Whew, so lets see its almost been about two weeks since my last blog. I guess thats because so much has been going on here! I must say though that I am having an absolute blast out here. I will admit there are sometimes that I still miss home, especially the times when it is freezing cold out here :) But in the past couple of weeks I have had some great experiences. The most notable would have to be the one I encountered last weekend, I knew that they had been calling for some foul weather to move into the area, I assumed rain, and well we all know what happens when you assume. I awoke the next day to about 8 inches of snow on our front lawn!!!! It was absolutly crazy, but I guess such is life at 8000 feet up in elevation.
We have started to go out on the gill net boats now and that is a fun experience as well. They big project out here is the Lake Trout removal program, Lake trout are an invasive species and have cause significant altercation to the vital Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout food web and populations. So our job is to try and remove as many of these Lake Trout as possible. So we use these gill nets that most times have been sitting out for over a week to catch these trout. We pull them up and literally squeeze the fish through the next and kill them, horrible sounding I know, but when you look at the terrible impact they have on the local ecosystem it is very easy to get past the "cold hearted" nature of the job. On an average day we will pull up about 3-4 gangs of net which consist of about 18-24 nets. On good days with good catches this results in about 1,000 lake trout ranging in size and weight. It is definatly something to see! Normally we use hydrolic pullers all day but recently my boss and I had to go out and pull some smaller gangs, by hand! That was a tiring day but I feel like I got an awesome workout lol.
Other than working I have done a lot of hikes and overnight camping trips, I think in the next week or two I may be taking some multinight trips over the weekend to try an experience more of the beautiful backcountry that Yellowstone has.
I have seen a ton more wildlife since I have been here though, my most memorable one to date was a large group of male big horn sheep, they look like rams, but are somehow different, im not exactly sure how, but they are some big beautiful creatures!
On a side note I have been keeping up with the sports and I did get a chance to see Game 7 of the Cup and was rather disgusted! But I am pleased to see the Phightin Phils doin awesome!!!!
Thats just about it for now! I hope everyone is doing great and is having as good of a summer as I am!!!!
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