Babe

Meet Babe.

I did not take these pictures. Back in 2007, pretty much anyone who came to Upper Newport Bay in Orange County, CA, could see and photograph Babe whenever they felt like it. She was extremely visible, often parading her newest litter of kittens out in front of joggers and motorists in the middle of the day, not at all afraid of the crowds of humans who visited the popular area.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of Babe's kittens, and it appears the ocphotosite.com website no longer exists. As of 2010, she was apparently still alive (Click here for a little news story and photo.). But when I worked with her, it was back in 2007-2008.

I worked for the US Geological Survey for about a year studying the movement of bobcats and coyotes through urban corridors. It was a really interesting study. We drove around Newport Beach, Irvine, Tustin, Laguna Beach, Laguna Woods, Costa Mesa, Lake Forest, and Aliso Viejo monitoring the cats with telemetry, regularly checking a few dozen remote cameras we had set throughout the area, and trying to get more collars out on the animals. The main purpose of the study was to learn more about what the animals needed in a corridor, so that when the Orange County Great Park, which was in the process of being built on the old El Toro Marine Base, was completed, it could facilitate the movement of individuals between the Cleveland National Forest in the east and the San Joaquin Hills along the coast. (Interesting note: Will Smith's character was based out of the El Toro Marine Base in the movie Independence Day.)

Babe was already a pretty well-known cat before she was captured, which happened a few weeks before I got on the project. The capture crew had initially wanted to call her Tamale*, because she began to overheat while they were working her up. This happens occasionally, and they doused her with water and put alcohol on her ears to help her cool off. Eventually, though, they decided to call her Babe, after her habit of cruising Upper Newport Bay.

Unlike the collars we used on the mountain lions in Colorado, the bobcats had GPS collars that collected data points every few hours but could NOT be remotely downloaded. The data was stored on the collar, and when the collar's battery got low, it was programmed to automatically drop off the animal, and emit a different signal to let us know. Then we could walk in and retrieve the collar, plug it in, and get all the GPS data off of it.

Unfortunately, many of our collars failed. Often the drop-off mechanism would fail, the battery would die, and we would lose all ability to find the bobcat, relying then on spotting the cats on remote cameras and trying to recapture them to manually remove the collars. Thus, whenever we detected the drop-off signal, we weren't always 100% sure that the collar was actually no longer on the animal.

One day, Babe's collar started emitting that drop-off signal. Upper Newport Bay itself is a nature preserve, but it is surrounded by very densely populated neighborhoods and a handful of ritzy golf courses. Now Babe had been on her own for a while, having booted off her last litter of kittens, and had kind of disappeared out of her normal area for the previous few weeks. We actually feared she had gotten killed on the road somewhere. When Robert finally did pick up her signal, it was a few miles away from UNB in the heart of one of the neighborhoods. A day or so later, it started to give the drop-off signal.

So Robert set off to find it, eventually pinpointing it in someone's backyard. Robert knew there was the possibility that Babe was still wearing it, so he gave her a few days before walking in to retrieve it. When he returned, the signal was still there, so he got permission from the homeowner and walked into the backyard to get it. The backyard was small, lined by a row of hedges planted in a raised bed that backed up against the stone fence behind it. Robert crawled back behind the stickly, poky hedge with difficulty, came around a corner, and came face to face with Babe herself. 

She didn't act aggressive at all, but Robert immediately got out of there and told us the news. We easily figured she had had her kittens back there. It was quite a protected spot, out of reach of any coyotes or other bobcats that could kill her kittens, and sheltered from the elements. Our best guess was that the collar just happened to drop off there shortly after she gave birth, and her kittens were probably snuggling with it. We decided to give her a few weeks to get out of the area before trying to get the collar. Now, of course, we had absolutely no way of knowing where she was at any given time. 

And so, when the few weeks were up, they sent me in to try to get the collar. 

Robert and one of our supervisors, Lisa, came along. This time it was my turn to poke my head through the hedge. I dove in at the corner and cruised against the stone wall where the foliage was thinnest. When I reached the spot, I stared hard, trying to see through the darkness of the thick greenery. At first, I thought I could see a divot in the dirt, and eagerly moved closer to try to find the collar. But as my eyes adjusted, the dark form in front of me changed, morphed, took a different shape, until I could perceive the barely visible twinkle of a cat's eye against a dark bobcat-shaped head, tufted ears and all. She was still there. 

Again, she didn't react. I could have gotten a face-full of bobcat claws, since I was probably only about five or six feet away from her. I think she understood by now, after her years of frequenting the Bay, that we humans weren't likely to hurt her or her kittens, and bobcats, unlike canids, typically crouch and take cover when threatened rather than run for it. But needless to say, I got the heck out of there. 

