One of my new favorite bands, and one of my new favorite songs. Check it out...

The video is boring, just a picture, but the song is great!

Surprisingly, the band is from Colorado, not Idaho.

Happy Summer Solstice!

This is one of my favorite days of the year! I know I'm a little late, but I hope you all had a day full of adventures.

Unfortunately, I was stuck inside working all day (and I'm still working), but I know I will be having some more adventures soon!

Horse ride this weekend and PBR next weekend! Stay tuned for updates!

Backcountry trip into the Selway-Bitteroot Wilderness

This past weekend, Christie and I had a really nice camping trip down along the Selway River, only a couple hours from here.  She was on horseback, but the horse that I was going to ride didn't want to get into the trailer, so I got to hike the whole way.  It actually turned out to be a good thing, because I am not used to hiking in the backcountry with a heavy pack anymore, so I figured this would be good warm-up for my trip with Mike and Caroline in Glacier in a few weeks.

I think for the rest, I'll just let the pictures tell the story (with captions, of course).  For some of the pictures, you will need to look closely and pay attention to the caption to know what you are looking at.  There are a lot of pictures on this post, so I made them all small sized to make them fit better.  To see them closer, just click on them, and the full-sized image will pop up.  (To exit, either press ESC or click outside of the picture box).

Another great shot, looking back down the river.

Here is a really cool creek coming off the mountain.

We had a lot of really great views of the river along the whole trail, which followed the river the whole time we were on it.

Much of the trail seems to have been cut right out of the mountain side.

Another great shot of the river.

I thought this creek was really cool because of all the waterfalls, especially the one at the very top.

The water was very clear almost all the way down.

There are sandbars and beaches all along the river, and the sand was very soft

This was Christie's view for most of the trip.

This crazy mule doe came about 30 feet from us while we were eating lunch.  Curiosity might kill her in a few months.

There were a bunch of groups rafting down the river, which really made me want to do it.  Unfortunately, the Forest Service only lets one group go per day, and you have to reserve your spot about a year in advance.

Can you see what's going on here?  That snake is eating a frog whole!  And the frog was awake for the whole thing!

Another great shot of the river!

Blue just checking out the scenery.

Look closely- you can see the osprey in her nest.  She was squawking at us while we were going by even though we weren't even close to her. 

We saw a couple of these on the trail.  Can you tell what it is?  It is a little rattle snake.  It was very tiny, I bet there are some big ones out there in the fall.

Spots like this on the river really make me wish I could raft it.

And spots like this.

We saw lots of frogs and toads on the trail, too.

This was our campsite for the night.  Right on the river, with the sound of the river rushing all night long.

The driftwood on the beach was very dry and gave us an awesome fire for the evening!

Here is a small mule buck that was also curious, but much more cautious that the doe we saw earlier.

Another spot that makes me want to go rafting down the river.

Here is another mule buck we saw, but he didn't want anything to do with us.

I think this might be the same doe we saw the day before, still getting very close to us.

Here is a group of boaters that is just leaving their campsite for the day.

You can see the dark spots on the beach where they camped the night before.

There were a ton of butterflies on the trail, mostly congregating around horse poop.

Sorry for the weird arrangement of the pictures.  Probably the first complaint I have so far of the Blogger is how annoying arranging pictures are.  They snap to the weirdest places and the when I add a caption, the arrangement gets all screwed up.  But anyway, enjoy the pictures!

Just some pictures from the last couple weeks....

I just thought I would put some pictures up that I have been taking over the past week and a half or so.  I have been doing some fun stuff, and trying to take pictures while I do it, so here are some of them.

About a week and half ago, we had some rain in the middle of a nice sunny day.  It gave a nice double rainbow.

I went on a nice afternoon hike up Moscow Mountain.  This is one of the only pictures that came out well from the East Peak.  

Near the end of my hike, I found these guys just hanging out right in the middle of the trail!

Here is one of my sunflower plants coming up with the seed still hanging on.  My garden is looking pretty good after only two weeks.  My corn, onions, cucumbers, and sunflowers are already pretty good sized.

Yesterday, I was at a day long information meeting with our collaborators over at AMGEN for the bear project.  They took us out to lunch and dinner.  Here is the view from our table at lunch at the restaurant overlooking the golf course.  You can also see Moscow Mountain in the distance.  And the food was incredible.  Good day!

So what would you say...ya do here?

Sorry for not posting in a while, I have been pretty busy with studying and work and such that not only have I not had much time for writing on the blog, but I also haven't had too much time for adventures.  Moreover, the few adventures I have had haven't been documented by photos, and I want to make these posts interesting somehow.

Given the lack of photos of adventures, and the unexpected demand for more blog posts, I thought I would write about what I do at work, which actually is a fun adventure in itself.  It might also help a lot of you actually know what it is I do, although I promise not to go into too many boring details.

I actually love my job.  It is awesome.  I work for the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University in the department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences.  My official title is Research Technologist 3, but my working title is Shared Lab Coordinator.  The main premise of my job is that many of the faculty in the Department either have very small research labs or none at all, so the Department provides a shared laboratory for those faculty members to have access to commonly used equipment in order to do a minimal amount of research.  I am also leased out to any faculty in the department that needs me and split my time among many different faculty.  The greatest part about this is that I get to have a very nice variety in the work that I do.  For some of the faculty, I just do regular science-y stuff like running gels or doing PCR, but for others, I actually get to interact with live animal subjects or patients.

Want to know the coolest part about getting to work with live animal subjects?  I'll let the pictures do the talking.  (I get to work with grizzly bears).

This girl is actually taking an ECG with her IPhone (yeah, there's an app for that)

Liver biopsy

Big hands

Just hanging out in between blood draws.  I get to put a very long catheter into their jugular in their neck.

After the tests for the day, before they woke back up.

This fella weighs about 600 lbs.

Big teeth

The drugs hadn't completely set in yet and he was a little twitchy, so I had to wait until I could intubate him.  I didn't want to stick my hands in a bears mouth before he was completely out...call me crazy.

Intubating the bear...it is so much easier on a bear than on a human.

Lots of bear spray...just in case.

So...yeah, my job is pretty cool.  Working with the bears only actually happens every few months, but it is pretty cool when I get to go out there.  Besides that, work never really ever gets to be routine, since I am working on so many different projects and maintaining a lab.  I actually don't really have any pictures of my lab, but I did take a picture of one of the buildings I work in back in the fall:

Besides working lately, I have been doing some work in my garden.  Since the last time I posted about it, I hadn't done too much to the bigger plot because I was so busy.  When I went to plant last week, the ground was rock hard.  So I found some free horse manure on craigslist and got a couple truckloads, and after rototilling it, the soil is soft as a pillow.  I got my all my seeds in...two rows of corn, one row of peppers, one row of cucumbers, one row of onions, one row of potatoes, one row of tomatoes, and some sunflowers in the front.

Well, anyway, I hope you enjoyed the post.  I'll try to get some more pictures of my adventures.  I will probably be doing a fair bit of mountain biking, horseback riding, and camping in the upcoming month.  

And I will leave you with something that gave me quite a laugh...here is someone in the fields behind the vet school that just got a bad haircut...