching, and the rest of us bringing scissors and syringes and bandages and bute. We put in nine stitches, which took two hours, several shots of local anesthetic in the leg, and two shots of a general sedative in the neck to dope her up a bit (but not knock her out).
A few days later, we had a second incident...the stock escaped. H and I were changing Kat's bandage that morning (looking good), and H forgot to lock the gate with the carabiner when we left. The gate still had a sliding bar to close it, but the mules know how to deal with that. A few hours later, at lunchtime, Penny and the mules were right outside our kitchen window.
The field is a mass of chest-high hay at the moment, and the stock was wild in it, running and trampling and eating everything. It doesn't help that the lead mare is a mustang, and enjoyed the excuse to be a wild horse for a while. They ran from one end of the pasture to the other, which was murder on Kat's leg. Tyler managed to catch the slowest mule, and I was able to lure one in with grain and slow down another enough to be caught. Then J caught the lame Kat at the watering hole, and we herded the other two into the corral after the rest were tied there.
Luckily, they didn't do too much damage to the hay. It was a bit trampled, but it'll spring back up before we start mowing it this week. The fun thing is that H thought it was a good excuse to give the lead mare some extra training on respect, and I came along to watch.
What H basically did is use a whip (for sound, not for beating) to make the mare run circles around her in the corral, and the mare was not allowed to stop unless H said so. When H gave her the cue to stop, the mare would walk to H, licking her lips (a sign of submission) and get a rest for a minute before H started her up again. The intent was basically to affirm that H was in charge, not the mare, and that getting to spend time around people was a privelege and a place of refuge. Then H let me try it, and then we both did it with the crankiest mule, just to see if we could. We even got to set the whip aside.
I have to admit, it's a really cool feeling to be able to control the movement of something as big as a horse or a mule by voice commands and hand signals ALONE. By the time we were done, I was able to call them to me from across the corral, or make them follow me around without even having to make eye contact.
It was a few steps above my usual stock interactions in terms of difficulty, and I enjoyed it immensely.
|
|
| The unlucky |
[24 Jun 2008|02:45pm] |
We have a graduate student here doing research on rattlesnakes. While that's ordinarily a high-risk sort of topic, he's never been bitten. However, he was evacuated out of here for the 2006 fires, and had to be flown out last year for a bad gash on his finger (broken glass).
Last week, the day after his parents left from a week-long visit, he was running a very high fever and seemed really out of it. By the next morning, he had muscular aches, headache, and bad chills. This was all very indicative of tick fever, so we flew him out. He spent a few hours in the ER in Boise, got on antibiotics, and felt better right away. He's still on antibiotics, but he flew back in yesterday.
About two hours ago, he was walking down a hill and fell.
Onto his telemetry antenna.
Which went into his eye.
It punctured his eyelid and went pretty deep into the socket. The bleeding is minimal and there's no fluids, but he had a good headache. We don't know the extent of the damage. So, we flew him out again. The plane just left and they're going straight to Boise.
Edit
IT WENT INTO HIS BRAIN OMG OMG AGGGHHH
The eye seems to be okay. The brain seems to be okay too. They kept him in the hospital overnight last night for observation. The cat scan showed a blood trail, but nothing too major, so they'll do another one tomorrow and see how things are going.
Rule: it is never a good thing when you can make the neurologist on duty say "I've never seen THAT before!"
|
|
| CAT POST |
[24 Jun 2008|02:41pm] |
Yesterday was the day to take off Pan's paw bandage. His broken toe is taped in two places, there were stitches in his paw, and there was cotton batting, vetwrap, and tape over all of that.
Mind you, getting this off required about 45 minutes of making tiny tiny nips with ineffectual scissors, while Pan was wrapped in a blanket and pinned by at least two other people.
Needless to say, once the bandage came off, Pan had torn his toe tape off within an hour. Plus, he hated us all forever. And his paw was bleeding a bit because he took the stitches out too.
He seems better this morning, and not so freaked out. His broken toe sticks out a bit, like a velociraptor. There's nothing we can do about it now, so he'll just have to deal for a few weeks. The bleeding also stopped, so I'm hoping that's just the aftermatch of the stitches. It was only a few drops here and there anyway.
He doesn't seem to trust us at the moment, and I got scratched last night when I was trying to fix his toe, so I feel kinda crappy.
|
|
|
[21 Jun 2008|02:39pm] |
Sometimes, being in the wilderness doesn’t really feel like being in the wilderness. Sometimes, that’s because I feel really connected to the outside world, as I do when I’m online. Sometimes, it’s because the outside world comes to us, perhaps with more frequency than we would really like.
