Pictures of a typical day at work

here are a few pics for you, some of them more random than others:
the above picture is of a little stick village me and eli built while we were at the car waiting for bob and joe to get done with their survey.
if you look in the very center of this picture you'll notice a little gray fuzz ball. this fuzz ball is a velvet ant. i suppose this picture is more for curtis than anyone else, but these cute little pieces of lint are actually quite painful if you get stung. they're more related to the wasp than to the ant.
kix anyone? where's the milk?! okay, so no, this is not cereal although it looks like it. it's bunny poop. i just thought the resemblance to kix cereal was uncanny. are we really sure we know what's in the food we eat? :)
this is amanda, one of the field technicians. i plan to get pictures of everyone on here so you can see who i'm working with.
the swamp monster! ahhhh! run for your lives!! :) haha! just kidding, it's just me! the habitat that we have to walk through varies incredibly. two days ago and yesterday we were walking up through small rivers, battling our way through the thick reeds. and we often encounter really nasty stuff that you have to fight through - mesquite, cat's claw and all sorts of thorny horrible plants.
this is murrelet, our fearless project leader. she has two dogs which sometimes go on the surveys with us. today we only took tui with us and she was perfectly quiet and well behaved. only a few rabbits attracted her attention.
our beautiful field house. i'm yawning, stretching and getting ready for the day. haha! i'll take some pictures of our real field house soon. this was actually a run down and nasty trailer that was near one of our sites. i just couldn't reisist posing with it.
we are so thankful for trees and shade! sometimes even the smallest slivers of shade provide a small, but important, drop in temperature. it wasn't that hot today but with 55% humidity it makes it a wee bit uncomfortable, although that was better than the 70% humidity that we had two days ago. the moisture really jumps when you get right next to the river and makes the heat feel even hotter.

southern utah trip...

this first picture below is a lighthouse that's right on lake havasu. my cousin and her boyfriend came over from phoenix two weekends ago and they took me out on their boat. it was wonderful! i got to see a side of havasu that i don't normally see, since i'm living and working here and not so much a part of the lake scene. there were so many boats all over the place and lainey and kevin were kind enough to answer my millions of questions about them and everything else. they took me on a ride down the river and then afterwards they took me to kevin's parents summer home, a fifth wheel on the lake. he has a wonderful family and they had me over for dinner and then his step mom took me around the park and i got to see the community that they live in. it was a great weekend!

to continue, this past weekend i got a stint of 5 days off! i know, i know, you are all jealous. :) i had a bit of deliberation over what to do. i first was thinking about catching a ride to safford, arizona to visit grandparents. and then i was just going to stay here in lake havasu city since everyone else was leaving. and then i decided to rent a car and head up to southern utah and play around there for the long weekend. luckily, my brother-in-laws family lives in cedar city, utah and they were kind enough (as always) to let me stay at their house for the time that i was up there. on the drive north i found a little public (and free!) beach on the colorado river, right below hoover dam, called willow beach. it's quite pleasant and not at all crowded. my thought was to do a little swimming, an action that didn't really come through. sure, i had every intention on going swimming, but as soon as i got in the water my only thought was to get out as quick as i could. yeah, i think there were ice cubes floating in that river. it was colddddddd! it was nice and hot outside, so i would sit and read my book and then when i got unbearably hot i would jump in the river, thinking that i might be able to stand it. not a chance. but that little jump was quick enough to cool me down in a hurry. when i pulled up to the beach i had thought it odd that there were many people out having picnics, yet no one was really swimming. now i understand why - hehe! even with the chill, it was wonderful to find out that little bit of paradise.

on thursday i played tourist and did the whole zion national park thing. i do have to say that i was quite disenchanted with zion. it was a total tourist trap with way too many people. sure, it was incredibly beautiful but it was kind of hard to get away from the crowds. i managed to find some places where i found a bit of seclusion. i would just pull over on the side of the road and just start walking across the sandstone and try to get "lost". it worked! i lost the crowds and was able to take some amazing pictures of the rock. it really is quite beautiful, as the pictures below can attest to. i found this type of sandstone (below) more pleasing than the huge towering cliffs. i just really liked the shadows which brought out the contrasting and elegant lines and layers, so i took a lot of pictures of these.



later that afternoon i wandered up a less traveled zion road and came to a little town called kolob creek. i told shawn that i could definitely live here. it's perfect! he can have his horses, i can have my huge lawn, we'd have a lake down the road. it'd be perfect! and we'd have to provide our own electricity, since we wouldn't be on the grid. sounds like a dream, huh? so these pictures below are primarily so shawn can see our future home town.

and then here's more privately owned land just next to zion that would also be perfect to live in.


on friday i did a hike to kolob arch. it's in a less traveled section of zion so i decided to enjoy the solitude. i did encounter a few people on the trail including an older couple from austria. many of you know that i absolutely love talking and meeting new people, which i got to do in plenty on this trip.

so i didn't make it all the way to the correct vantage point to view the arch. i only went 8 or 9 miles instead of the full 12 miles. tyson's sister, krystal was playing volleyball for the utah summer games and i did want to go watch her play that evening, so i didn't complete the hike, but i did well enough to be able to see the arch.

