Gothic or Go Home

5) Droughts and Trenches

We ran out of water. I don't really want to talk about it, because it put me in a very displeased state of mind. The whole summer spring ran dry, so we had no water ever since climbing Gothic (oh no, another missed blog post...), and had to haul it up from Gates. We groaned about this, but it was so much better compared to what would happen next.

It was only a few days before they shut off the winter water with no warning. I had 3/4 of a Nalgene. It was like 127 Hours, but shorter. Luckily, it was back on again in 24 hours, stopping me from continuing my desperate measure of drinking skim milk. That's also when the construction began, recreating a WWI-esque trench over 5 feet deep directly next to Red Rock.

4) Start Wearing Purple

Since Kayla, Ro, and Rick were to leave very shortly after Jessica, we determined that one more mountain was in order. After all of the Alumni Reunion activities were complete, we got up very early to ascend Purple Mountain. No, this is not a sugar-rush induced euphoria; it is a real peak.

3) EVERYBODY'S BETRAY ME

2) Going to LA (August 8-13)

This was a surreal part of my summer, but absolutely phenomenal! I got to spend just shy of a week in LA, where I got to see the wedding of BenDavid Grabinski and Amanda Zubillaga. It was absolutely magical. Having never been to LA, I didn't know what to expect, except what I gleaned from everyone's foreboding glances and Scott's quiet decree that I should leave my Tevas behind.

I almost lost it when I landed in Denver for my connection. All of the people, many of whom were wearing fedoras, combined with the odd neon signs and billboards which have been blessedly absent from my life this whole summer, were almost too much for me. I coped by falling asleep.

When I landed, I met Thomas at the airport, and we drove to Anaheim. It was a great evening of talking in the humid California air. Like Carol had warned, it was like swimming in oxygen. The next day was to be spent entirely at Disneyland. A very weird transition from RMBL, but fun in a different way. We bounced around the park, spotting Grabinskis here and there and cooing over Max and Lily, the littlest ones.

Friday was when we drove to LA. The rehearsal dinner was that night at a burger place one could only describe as "chill" which had a killer veggie burger and was full of great people who would be at the wedding the next day.

Saturday morning I met up with Alice, who took me out to brunch (as per my whinging) at a very Californian brunch place with a bit of a line but absolutely incredible food to make up for it. I took a picture of my breakfast (corn hash, avocado, fresh tomatoes, sunny-side up eggs, and a bowl of fresh berries and juicy apricots) to remember when back in the cold granola bar mornings of Gothic. I wheedled her into taking me to the Phillips homestead, a sprawling California house about 30 minutes away. She was weirded out but secretly liked it. Or so I have the artistic license to say. I saw her parents and her koi, all of whom were charming. She then drove me back to the hotel, pointing out lots of LA landmarks (LAndmarks?) as I tried to take it all in.

That night was the wedding. It was absolutely incredible. I won't even try to sum it up in words, but it was a gorgeous, personal ceremony followed by an unparalleled dinner. I pretended to be a photographer so I fit in. I had also showered for the past three days straight, so I was feeling pretty fresh. Thomas and I played with the golden dinosaur decorations and I danced with Hannah to Kanye. A perfect dream of a night.

1) Climbing Avery (August 5)

Since Kristjan's family were leaving the same day as I was going to LA, we all decided to do one last hike: Julia, the Niitepolds, and me. Hiking with little Aime was a very different experience. Six-year-olds have a lot of energy, and most of this was channeled toward inventing entirely new personas for us as horses. My name changed every time I asked her what it was, and I was frequently chased by pesky flying foxes, sworn enemies of the pikas (she explained).

I have been bad.

Is that how confessions usually start? In any case, I'd love to be able to say I've been too busy to blog about my adventures, but to be honest, I've just been having too much fun. I'll try to skim over some highlights of the past several weeks. The past August, really. This will be done in five distinct posts, so as to make the portions manageable.

I was ready to make my peace. I really was. We hadn't set the traps in a while, and the one that was still left set was idle. I freed a mouse caught by its tail yesterday morning, and no more traps were set.

Yesterday, after Kayla and I returned from climbing Purple (I know, I'm several posts behind at this point, but they'll be coming after this rant), we laid down on the couch, crooned to sleep by Brandon Flowers. I was dozing, but I did hear a couple of scratching noises, which were odd. I ignored it and snoozed again.

Just as I woke up to go to lab, Danielle and her dad got home from climbing Gothic. Kayla and I were up now, and we started bustling about. BUT THEN...

We saw it.

