Spitting into the Wind

(Dated 29 April to 2 May) Sunday I headed up with Kaitlin for my first day at the higher elevation site: Hailstone. On our way out of the Park we saw a strange ungulate on the side of the hill, which at first I thought was a horse until I got a better look and realized its head was the wrong shape. It was a moose! I didn’t get a picture, but it still was pretty sweet to randomly see a moose on the hillside. The drive after that was pretty chill, there’re only two turns you have to make, and we drove past some nice river and pond areas as we approached more mountains, as well as lots of rangeland. There’s this one section that has all these hats on the fence posts of the grazing land, that goes on for several miles of fence, and no one knows why, apparently (Kaitlin said she asked Jeff about it when they first drove up together last week). Most of them are baseball caps of all colours, but a few are workman’s helmets (like for construction sites) and there are too many to count. If I ever get to a thrift store I may have to buy a really cheap hat and put it on a post, to leave my mark behind haha. After briefly driving past our future campsite, we wound through some twisty mountain curves that had us climbing in elevation very quickly before finally arriving at the site, which was actually just a random spot in the mountains. One side of the road is the so-called “meadow” site, which is basically a side of a mountain with a large bowled grassy section that apparently is good for squirrels (I’m dubious), followed by a rocky cliffside leading down to the road. The other side of the road is not as steep or tall, but is still fairly up and down, and is a longer and narrower stretch of land, and the sloping section is bordered by trees (and snow). Here are a few pics of the site taken from the meadow area, and in one you can see one of the blue flags that we use to mark squirrel burrows (no grids here).

Anyway I got stuck on the super steep section, because that’s where Jessica had been working, and started off the day by seeing a squirrel right on the top of the hill/mountain. I set out traps and then went scoping in the rest of the area, but it kind of sucked because I had to keep going all the way up to the top of the hill to check the traps for that one squirrel, and the extra 500 m of altitude did not help matters. After setting several traps and losing many squirrels (the meadow is all the same yellow clumpy stuff, and the squirrels are magical about blending into the grass and shrubbery unless you have your binoculars trained on them, which you can’t do all the time because you have to look where you’re going because the ground is so steep and there are so many rocks) I finally caught and marked a new one. He was very squirmy (as predicted, since these squirrels are less habituated to trapping), but he still became “17.” The squirrels at this site only get numbers, so it’s a lot harder to name them, but I was thinking about Dancing Queen as I was working on him (“young and sweet, only seventeen”), so maybe that’s sort of his name… Anyway I kept checking on the squirrel at the top of the hill, who kept dodging around the traps and refusing to go in them, and even though we were at the site for barely 6 hours, it felt like a very long time and my knees and ankles were hurting from navigating the steep terrain. Towards the end as I was making my way down the hill, I realized that there was this extra cliff stretch that I hadn’t done yet, and I made the mistake of climbing down it instead of going back to the road the better way, so it was slow going and I really freaked myself out because the rocks were kind of shifty and it was tricky keeping my balance with the trapping bag. I was joking to Kaitlin over the radio that Jeff should hire sheep to monitor the squirrels on the hill instead. She was still working on her side (there are way more squirrels over there) and she could tell that I was not doing too great up on the hill, so I went back to the car and waited until she had finished closing her traps. Here’s a shot of me at the beginning of the day before I got so beleaguered.

Anyway I was a very tired and sore by the end of it but we had to hang out in town until the evening because of the gate closure thing. We went into Black Diamond, the closest town that we normally go to to use the internet, and wandered around the shops trying to find something that was open (there was a soda shop and a bakery that we wanted to try) but everything there closes pretty early (like before 6) so we ended up visiting a gas station that said it had soft serve, which was pretty good, and then we killed several hours in the bar again using the internet and feasting upon potato skins, since we needed some tasty food after the day we had had (and because we wouldn’t get back to the station until after dinner anyway). I had never had them before, but they were really good, with lots of cheese and green onions and sour cream and it also helped that I had spent most of the day hungry (some days you just can’t get enough to eat, it seems, and climbing all around crazy steep hills will make it even worse). As we were driving back to the station, we passed a whole herd of elk on the side of the road (and waited for one to cross the road in front of us) but I didn’t manage the best picture of them because it was getting dark. They look pretty funny from the front, because they have this big neck ruff that makes their head look abnormally long up and down, and they’re really big when you see them that close.