 Eventually we were able to retrieve the collar, and Babe came back to Upper Newport Bay with a new set of kittens trailing behind her. She no longer had her necklace, just colorful earrings that she would have for the rest of her life. 

I don't actually know where Babe is now, if she's still alive, what happened to her, etc. Odds are, she got hit by a car, because that seems to be the fate of pretty much every urban bobcat in southern California. But she was one of our greatest tools in educating the southern California public about carnivores, letting them see the untamed beauty first-hand, and teaching them that bobcats can live alongside humans peacefully with no need for fear, as long as we maintain the appropriate distance and respect.

Regarding the bigger project, we ended up getting some interesting data from our cats. We found that in the more densely human-populated areas, somewhat removed from big expanses of habitat like Upper Newport Bay, the Laguna Coast Wilderness, and Crystal Cove, the bobcats were using whatever they could find to move around and build their territory. Two of our cats, named Homer and Sloane (both cats I got to help capture - Homer was my first), were caught right at the junction of the I-5 and I-405 freeways behind a Carmax Superstore. Both had almost completely linear home ranges along the riparian strip that wove between office complexes and neighborhoods. I don't know the status of the Orange County Great Park project, but I hope it's able to connect the east and west habitats, allowing more gene flow among the bobcats to help them maintain their populations in Orange County....because in this world of increasing distance between Man and Nature, the bobcats were the perfect ambassadors.

P.S. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you can find the final report of our project at the following link: Click here! Toward the end, in the appendices, are a bunch of really cool camera-trap photos, including some taken when a wildfire swept over our Cuddeback cameras without damaging them.

*Now that I have spent four months in Mexico, I feel the need to emphasize that the singular of "tamales" should be "tamal", not "tamale". That bugged our Spanish teachers to no end while we were in language class.

In the Lion's Den

One day, I found some mountain lion kittens.

By far, my favorite moments working in the field of wildlife biology have been, and will always be, when I get to see wildlife out doing its thing. When one works primarily with carnivores, this is not a frequent occurrence.

During my time on the mountain lion job in Colorado, I was lucky enough to get a few glimpses of some of our collared cats, as well as an older kitten when I accidentally stumbled upon it (see the post "Here, Kitty"). But what I really wanted was to see kittens in a den. My boss and a tech who was only working part-time for us - which only added insult to injury - had found a den earlier in the season, and I had searched a few likely spots since then but come up empty. 

We usually only checked the den sites to confirm whether or not one of our female cats had had kittens. We weren't cleared to handle them at all - you need special permission from Animal Care and Use committees to do that, apparently. We also had very narrow windows during which to search, as we had to wait until Mama was off hunting, since the last thing we wanted was to stumble upon a very defensive mother mountain lion. The few times I did den searches, we either missed the kittens, or the mother had already moved them. 

I say "miss the kittens" because if you've ever seen a mountain lion den site, you'll understand why it can be so hard to find them. Of the four I had seen, two were located in extremely dense scrub oak thickets, and the other two were in boulder fields. Scrub oak is a species of oak that is short, tough as nails, and grows really close together in enormous groups. You basically have to crawl on your hands and knees underneath the snagging branches to get through it, twisting through it like a labyrinth. Scrub oak destroyed my favorite pair of field pants, for which I have not yet forgiven it. The boulder fields are almost equally annoying, as you have to hop from rock to rock, checking for protected spaces underneath them where a mother might stash kittens, all the while trying not to slip and fall and break your neck. 

As I've said in previous posts, we had GPS locations for all of our cats from their collars, taken every four hours and remotely downloaded; so den sites were usually easy to spot on the maps as an enormous jumble of GPS locations all concentrated in the same general area. But satellite fixes, at least with our technology, are not 100% accurate - depending on the location of the satellites, the position of the cat, the weather, the vegetation, etc., a cat can stay in the same spot for hours and we'll get a map of points sprawled out over maybe a fifty-square-foot area. The kittens could be anywhere in there.

Skunk kill from this cat

And now, I'd like to introduce another star cat, one of my favorites because of her interesting eating habits. She was apparently quite old, and the last time she'd been captured the crew had noticed that her canines were worn almost to stubs. She had had multiple litters of kittens but, to the knowledge of the team, none had ever survived - for some reason, she always abandoned her kittens shortly after giving birth to them. But the most interesting thing about her was the most common prey item I logged for her: skunks. Her data was always easy to collect because I just had to follow my nose, and more often than not it would lead me to a pile of black-and-white hair and little bones, with the occasional intact head or tail sitting amidst it all. Whether her inability to raise young, broken teeth, and taste for skunks were all tied in somehow, maybe to a brain injury or other deformity this cat had, we could never be certain. 

