Tracks

Well, many things have happened since my last blog entry. I have simply been too busy to write anything about them. I traveled out-of-state on three consecutive four-day weekends, using the remainder of each shortened week to work extra hours, buy and sell a car, and pack up and move to Utah to begin my new job.

My first trip was to Canyonlands National Park, with Jess. On the way there, we stopped and looked at some dinosaur tracks; the three dark spots in the pic below are the indentations made by the dinosaur's three toes.

Me at the trailhead. We intend to hike to the Colorado River, 10.8 miles away and 2000 feet down.

Some lovely patterns in the Navajo Formation on our trail. The Navajo is the formation I will be studying this summer, many miles to the north of Canyonlands.

Jess and I were backpacking down off the Island in the Sky toward the Colorado River, which you can see at one point in the distance in the upper-right quadrant of the picture. We had to climb down more than a thousand feet to get into the canyon you can see in the middle of the picture.

The view up towards where we came from, from our campsite that night. We only got about 7 miles before it got dark, still several miles shy of the river. It was perfectly quiet and very peaceful there, until a strong wind whipped up in the night that lasted most of the rest of the weekend, turning the 70-80 degrees forecast when I was planning the trip into more like 40-50 degrees, which we weren't really dressed for.

I make a pizza dinner. This picture nicely shows the appaling state of my hair, which is probably more of a mop right now than it's ever been in my life.

Me eating, and on the hike back out.

Two different sizes of ripples preserved in two pieces of sandstone along the trail.Jess hiking out. Climbing the more than 1000 feet needed to get out actually proved to be less stressful to our bodies than the unrelenting downhill hike in, but the damage was done. Jess's thighs were so ruined by the backpack that the rest of the weekend she was able only to totter about, holding on to me if we had to descend stairs. (She did manage one handicapped-accessible trail in Arches on her own.)

The next morning we drove into Arches National Park and cooked breakfast, with a view of Balanced Rock...

...and the Fiery Furnace...

in the distance. The Fiery Furnace is a labyrinth of sandstone fins through which you are allowed to wander if you purchase a permit at the park visitor center. It is very nice, quiet and pretty, with no marked trails.

I took this picture of a beetle at the end of a set of beetle tracks because I am always delighted to find the maker of tracks. Looking for tracks is part of what I will be doing this summer.

More shots from Arches, with the La Sal Mountains in the background.

On the way back home, Jess and I stopped at the Thompson Springs petroglyph site, at which can be found many petroglyphs and pictograms from many different periods, starting many thousands of years ago.

Then we came home. I bought the car on the left to replace the car on the right. They both happen to be Mazda Proteges. I wasn't looking for another Protege, but the nicest-looking car I found happened to be one.

The weekend after that, I went to Houston to visit Jordan, my friend from field camp. Remember Jordan? Jordan's boyfriend had paid for a friend to come visit her, and she chose me, so I must say thank you Niall (and Jordan!) for allowing my visit.

Jordan's car's tire exploded as she was driving me home from the airport. We sat on the side of the highway for an hour, cars passing other cars on the right and whizzing past us at 75 mph, as AAA struggled to figure out where we were.

Houston has a small and extremely unexciting downtown compared to Denver. But that's all I know about it as mostly I hung out by the pool and played with Jordan's cat, Mr. Peppernut. Jordan and I:

Also, we went to a Thai restaurant that had some very strangely named dishes. Below, find: "Broccoli is a Push not Bush" and "Paeneng is Curry so Hurry," among other gems. Click for detail.

Then. The next weekend, I went with DP to NM. We stopped first in Taos, where visited the Rio Grande gorge and bridge...
...and stayed at a hostel called the Abominable Snowmansion. We got a private room, the bed of which happened to have a memory foam topped mattress, which I thought was a very fine deal.

We also went to Santa Fe, which I have no pictures of... everybody knows what Santa Fe looks like, right? ...but I do have this video of a male pigeon trying to get noticed by a female:

And we did some fossil hunting outside of Santa Fe, where DP gets her first practice using a rock hammer, trying to break an ancient brachiopod out of some limestone.