on the way back i kept stopping next to all the little streams and took lots of pictures of them. i absolutely love water and anything to do with it and i kept thinking that if this stream was bigger than there would be some amazing swimming holes.


hamming it up for the camera...


and on my final day, saturday, i headed north to fish lake national forest. i didn't really have too much of an agenda and so went where the wind took me. i found some cool little nooks and places that i'd never been before and, indeed, i had never heard of fish lake national forest before so it was a fun and new adventure. when i was getting ready to head south, back to cedar city, i found a hieroglyph place called fremont indian state park. it's awesome! i have never seen hieroglyphs before and so took a lot of time looking at all the hieroglyphs that i could stand and i still want to go and see more!

this whole place was chalked full of them and i got description papers for a lot of the markings. i have to admit that i think that some of the interpretations are pretty far out there, products of fertile imaginations, but i don't know that i could do too much better in coming up with the translations. maybe there's a wind of change blowing that's telling me to change professions. hmmm....


here's me standing in front of some of the mini cliffs that some of the drawings were on.

and again the cliffs. oooh, how pretty!

and to conclude my trip report, i just wanted to include two photos that describe some of the communities that i drove through.


yes, this sign does say "watch children act like monkeys". haha!

and if you are having a hard time distinguishing what exactly is hanging on the tree, they are shoes. many, many shoes.

hualapi mountains

we all had thursday, friday, and saturday off and so most of us technicians and one of the supervisors took off to the hualapi mountains: eli, joe, dave, erik, amanda, and i. we went looking for cooler temperatures, which we found. it was incredibly beautiful and much cooler than the heat down here. whew! when we got there we found a nice spot to do a little hiking. all of the guys are die-hard birders and they and amanda took off at once to go and search out new and exciting birding experiences. i went off on my own to have a little alone time for contemplation, journal writing and reading. i really didn't get to the reading, but the other two things were quite a bit more important than reading a novel. i hiked up to the ridge and found a nice spot under a tree and spent the next hour and a half there. i was so pleasant to just be up there surrounded by nothing but nature. i thoroughly enjoyed my "alone time".

that night we found the perfect campsite overlooking a valley. it was just a pullout off the main dirt road that winds its way through the mountains. the whole evening that we were there, there was only one car that drove through. that night i slept out under the sky. in the picture i haven't yet put out my ground pad, but this is the view that we had the privilege of experiencing. it was incredible! the moon was out and very bright, so i couldn't really see the stars all that starkly, but it was still just perfect. and it was cool. i had brought and long sleeved shirt, pants, and a fleece and i was still a little bit cold. so when i got in my sleeping bag it was perfectly comfortable. i slept like a baby. i guess all the guys went out owling in until about 1 and then they got up at about 5 to do some more birding. i'm impressed! i guess i value my sleep way too much!

so the next day (friday) we went to conquer hualapi peak, about a 7.5 mile hike that is uphill both ways. and i'm not kidding - there were ups and downs both ways. when hiking i hate it when the trail starts sloping downhill because i know that i'm going to have to make up for that lost elevation. and this trail was a master at that folly. it was also incredibly beautiful! the only self-induced problem was that we started hiking around 10.30am! oops! so yeah, we were hiking in the hotest time of the day and we all we roasting. but we still had fun. and even though i have mentioned in a previous post (baldy) that i'm a really slow hiker, i'm proud to report that i was the first to reach the top. i guess at home all the people that i normally hike with are extremely, inhumanly fast. at least that's the reason that i'll use. it was so nice that everyone else was really taking their time going up. they were also stopping a lot to look at birds so we got in a lot of nice breaks. it was just refreshing to be able to stop and "smell the roses", to look around and see things and learn the plants and just to enjoy the hike instead of racing to the top. i can say that now but i do have to admist that i also like getting a good hiking record, for me at least.

in the pictures, from left to right, are dave, eli, becca (me!), joe, and erik. i just realized that i don't have a picture of amanda of amanda on that hike but she was there. anyhow, i got to the "top" and realized that i couldn't go up anymore. the trail just ended and there were huge boulders above us. so we didn't ever get to the "true" summit, but i definitely got close. this picture with all of us sitting is taken right below the huge boulder summit.

on our hike we saw countless birds (ask the guys and they'll tell you the specifics on that), tons of lizards, and i saw a mule deer. it was nice getting out of the lake havasu area and going to a place that was still wilderness and not cultured civilization.

gila river confluence

i was down south for the first week that i was here, doing surveys down in the yuma area and working our way back up to havasu. i had a blast! as you can see from the picture, we worked really, really hard! haha! pictured are dianne, shannon, amanda and me. one of the routes was a kyak route, which dianne and amanda did while me and shannon did another route along the gila river. after our routes were done we met up at the mouth of the gila river, where it dumps into the colorado. it was sooo deep! haha! just kidding! it was actually pretty shallow in the gila and i walked the 150 meters down stream to the colorado and went swimming in the river. it was kind of like a treadmill. i swam and i swam and couldn't make my way upstream because the current was pushing me down so well. at least i didn't end up down stream. because i stayed in the exact same spot the entire time, i viewed my swimming marathon a success! and when i got tired, i just stood up. yeah, not very deep either. the colorado came up to about my armpits or thereabouts. not too shabby!

while we were out "in the field" (complete with hotels) i had my birthday! i am now officially 27 years old, with shawn's birthday to follow on june 16th. since that's tomorrow, here's a little reminder to email him a birthday wish *wink, wink*
when we went out to do our surveys, it was just me and shannon, she sang "happy birthday" and "she's a jolly good fellow" with lots of "hip-hip-hooray's"! it was a wonderful morning. that afternoon we met up with dianne and amanda in a small, really small, incredibly small town called palos verdes in california. we had a kitchen in our room, which was incredibly nice since there was really no place to eat. we also had a toilet that didn't flush, spiders that crawled around on the wall next to the shower, dead cockroaches in the sink, and the motel "office" was the bar making it an altogether great place to stay in. hehe! anyhow, that night shannon made me cupcakes for my birthday. it was so sweet! so i stayed on my bed during the evening, reading and pretending to not know what was going on. it's really hard when we were all crammed into the same motel room, but i did it. and i was very touched. so i did have a bit of a birthday party and those cupcakes were great breakfasts for the next couple of days. :)

Arizona Territorial Prison

I'm now in Yuma doing surveys. We get up in the morning early and leave our hotel by 5am. We then do surveys in the morning until our plots are done, which can vary in time. The plots down here are pretty small because they are all restoration sites that have farm land or city around it. When we get back to Lake Havasu they'll be quite a bit longer since there's a whole wildlife refuge that we'll be working on. Anyhow, so this leaves us the whole afternoon to go and do something.

One of my supervisors, dianne, went to the Arizona Territorial Prison when she was young and wanted to see it again. so we went this afternoon. It was pretty neat being able to see this place and to learn about the people that were convicts there.
I don't know if you can read any of the stories under the pictures, but some are more gruesome than others. There were people in there for all sorts of things like seduction and stealing anything over $50. i wish that some of the things were still punishable, like adultery. there were several people in there for that. if that was still punishable by imprisonment it might cut out a lot of heartbreak.

and here's one of the more recent convicts. she was put in prison for her incredible ability to smile. yep, don't let that frown fool you, this one is quite a gem! her smile was so devestating that it caused wagon carts to run off the side of the road because of the stunningness of it, causing injury to the many that surrounded her. she did use this to her advantage a time or two and caused intentional injury to innocents. yep, she's a real danger so keep your eyes peeled (or rather hooded) for the modern medusa!












she is a rather hardened criminal, as you can see from the grimace below:









her living space, shared with earth shattering beauties just like her:












needless to say, it was a pretty educational and fun place to go to. it was kind of neat sitting in the cells where these people lived and just trying to imagine being one of those people.

there was also a section in the museum on the mormon prisoners who were incarcerated for polygamy. of the dozen or so that were brought there, there were only about 3 names listed and one of them was Charles L. Robson. hmmmm.... i wonder if he's related to shawn? if so, shawn never told me that he had a convict in the family! haha! :) but if he really is related to dear Charles, then that's okay, too. family history is never complete without all those quirky stories.

and this last picture is for those of you who don't know what the lower colorado river looks like, at least in some of the places. it's just a lazy flowing river that does not look at all related to the raging colorado river that carved out the grand canyon. the habitat on the edges of this part of the river have been restored, so you won't find this view everywhere.

just fyi, it was 101*F today. pretty hot for me although i am getting more used to it. i'm even getting a bit of a tan! :)

first day on the job!

i have arrived! i'm now in lake havasu city, arizona and am living in my "field house". you'll notice the quotations because i don't think that i can, by any right, call this a field house. it's more like a luxiery house. i have my own room, that came with sheets, a blanket, and pillows. and the house comes with a tv in almost every room, cable, internet, a big living room/dining room/kitchen that's all open, and a swimming pool. i'll bet that this house is pretty new and it's spotlessly clean and big. wow! field houses aren't supposed to be this nice! i feel very spoiled but i suppose i'll just revel in the niceness and cleanness and wonderfulness of it all. :)

today we had a training session where we sat in a classroom at the community college and learned all about the yellow-billed cuckoos. i learned a lot and am getting more and more excited to really start the surveys. and then tomorrow we're going to go out and do a practice survey so that we can understand how it's all going to work. i've learned that i really need to get to know the plants around here. everyone else nodds and knows exactly what murrelett (the project director) is talking about when she mentions a type of tree or bush. i have not a clue, but i'll learn pretty quick. especially since i'll have to be crawling under them and around them and looking in their branches. i'll learn quick enough. so on wednesday i get to go south to the mexican border to really start surveying. me and another girl technician (amanda) and two female supervisors (diane and shannon) will go down there and work our way up the colorado river doing surveys until we get back to lake havasu city. i think we'll be about a week before we get back home to our nice and cozy "field house". i'll let you know how it goes! :)