DEMONMAU5, in the daytime. It was sitting on the counter, where Kayla found it. She said wryly that it was "a recap". It was missing half of its tail. And it showed no fear. Astonishingly cute, it had big ears and eyes, and sat charmingly on our windowsill. We tried chasing it out of the house, and it eventually complied. But that was not the last we saw of the latest DEMONMAU5.

This morning, I rolled over in bed a little before my alarm went off. I heard Julia get up, go downstairs, and walk around. Then I heard an, "EW!" I got up and went downstairs. Sitting by the food cupboard was a gnawed on Hershey's chocolate bar. The edges of the plastic were nibbled, and likewise the edges of the chocolate itself. Julia had seen the little fella sitting boldly in the sink, surrounded by its own feces. All over the dishes. She had removed it, but the threat still stands.

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

Dear DEMONMAU5,

Your days are numbered. From now on, I will be taking pictures of all your dead brethren. Here is the first. Your fate is here for you to see, and I hope you take it to heart before you repeatedly scamper over our clean mugs and sponges again.

Good looks can’t get you everywhere.

Signed most gravely,

...was incredible.

After last night's Cabin Crawl (a LOT of fun!), Danielle, Julia and I were planning on a quiet night in Red Rock. The beetle girls were off hiking to the hot springs and we'd had a nice dinner at the dining hall -- Surf 'n' Turf, homebaked bread, and apple pie -- with Ian Billick, the director of RMBL who was concerned about our social situation, which was very sweet. Afterwards, we did some evening data entry before heading back to the cabin.

I was sitting on the futon, feet curled up, entering Speyeria mrr data and listening to LCD Soundsystem, when suddenly there was knocking on the door. Weird, because the girls were far away and the boys drove to Jackson Hole for the weekend.

It turned out it was a crew of people we'd met at the Cabin Crawl, mostly comprised of Schofield cabin, who had been Russian themed. As it turned out, they'd developed Russian personas for their cribbage games, but had usefully applied it to the Crawl as their theme. They'd remembered our beloved Red Rock (turned into Red Rum for the purposes of theme-created) when they had come up the hill to retrieve more of their party and had popped over to invite us to a sending-off party of sorts at Stupid Falls, where Danielle, Jessica, Kayla and I had incidentally spent our whole afternoon, dipping in the top of the falls in our skivvys (a delightful word I'm using here for the first time), napping and chatting on the rocks.

We trekked over in the dusky light, using our headlamps to avoid the cow-produced puddles and find our footing down the slope to the falls. Two ukeleles twanged through the night as we all laid down in a puddle, heads on each other's stomachs to look at the stars. Various constellation myths were told, and we all felt very small together.

As it got darker, we started seeing planes, then satellites, then the Milky Way. Suddenly, a flare lit up the sky -- an incredibly bright meteor, its trail still visible even after it vanished. There were two or three more as we laid on the rocks, shivering in our Tevas but warm with the surrounding pile of biologists, all laughing and exchanging stories about the growth of their leg hair, their study organisms, and speculation as to what meteors might hold.

I never would have imagined that I would have to leave Iowa in order to have my first cattle-herding experience, but yesterday, I was proven wrong.

Saturday night, we had a lab-and-families potluck at Carol and Ward's cabin. The boys were very secretive about what they were bringing, but we had ambitious plans: couscous and chickpea salad with tomatoes, as well as a Martha Stewart rhubarb cake made with Aunt Ro's rhubarb. Luckily, we started early. We had several substitutions to do (the CB grocery store didn't have mint and we didn't have enough oranges or any sour cream, to name a few) as well as a lot of tomatoes to cut and oranges to zest.

Three lengthy hours later, we had decimated our paper tablecloth with orange juice, stuck the overflowing cake in the oven several different times, and decided that chickpeas smell incredibly suspect. We took up our various cooking vessels and trekked through the rain to the house.

It was a great dinner. My parents, Ro and Rick, and the Niitepold and Swartz families were all there, and although the rhubarb cake looked more like one of the villains from Troll 2 than a Martha-worthy masterpiece, it tasted damn delicious.

We knew that the next morning, we had to get up for Speyeria mrr, but we had a night in the condo to watch some of the Olympics and Game of Thrones first. Oh, and a hot, pressurized shower. Amazing.

The next morning was a later one, due to the cloudy forecast, but we rolled out to the meadow around 10:30 with our nets. Two sites into the six, we noticed cows banging into the fence headfirst. This was odd, because it was the side of the fence of South Gothic, where we'd just had dinner the night before. That's when we noticed two of the residents waving their arms around until the cows bolted off in the opposite direction. Kristjan took up his net, and we ours, and we trooped over to the research meadow: another supposedly cow-free zone.

Spreading out, Kristjan, Julia, Winston and I went searching for the vanished bovines. It was only when I reached the top of a hill to see two giant, red cows that I realized I had no idea what to do. So, naturally, I made a lot of noise, yelling for Winston and Julia. Winston came over from the right and we stared down the cows.

"So... now what do we do?"

That's when we realized what was at stake. The legacies of both Iowa and Alabama weighed heavily on our shoulders. We decided to look for an openable fence. Weirdly, we hadn't found where they'd gotten through, although we'd seen several calves just bowl into the wires, tangling hooves and ears until they made it through. We found a gate eventually, just as Julia came down the hill from the upper research meadow with three calves in front of her. The gate was tightly attached by three twisted wires, but with Kristjan, Winston, and my Benchmade knife, we wrestled it open.

Of course, just as we tried to herd them through it, the biggest one saw Kristjan's pink shirt, got intimidated by its manly quality, and ran up the hill with four calves and three dusty biologists in hot pursuit. As we panted to the top, we rethought our technique. Staying behind them, we yelled out encouraging phrases to keep them moving along the fence, back to where Kristjan was holding the gate open. Giving them a wide berth, they finally made it through the gate, which we cinched up behind them with sounds of victory. 

CABIN FEVER

Last night, Danielle, Winston and I watched Cabin Fever, and everyone promptly fell in love with Eli Roth. The beetle girls were off backpacking and Julia chose instead to simultaneously watch our reactions and Pride and Prejudice from the dining table.

I'd received the DVD from a mysterious hometown source via Amazon, much to my delight, and had opened it in the lab, where Kristjan viewed the cover and helpfully said, "Hey, that cabin looks just like Red Rock."

NEW STUDY SITE: 401

There's been a lot of excitement and a busy last couple of days with the discovery of a new colony of gillettii. It is what we call in the industry, a BIG DEAL. All of the papers we've read about gillettii say that they don't travel very far, and really they've only been found south of the main site here in Gothic, which is the prevailing wind direction. Basically, no one has been giving them enough credit. There are around 150 egg masses found already there.

The new site was found about 30 minutes north of the main site (about a 35-minute walk from our cabin) on an absolutely stunning part of the 401 Trail. Just when you think you're inured to the view of mountains and aspens all around you, nature throws a big one in your face. The site is near some beaver ponds, which means lots of tromping through debatably solid ground to examine the undersides of leaves for eggs, of which there are plenty.

WE REPRESENT THE BUTTERFLY GUILD

Last time I was at RMBL, still a tender, wee young thing, my Aunt Ro, Uncle Rick, my parents and I attempted to climb Dorothy, the "unnamed peak" east of Bellview. There are few things more frustrating than being one saddle below the summit and seeing big, buzkill rainclouds roll in, threatening lightning and necessitating a quick traipse back down the slopes. This is exactly what happened, which is why Ro came up to me and told me that she and the beetle girls, Jessica and Kayla, were going to do Dorothy on Sunday and that I had to join.

Sitting at the lunch tree on Friday, I anxiously proposed switching our precious day off to Saturday instead of Sunday. There was an overwhelmingly positive response from all four of the other net-wielders, who all wanted to come as well. Leave it to RMBL to yield a group of people who want to sacrifice their Friday night for an early bedtime, get up at 6:00AM, and climb a thirteen-thousand foot mountain.

We planned on driving in the ancient Ford Explorer. Unfortunately, the Explorer had other plans. 6:45AM was the first time jumping the car that day. There would be two more occasions to follow, along with manually pushing it.

Luckily, we didn't dramatically detour like last time, and we made it up the mountain in about three hours, spotting elk (live, bones, and carcass), golden eagle, annnnnnnd...

Pika! The cutest little beasts in the world. They are, as one comment on the Facebook photo suggested, "mountain hamsters" of a sort. This one must have been a juvenile male -- whom my grandma Toff once said are always the bold, weird ones; appropriate, no? -- because it approached us multiple times, once even licking Julia's boot. We took full advantage of the photo-op.

Some great things here have no place in the narrative, but add to the splendor of RMBL.

Today I saw a moth on our mirror (a not-uncommon occurrence) and remembered just how awe-inspiring it is to be in a place where, rather than freak out and throw a spider ouf a car window, people identify it -- not a spider but an Opilione -- watch it move, and name it Pringles.

It's phenomenal to be in a place full of people willing to ask questions and get answers that may not be what they were looking for, and to find it interesting anyway.