For the past month, the airspace above us has been choked with recreational flyers every morning. It seems like as soon as the buzz from one aircraft dies away, another one comes along right behind it. The River of No Return Wilderness is a really popular place to fly small aircraft…Harrison Ford does it…but I’m really ready for it to stop.
The thing is, we have aircraft come here several times a week…our mail planes, visiting students, visiting professors and researchers, Idaho Fish and Game crew…all sorts. We have to meet those planes to get our deliveries, move equipment, or get people settled in. Therefore, every time I hear an engine, I have to stop what I’m doing, go outside (if I’m not there already), locate the plane, and determine if it’s circling to land or if it’s a plane I recognize (there are about five, although only two come here on any regular basis).
Normally (or ideally), I’ll have to do this maybe twice a day. Lately, I’ve had to do it maybe twenty or thirty times a day, sometimes while I’m still in bed in the morning. It doesn’t help that some nearby (30 miles) guest ranches have “fly-ins” for recreational pilots, or that some pilots are curious about who we are and will circle around and around our airstrip to get a look at us with no intention of landing, while we have to scramble for the ground-to-air radio and find out what their intentions are and if they’re in distress. If it’s a plane we’re expecting, a plane that circles and doesn’t land is either waiting for us to clear the runway (of people, equipment, or hoses), wants to know our wind speed at the ground level, or is probably having problems with their flaps.
Recreational users have priority over researchers in wilderness areas. If a researcher comes across somebody hiking or fishing while they’re working, we’re not supposed to interfere with the recreational users for fear of disturbing their “wilderness experience.” In the past, fishermen have gotten really angry when a researcher even says hello to them, since their perception of total solitude has been disrupted. But these aerial recreationalists are really putting some major holes in my wilderness experience. It’s like living in a airshow.
It won’t last forever. Soon the weather will get too hot for anyone to fly much, and we’ll only see planes in the cool hours of the morning and evening. But until then, it is aggravating.
You heard me, Harrison Ford.
|
|
|
[23 May 2008|03:45pm] |
Things are...going better.
Big Creek has gone down and our airstrip is no longer flooded. Pioneer has gone down so our bridges are no longer flooded, and the water has started to return to its usual clarity.
In the meantime, though, things are still a bit of a pain. I spent half of yesterday morning helping clear debris off the airstrip (logs and branches and other things the river washed up). The second half was spent standing hip-deep in Pioneer, wearing leaking waders and trying to fix our broken waterbox by clearing sand out of the lines and jamming a 6-foot extension pipe into our intake. The water was so cold it burned like lava.
We eventually got the pipe in, the waterbox filled up, we let it settle for an hour, and then spent 20 minutes bleeding out the water in the lines before we could both take hot showers. That's when we realized that the water didn't work (again), and that the pipe we had just rigged up there had come loose.
I begged off this time, since I was so cold I was having problems doing manual tasks like opening doors, and Tyler got some other people to help fix it (for good, this time). I took the afternoon off.
We're excited that one of our friendly acquaintances from UI has flown in now. She'll be here for the summer doing woodpecker research.
The airstrip is clear and our mail/grocery/Amazon-birthday-book-order plane is coming in soon. Things are looking up!
|
|
|
[19 May 2008|03:43pm] |
Because all the cabins here are supplied from the west waterbox with the exception of our cabin and the Dave Lewis cabin (under construction), up until this morning, we were the only cabin on the premises with running water. But now our intake has washed away in the flood, and we'll be getting buckets from the creek like everyone else.
Every day the water has gotten a little higher, and overnight, it finally reached the point where we could no longer contain it. The speed of the water coming down Pioneer at a bend by the Hornocker cabin eroded the bank so much that now my favorite footbridge is out. We've tied it down so it can't be washed away, but it's not safe to use and one end has sunk about a foot. The main bridge to the airstrip is also out because the water finally got high enough to start overflowing the banks around it, so you can't reach it without wading.
Our best bridges are the two small footbridges that cross the creek at the fords, one by the corral shed and one above our cabin. The creek is wide enough there to diffuse some of the energy.
Two trees are down across the creek. The airstrip is a lake with geese floating on it. The river jumped its banks onto the north pasture (a floodplain), and is now flowing over it.
We have 20 high school kids and one professor hoping to fly out today, and 3 carpenters and 4 guests hoping to fly in. The only way they can do this now is to hike upstream 6 miles and use the airstrip at Cabin Creek, which is not yet underwater.
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
losthemlock's journal