Unfortunately when we got to the gate there was still a car there (it was almost dark by now) so we pulled over to wait and see if they would leave soon. Just as we were about to go through the gate someone came out to their car so we turned and drove back a little ways to the ranger’s station (where we get water and can use the pay phone) to wait for the car to drive past us. As we saw it coming, I joked that maybe we should duck, and then Kaitlin fake ducked, so then I faked ducked too, so then we both ended up ducking in the car, which was pretty ridiculous. The car passed us and we had just started the truck again when we saw another one coming, so Kaitlin pulled the keys out and we ducked again, except that the light came on when the keys came out so if the people looked at the truck they would have seen the backs of two people ducking in a car that was lit up from the inside – pretty absurd. We were both very slap-happy tired at this point, particularly because we had gotten up so early to leave, that we couldn’t stop laughing as we were coming home. Monday we went up to Hailstone again, but the weather was not quite in our favour. It blew snow flurries on us most of the day, which kept the squirrels fairly inactive. I chased around a few of them, but they were all marked and hard to see through the snow. We decided to try switching around a little bit, so I worked on the meadow for the first part of the day and then worked on a bit of Kaitlin’s area for the second part. I saw a few more squirrels at the second part, which was cool, and I tried to chase them into traps but they were reluctant to go in and after about an hour I stopped seeing them at all. Thus after a good effort spent in the windy snowiness, we gave up and went back to the station early, leaving it the easiest data-entering day so far to date, since I had caught not a single squirrel (I think Kaitlin caught a few on her side, but nothing like the day before). I took the opportunity to shower, since though they keep saying the showers will be running soon (the year has been so warm that the creek has basically thawed), they haven’t fixed the pipes yet so I wasn’t sure when I would get another chance, especially since we might start camping soon after the other assistants arrive (although not in the bad weather, hopefully). Dinner was tasty vegetarian chili and cornbread, which was nice (the day before there was carrot and potato soup, but we got back too late to eat any of it, though I had some for breakfast and it was really good). Tuesday it was still flurrying up on Hailstone, but the worst was the wind had picked up. We had heard that Hailstone was absurdly windy, but up until then we hadn’t experienced the wind’s true velocity. I found myself leaning against the side of the big hill while watching squirrels because it was easier to be semi-lying down than to try to keep myself upright against the wind. I started out on the rocky slopes where I had seen a lot of squirrels on Sunday, but I only managed to find one of them. Fortunately, even though he was up part of the cliff, I threw a trap down in front of him and he went into it after less than an hour. He became 23 (“nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three…” la la la) and was surprisingly cooperative in the trap, which I guess made sense because he had eartags already which meant that he had been caught there before. I next tried to go up the big hill to find the squirrel at the top, and at one point radioed Kaitlin saying that I may be blown off the hill. She responded by saying that that would be bad, since I hadn’t finished telling her about the Australian Working Holiday Visa (she’s done WOOFing in Ireland, so we were comparing various traveling plans) and it would throw the cooking schedule off (lol). I didn’t see any more new squirrels around, but I set a few traps anyway in the hope that the top-of-the-hill squirrel would discover a fondness for peanut butter (he didn’t, and when I came back to check the traps the wind had blown some of them over and triggered others – grr). I then radioed Kaitlin and said that I was “spitting into the wind, Jack” (which is a Titanic reference if you don’t know, and was pretty fun to do up on the top of the hill because it was carried very far away, the snow was literally blowing sideways to the point that I was walking backwards a few times to keep it out of my eyes). A few minutes later she told me that she had “the Titanic song” stuck in her head, so naturally I responded with a rendition of “near, far, wherever you are,” and we sang the rest of the chorus over the walkie-talkie, which was pretty epic. Kaitlin made dinner that evening too, and we sang another rendition of “My heart will go on” in the kitchen while I was helping her clean up (it kind of sucks that the person who cooks is also supposed to clean up everything, I feel like that should be more balanced, because it kind of takes away your whole evening, but oh well). We had some troubles with a few of our squirrels in the traps, though, one of each of ours somehow managed to escape from the trap while we were watching, I guess by tripping the door upwards somehow with their nose. It was very frustrating the time it happened for me, but at least I had seen that the squirrel I had was already marked, so I didn’t worry about it too much when I watched it escape from under my eyes. We did get adorable shots of a squirrel outside the grid – isn’t he (or she) the cutest?