It became clear late in the winter that something was going on - whether she was injured or had kittens, we weren't sure. All we knew was that she was sticking around a particular area for a long, long time. It seemed an odd time for her to have had kittens, but then again Colorado lions don't seem to stick to a regular breeding schedule - they can have their kittens year-round. 

And so, one day, I was instructed to go with another technician to investigate. 

At first, it was an easy hike. The other tech and I - an older, seasoned guy who had worked with lions for decades - drove as far as we could over a rough two-track road, then walked the rest of the way, along a creek and around a gently-rising hill. It didn't take long, however, before the trail ended at a massive boulder field. Below, we could see enormous rocks littering the hillside, the area devoid of almost all vegetation except for a tiny oasis of scrubby trees and shrubs in the very middle of it. We had to backtrack and hike over some pretty sketchy stuff to get down into it. We clambered over the boulders as best we could, and all the while I checked the mother lion's telemetry to make sure she wasn't in the area; we were able to hear her signal, but it was very weak, clearly indicating that she was far across the valley below.

It took a long time but we finally reached the trees in the middle. We were in the middle of the big jumble of GPS points, most of which were concentrated, of course, around the boulder field. I balked at the task before us; it was going to take ages to search under the rocks. I briefly considered giving up. After all, the kittens were probably gone or dead, and I had learned from experience that trying to find these guys in this kind of situation was like - pardon the cliche - trying to find a needle in a haystack.

However, Nature itself, this time, came to my aid.

From startlingly nearby, I heard a shrill whistle. It sounded completely out of place in this barren, silent landscape. I thought maybe my coworker had made the noise, but when I looked at him, his eyes had gone wide. "Kittens!" he said.

"What?" I said. Surely mountain lion kittens didn't whistle.

But the whistling continued, and as I was closer, I scrambled over the enormous boulders, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound. When I stood atop a particularly gigantic rock, looking down at a little patch of soil separating it from its neighboring rocks, a slight movement caught my eye.

A mountain lion kitten, days old, crawled out from under the boulder, its ears and eyes still shut, its fur speckled with little black spots. In between its whistles, we could hear the whistling of a sibling, still concealed beneath the rock. The visible kitten groped blindly in the dirt for just a few seconds before heading back toward the safety of the den.

I couldn't believe my luck. I had finally seen a mountain lion kitten.

Click on the video below from the Cincinnati Zoo for some examples of the sound.

The whistling is the kittens' method of communicating with their mother, and I heard it later, from the Golden lion's kitten ("The Cat Came Back - Part II"). It's certainly not the sound you would expect to come from a cat. I was glad the little kittens had done it, though, or we probably never would have found them.

Unfortunately, the crazy mother did abandon them, as her behavior over the next few weeks didn't indicate she was still supporting kittens. And so, a little while later, I brought my boss Kevin to the site to see if we could find them.

We made the difficult journey back to the site, and I lowered myself down into the space between the boulders to dig around in the dirt. It didn't take long for me to find little bones and poofs of spotted kitten fur. Kevin even got down and crawled as deep into the den as he could go, which was pretty deep (see pictures).

See if you can find his shoes

So, it was kind of a sad story, as the kittens didn't make it; but these things happen, and I'm not sure I would have felt better if we had had ACUC permission to rescue the kittens and bring them back to Fort Collins. There, they would have grown up in a pen (if they survived at all), then probably been translocated out in the woods again to fend for themselves. Some lions can thrive in those circumstances, it's true. At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, since I love seeing wildlife up close and getting the chance to touch and smell and hear the animals while processing them at capture, it's always best to interfere with these animals' lives as little as possible.

Nature can be harsh, yes. Mothers abandon their young for reasons we don't understand. Animals take the lives of other animals to survive. Even though I love carnivores, and I myself eat meat occasionally, whenever I'm watching a documentary of a wolf or a pride of lions chasing down its prey, I find myself rooting for the chased, the underdog, the victim. We find ourselves empathizing with creatures, allotting human rights and qualities to them, finding sadness in tragedies such as these. Some people think it's in our nature as humans to fear the wilderness and all its ferocity, its untamedness, its danger, to want to distance ourselves from this life-and-death struggle that goes on outside our cities.

But is our fear of wilderness in our nature? Or do we fear it because we have lost our nature?

Chasing wolves with painball guns - