Over the past weekend Team Spaw went to Yellowstone on a trip. There were a great many things I loved about the park except for one, the stench of sulfur. At times it almost made me gag. I did have a problem when they set me in the back seat and we went over the mountains, I got motion sickness really bad to the point that we needed to buy dramamine to take care of it. If you love geology then Yellowstone is the place to go. I enjoyed the trip very much and the icing on the cake was when I got a picture of a wolf. The downside was all the tourist it was so crowded at time and it is a shame that most of them went through the park with selfie sticks trying to get a picture with them in it. Sometimes it was so bad that they ignored the rules and got off the board walks and onto the thermal active area that has a thin crust, so I took pictures of the people who did it and I am posting them to the park pages to people shame to try to get people to pay attention. 

So this week all I have done is write my paper, add the references, add more to the paper, and then turned it in. Other than that I was on campus processing the data collected last week. It is slow going because I have never used Radan 6.6 and in terms of the Radan I have been working with it is a dinosaur. So since I am not use to this program I am having to read the manual as I go along. The awesome thing is that this Friday we are going to Yellowstone National Park and I am really looking forward to it since I always wanted to go but never had the chance. So be prepared for a lot of photos to show up on here and Shutterfly.

So this morning we went out to our site at 5:30 trying to beat the rain. We were there maybe 15 minutes before the sky opened up, but since we had already had the grid laid out and everything set up we went ahead and ran the scan hoping the rain would soon depart. Unfortunately it rained all the time we were there and then the rain followed us back. Normally I would not mind the rain so much but it was 48 degrees out at the time and it soaked through my hoodie, my hat and my boots. I am thankful it did not soak my pants. One thing we were worried about was that the pooling water on the surface would mess up the radar. So when we got back to SKC we checked the data on the computer and so far it does not look like it but we will not know further until we run the filters and remove the background echos.

On Saturday a few of my team got together with us and we went up to Glacier National Park and drove the Going to the Sun road. We stopped at all the turnouts on the road which took us a while. We only made it to Logan’s Pass before we turned around. That was at 7:30 p.m.. The weather picked up and ominous clouds were coming in, the wind was strong and cut right through you. Looked up the temp and it was 33 degrees. So glad I made everyone bring jackets and wear pants. We took lots of pictures some of which I already posted on shutterfly. We are planning on going back in a few weeks and will hopefully make it to St. Marys, if so I will have more pictures to post.

We went out to our site yesterday and ran a test grid. It is so hard to walk about there. So we ran a 10 meter by 10 meter grid in the heat of the day. We were sweating but I made sure to bring plenty of water with us. In the end I came to a conclusion that we will need to run another test but this time with a very much lower diel constant to get better penetration. Tomorrow if it is not raining we will go out and run another test.

Today I set up a grid with the help of teammate Stefon. Since I have not used a Sir3ooo and have only worked with a Sir20 we thought it best to set up and run a grid with the machine at the college rather than wait til we were in the field. That way if we have any problems we could ask. Turns out we did but hopefully we got that all worked out. Tomorrow we are seeing if we can process the test run data and if so we will be taking the machine out into the field as soon as possible.

On Wednesday the 15th of June 2016 our team spent the evening at the Bison Range here on the reservation in Montana. It was a wonderful and awe inspiring experience to see some of the animals up close. When we first went through the gate and to the right next to some trees and a massive Elk with a beautiful rack on its head. On the trip through the park we saw plenty of Bison as well as their calves. At on point we came across a herd of big horned sheep. The mule deer were mostly bedded down for the evening but I got some good pictures of them still. I even got excited and told our driver to stop because I saw something in the trees and bushes. Turned out it was another big Elk, only this time we got a bonus as not far away was a momma and her baby. We did see one lone prong horn walking along and a lone juvenile great horned owl sitting in a tree. Funny thing is we did not see any bunnies hopping about.