Mostly in New Mexico we ate good food and slept.

On the way back we stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park, where DP took these excellent pictures of me:

...and then we came home, and I had a few days to prepare to leave for the summer. In the meantime I was working (manning a booth doing science demonstrations) at Elitch Gardens, which is a large amusement park right next to downtown Denver. I took this shot from the ferris wheel. (I had to text my boss to say I would be a few minutes late that day as I was stuck on a ferris wheel.)

On my drive to Utah I noticed that there was still a great deal of snow in the Rockies. This shot was taken from the interior of a rest stop.

It has been very cloudy and rainy here, and cold, though the sun peeked out briefly a couple nights ago to allow this shot of the swollen Green River, Blue Mountain and a farm which are all across from the housing area where I am staying.
Right now I and my fellow interns are in a house--which has delightful things like NPS signs in the garage--

but will be moving into smaller apartments once they are ready for us. Which is too bad, because from the current house I can watch a colony of prairie dogs that begins 20 feet from the windows. As I write this in the growing dusk of Friday night, one is picking up pieces of grass in its little paws and putting them in its little mouth.

There are also a lot of birds here...

...perhaps Abby can tell me what these are. I tried to catch them in nice, still poses.

We have been out in the field a couple times. Here, my supervisor, the park paleontologist, points out one of things we are looking for, which are traces of burrows in the Jurassic sandstone.

Also, see if you can see the tracks made by a large scorpion on this slab. The scorpion put down its feet close together as it walked, leaving sets of three dots on either side of its body.

One day we also went to look at the dinosaur quarry, for which the park was created, but which has been closed for several years as the building housing it was condemned. I will be telling more about that in a future post, but if you would like more information right now, check out this blog.

The quarry face is enclosed in a plywood sarcophagus to keep it from harm as a new building is being constructed around it. We went inside the sarcophagus to see the stunning number of dinosaur bones preserved in the rock. I have seen photos of the quarry from when it was open and they simply didn't convey to me the sheer size of the face and number of bones. This picture, taken in the dim light available, only hints at the full picture in the gleam of a few bone surfaces, from a partial spine and a limb bone, both on the right side of the frame.

We received the very exciting news that later on in the summer, once the building is up and the sarcophagus is down, we will be assigned the task of vacuuming the construction dust off the bones to prepare them for display once more. It is a huge surface to cover and should take most of a week. (The new building will reopen to the public in October.)

Today we drove up one of the scenic drives in the park, taking in views of the Yampa River,

Green River,

and Mitten Park Fault.

This is a truly beautiful park that is mostly wilderness and I encourage all my willing friends to make the drive out to experience it.

Finally, I leave you with a final piece of arcana, which you must click on and read for yourself:

Western triptych

I am going to talk about three things today. The first is very brief. Some of you may remember that in my last post, I spoke of waiting an hour at the DMV to find out that they wouldn't accept my CT birth certificate and told me to order a new one. My mother graciously got me one from the town I was born in and sent it out to me. Today, I waited at the DMV for four and a half hours and then, finally, shuffled up to the counter where I proudly presented all of my proper documentation.

I was told they couldn't accept my birth certificate because it was from the town. They needed one from the state.

My first thought was, no lie: "I am so glad I write a blog." Because writing a blog means there's a silver lining to every awful situation. Everything terrible that happens is fodder for a story. My sorrow is your entertainment. Hurrah, Colorado DMV, for bringing color to the lives of blog readers everywhere.

The second thing to talk about is the dance competition. Despite the fact that we had practiced constantly and improved a lot since the last competition, I and my dance partner (whom I'll call DP, which amuses me because it bears absolutely no resemblance to her actual name or her personality) were nervous. We had been watching one of the couples we would be competing against, and they looked very good. I had actually taken to referring to the lead as Darth Vader, because any great, evil figure always calls to mind the Star Wars nemesis for me.

I nearly keeled over when our Darth Vader showed up at the competition dressed in black with a giant black hat. It seemed to be an omen.

Here, DP pins on my number. I am wearing my new brown hat. If the bad guys wear black hats and the good guys wear white, what does brown signify? Morally ambiguous?