Jeff came back with the two new field assistants, Stephanie and Shawna. They’re both from the University of Alberta and only got here now because they had to finish exams, which wasn’t supposed to be a big deal because there were not supposed to be any squirrels at Hailstone until later in the season (but we know how well that turned out…). They’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the work so far, probably because there are now about 100 squirrels out on the Kitefield site, and that’s a lot to keep track of! But they seem cool.

Wednesday we woke up to snow in the camp, and although Hailstone is usually worse than whatever is happening at Kitefield, Jeff still wanted us to go check it out, to make sure nothing was happening up there, so Kaitlin and I headed up, while the rest of the crew stayed to wait and see if the weather cleared up so that the new girls could get some training done at Kitefield. It was crazy snowy when we got up there, with like a foot or so on the ground, and we knew it would be too dangerous to do much walking around on the scary hills and cliffs when you can’t see where the rocks are so we just walked along the road and kept our eye out for squirrels. There were some out, but they were already marked, and even if they hadn’t been there wasn’t really much we could do about it anyway. The did look super cute peeking out from the snow, although I didn’t get too many pictures because it was faintly snowing the whole time, and then it started blizzarding a little while later. Here’s a few pics, though, and especially note the one of me with my flag quiver (I made it on the drive in on Monday, because you have to carry around these marking flags so that when you see a squirrel you can mark the burrow and GPS it, but they’re a big pain to carry around so I made a quiver out of ducktape and one of my trusty bungee cords. I’m rather proud of it and it is super handy).

Here’s a picture of a Cliffside slope that has a squirrel in it (it’s the little black speck in the middle).

After it started blizzarding really bad, we went back to hang out in the truck for a bit, eat lunch, and see if the weather improved. We also decided to finally have “storytime,” which we had been talking about for a few days, since the drives were so long. I had my Kindle with me and began reading The Princess Bride, which of course is very fun to read aloud and Kaitlin hadn’t read it before (I have multiple times, which is why I was willing to read it, I don’t like reading aloud things I haven’t read before, since I tend to not remember what I’m reading). The intro goes on for a bit, but is still fun, and I was trying to decide what accent to give the Florinese father (who reads the son the story) since it’s a made-up country (turns out a later description in the book says it’s between Sweden and Germany, so I’ll know what to do now if we ever get to the later parts, like when he reassures the kid that “she does not get eaten by the sharks at this time” – in the book the “shrieking eels” are sharks instead). Anyway after we finished eating we realized that the snow was really coming down outside, and we were getting a bit concerned about the drive back out, so we decided to leave and call it a day. It was a bit tricky navigating out of the snow and down the mountain road, even with a 4-wheel drive, since there’s a cliff on one side and the snow was beginning to cover some of the tracks, but we made it out okay. At the start of the drive down the mountain, we noticed a spruce grouse doing his display by the side of the road. He had his tail and front feathers all fanned out, and looked pretty dashing, except that it was seriously blizzarding and I don’t know what females he thought would be out and about during a snowstorm, but either way I guess he was ready. We stopped off in town to do laundry, and wandered around a little bit while we were waiting for it, since we never got a chance to be in town when the shops and things were still actually open. We finally got to go to this bakery that we had been eying for several days, and it was very tasty! We tried a “sticky carrot muffin” (which was basically carrot cake without the frosting), a maple donut, and a cream-filled croissant, all of which were very good. We chatted to the lady for a little bit about the squirrel project, and it was funny because she seemed excited about squirrels when we first mentioned them, detailing how she used to feed squirrels nuts where she used to live, but then she changed her tune when we said that these were ground squirrels, and she started complaining about them constantly infiltrating her gardens. Oh well… We eventually set off for the camp again, only realizing when we were almost to the gate that we had never picked up the laundry from the dryer, so we had to turn right around, feeling pretty stupid. On the way back, though, we passed by a whole bunch of male big-horn sheep who were hanging out by the road. I hadn’t seen them that close before, and then only one or two males at a time, so it was pretty cool to see a large group and I got some nice pictures, although you can see their ear-tags really clearly, since they study this group.

That’s all for now, but the snow will continue to be a feature of at least the next post.