day: 9

...wow. ok, so you know the maps with the 1 mile x 1 mile squares, usually describing large forested areas? yup. today we did beaver surveys! it was super duper awesome, but like...oh my gosh. i am soooooo tired! we (and by we, i mean 3 groups of 3 and 1 group of 2) were assigned two of those plots each to walk through and find beaver lodges on all of the little lakes in the boxes. we were also told it would be nice to have skis (false: we were walking through the most densely packed underbrush forest). of the 11 lodges we saw, only two were active. this is due to...unfortunately...a crash in the beaver population in the whole of itasca--all the beavers are dying :( anyway, we realized we were lost when we looked at the gps and it was telling us weird things...like, that we were traveling at 108 mph and that we had traveled 138 miles at that point. HA! it was old. anyway, today was definitely a 10 out of 10. despite my back hurting and being so exhausted i can barely function, i had a FANTASTICALLY WONDERFUL DAY of ADVENTURE!!! :) oh, this morning i also made myself 3 eggs scrambled, a piece of banana bread, and orange juice (a nice big breakfast because we had planned to be in the forest from 9 am to 4:30 pm!). yes, mom--i packed myself a lunch to eat while being an explorer :) anyway, i'm super sleepy. tomorrow is our time to work on our group projects. we can't start our research yet because we have to sharpen the blade on the hand-auger, learn how to use a kemmerer (water sampler), and gather all of our supplies. our sampling schedule is going to be 3 days in a row, before dawn and slightly after dusk. then the rest is lab work and writing up our results. tomorrow i'm sleeping in a little bit. i'll head over there around 10 am rather than 9 am sharp. alright, that's all i can say tonight. chloe is verrrrrrry sleepy. ciao4now!