"Quit Naturalizing!"

This is a shot of a sunset from my window, from the west side of the ridge. Once the trees lose their leaves I expect to be able to get a much better view of the valley.

This is the severe thunderstorm moving in last night. I was terrified. It started hailing when we were having a meeting in the conference room and I wanted to curl into a ball. The building is my dorm.

Above is a great shot from the geology class hike. You can see Raven Lake which is smaller than Wolf Lake and more marshy. Wetlands class is taught on the edge of it. And in the back is the endless expanse of Lake Superior. Takes my breath away every time. I had to bring myself back down to earth, because I'm teaching geology next Tuesday!

Leaf fossil! There are really interesting rocks up here and I'm doing my best to learn them fast! This class is cool because it centers on a hike to observe the formations, but it is also very content heavy. I need to get my but in gear to study!

The geology hike goes to the top of Marshall Mtn, which is where my sunrise pictures were from :) You can see from the elevation it is not actually a mountain, but it is one of the highest points in the area.

Other classes I've done this week include FIRST Games, Orienteering, Forest Ecology, and Beavers. FIRST Games is team  building types of exercises - Fun but kind of exhausting. Orienteering is crazy intense. We were doing it on two different courses,  no one finished, and one student nat got stung by wasps and almost had to go to hospital. We are all coming out of orienteering with negative outlooks on teaching it. 

Forest Ecology was fun, cool hike, and I learned a lot more about identifying trees. The class mostly focuses on succession and balancing the needs of wildlife, water, logging, and recreation. 

Just finished Beavers which was fun even though we didn't see any beavers. Because of a lame winter, flooding earlier this summer followed by very dry months has really affected the beavers. We did find some very fresh signs though! A lot of speckled alders had been freshly chomped, fresh drag paths down to the water, and a brand new dam! The new dam has already dropped the water level dramatically. It's probably 6-7 feet deep behind the dam and only 1-3 feet deep on the other side. As we walked downstream for awhile there was a lot of freshly exposed mud and loose grass in the water that also showed evidence of the dropping water level. And we saw some beaver tracks! You don't see them often because they're usually in mud, but they look fairly recent. The mud was also firm enough to hold the print and you could see toe-nail prints (not in the picture though...)

And I leave you with a picture of wolf scat :)

Did I already tell you I saw a bear on our driveway on Saturday? Well I did. It was probably just a year old or so and crossed right in front of the car. It was using our stream study trails.