Beer Pong, a natural bridge, and one last visit to the hot springs

My last weekend in Pinedale...what to do? Part of my time was occupied with grad school application work, but that still left many hours.

Saturday: Borrowed Ryan's "Ishmael" book and drove back to Granite Hot Springs for a nice long soak-and-read. Almost finished the book in about four hours - a good story if a bit dated. No new hot spring acquaintances - just a young couple who obviously felt I was disrupting their hot springs solitude.

Sunday: Ryan and Nick decided that we should celebrate my leaving with a few rounds of Beer Pong. So they bought a mini-keg of Heineken, some margarita mix, 20 dixie cups, and two ping pong balls. The premise of beer pong is quite simple: if you manage to land a ping pong ball in one of your opponent's cups, they must then drink that cup's alcoholic contents. The night ended with all four of us rather tipsy and quite incapable of hitting small cups with ping pong balls. After that it was no longer beer pong, just beer.

Monday: Worked on my Cornell application in the morning, then drove up to the Green River Lakes with Ryan for a hike to the Clear Creek Natural Bridge (a place I had visited once before on my Osborn Mountain hike). ~9-10 miles round trip, so we got back to the car just as darkness became complete. I may post a few pictures if I have time in my upcoming packing frenzy.

I plan on leaving Thursday morning and arriving in Minnesota Friday night. So will end my Pinedale adventure, unless I sign on for the Snowshoe Hare surveys this winter.

Long day of four-wheeling

Having completed the areas mowed this year, we set out to draw GPS polygons around areas mowed in 2005. It was sometimes hard to find the borders of the old mowings, especially where the sagebrush is naturally short or absent, but sagebrush grows very slowly (3-4 foot tall sagebrush may be 60-80 years old) so in most areas we had no problems. Riding through 3-foot tall sagebrush between mowings is a wee bit tricky. One large shrub nearly tipped me backwards before I came down on top of it with no wheels firmly on the ground.

I saw more jackrabbits today - at least ten - than I have in my whole life. These beautiful creatures are quite conspicuous at the moment as they are turning white for the winter but do not yet have snow for camouflage.

Bouncing around on sagebrush stumps and badger holes all day left me with a sore butt and a flat tire. We plan on fixing the tire (but unfortunately not the butt) and returning tomorrow to finish the project.

Correction

Turns out the Jardine Juniper is only 1500 years old, not 3200 as was once believed. Still a mighty old tree though

Utah pictures posted

I added a photo essay with pictures from my Utah trip. Check it out here.

Rather fun day today, mostly riding around on ATVs GPSing mowed areas in sagebrush. Subaru Foresters keep appearing in my life. Perhaps they were always there and I am just beginning to notice, or perhaps it is a sign...

Done with the fence!

I finished rolling the approximately 5-8 miles of electric fence today, working alone as Kate is gone and Chrissy is still sick. Should be able to get out on ATVs to GPS sagebrush mowing treatments tomorrow. Josh took us out to eat in Jackson tonight to thank us for our work on the lynx project. Rather fun, though Josh likes to speed. He had his truck up to 110 mph on the way home.

Trip to Logan was great. I should have pictures up tomorrow.

The BLM has offered us extensions for our internships, though still at $9.25 per hour. I have an interview scheduled for the Florida job, and I am hoping that will work out so I don't have to decide between cold work for low pay and unemployment.

Getting out of Pinedale

I'm heading down to Logan, Utah tomorrow (near Salt Lake City) to visit Jenna Forsyth, a good friend from college. Will be nice to be back on the road and to see a friendly face after so long. Work has been taking down electric fence south of Pinedale. The fence was designed to keep cattle out of sagebrush study plots, but the study is mostly finished and the fence is blocking wildlife and cattle movements. Not the most exciting job, but not bad in the beautiful clear weather to walk along and roll up fence. Chrissy hates it though - we will have to find something else for her to do next week.