In this picture, I am exactly as tired as I look.

It was the organizers' second time running a competition and everything was tighter and more official. The contestants stood in the dimly lit basement, where you could hear a pin drop but for the committee head reciting the rules. We drew letters out of a hat to determine the order we'd dance our freestyle dance in. In the last competition, only the advanced couples were invited to perform a freestyle (any type of dance to any piece of their choice, as long as it had a country theme); this time, everyone was invited to. I had gone to bed the night before ready to improvise to our chosen song come game day, but the day of the competition, DP convinced me to come over and choreograph and actual routine to it, which we worked on for two and a half hours.

Above, our bar; below, close-up of the mirrored boots.

At six o'clock, the competition began, with an "open dance" in which everyone watching could participate and the contestants could warm up. Unfortunately, it was a line dance, and one I didn't know. I'm sure everyone knows what line dancing looks like, but in case anyone doesn't:

When the couples portion of the competition commenced, we danced the two-step and the waltz, sharing the floor with our nemeses, who were the only other couple signed up in our division. (At least we were guaranteed a ribbon again.)



Then we waited while Darth and partner performed their freestyle. They not only had it choreographed, they'd made a show of it, complete with rudimentary storyline, acted out with gestures and expressions. We hadn't done that! The crowd was going crazy for their act; the hooting and clapping was earsplitting and nearly constant. Oh dear.

When it was our turn, we stood in our pre-planned location on the dance floor and waited. And waited. And then the organizer came up to us and told us something was wrong with the .mp3 file we'd handed them earlier in the evening; only 45 seconds of the song were present. Thankfully, the DJ had it (of course he did; they play it all the time); it was KT Tunstall's Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.

We tripped all over each other for the first 30 seconds. Whether we were shaken up from our technical difficulties or whether we'd have had nerves anyway, we once again danced a lot worse than we'd been doing in practice. The latter part of the dance went smoothly, and we enjoyed watching the higher-level couples perform... but toward the end of the night, when the judges were asked to choose a couple they'd enjoy seeing again, and they chose our competitors, I was sure we'd gotten second. Until I saw their encore. I might have watched it more carefully this second time--what I saw was that while they danced with more charisma than we did, I think (indeed, with more than most of the intermediate couples), they just didn't have as many moves as DP and I.

And so we won.

You will notice in this picture that the sole of my boot has pulled away from the upper. After the competition was over, I stayed and danced for another couple of hours, until I noticed my foot felt funny. I looked down and saw my boot coming apart. (In fact, both of them were broken, though I didn't notice till the next day.) Remember, I got these vinyl-and-plastic boots for $8 at a thrift store. They were glued and not stitched. I am shortly going to toss them in the dumpster; I don't see any point in repairing them. They will be casualties of battle.

I had tremendous fun at this competition. The audience was really into it, it was tightly run without much standing around or confusion (beside our own technical issue, really) and I feel we worked really hard and were rewarded for it. I don't know when I'll next be able to compete, but I'd like to move up to a higher division. As for the question posed in my last competition-related entry--can I enter a competition and dance just for fun?--the answer turns out to be that if I relax at least a little, the question itself becomes unimportant. I certainly cared about winning, but I cared more that we'd put together a great routine and danced very well in practice, whether or not we did in competition. We knew what we were capable of.

The third thing to talk about is this summer. I've accepted a summer position in one of the parks I passed through last fall, about which I wrote: "...the whole place is like a giant, beautiful puzzle in rainbow colors... I am quite sincere in my wish to work there and if that happens you will have a whole summer of posts and pictures of the place."

This is Dinosaur National Monument, whose beauty and complexity stunned me last September and where I became determined to get a job this summer. I have. I'll be doing geology and paleontology in settings like those below:

To see more, revisit my previous post on Dinosaur. Those of you who like to travel, take note: Dinosaur is about 6 hours from Denver, has a lovely campground just down the road from the housing I'll be staying in, and is, well, gorgeous. The nearby Uinta mountains offer even more hiking and sightseeing opportunities. I will be there May 23 through August 12 or so. Come out and I may even take you fossil hunting. Start making plans now!