Well, summer has finally arrived here in Yellowstone. Thank
goodness. Hopefully it'll stick around - Last week found parts of
the park under several inches of snow, and random hailstorms are
still disrupting plans for getting out and hiking. The mountaintops
are still somewhat covered in crusty snow, making mountain climbing
a bit difficult yet. I had the opportunity to make the most pitiful
snowman ever. I think that I'm entitled to bonus points for making
a northern hemisphere snowman in June. Judge for yourself.
With our position along the prevailing weather patterns and the
added factor of extreme elevation (6000-some-odd feet here in
Mammoth Hot Springs), warm weather sometimes comes a bit late.
While you in Maine are enjoying beach weather, it's still dropping
down quite a bit here in the Northern Rocky Mountains. It's been a
fairly wet spring, so we may have another tame fire season this
year. Although it gives us some dependable overtime (firefighters
need lots of maps), it's kind of disruptive to the tourist
activities in the park.
Much of the last two weeks has been spent in the field. I've been
traveling all over the Northeast portion of the park and spent quite
a bit of time in the Lake area (on the north edge of Lake
Yellowstone). The rest of this season's workers have arrived in our
department, and everyone getting their feet wet with field training,
bear safety, and digging into our wide range of delicious spatial
data to play with.
Wildlife encounters are getting more frequent as people get deeper
and deeper in the woods. Early this week, 3 of my coworkers
encountered 4 bears in one day, two of whom were fornicating.
Unfortunately, they forgot their camera. Tsk. Bison encounters
have been at a minimum, with everyone giving them a wide berth.
We're all still a little skittish from our encounter nearly two
weeks ago. Last week we had a mother Elk leave her young (<2 days)
baby hidden outside our window for several hours while she grazed,
and we had an office full of people seeking a glimpse of the cutest
baby this side of the Tetons.
<shameless plug> In other news, I took some time in the last few
weeks to design a department t-shirt. It's a little more
professional than the stencil job we did last year, and I think
everyone needs one. Go see my design at http://www.cafepress.com/gis_sac
and order one for yourself. </shameless plug>
That's all for now.
Nick
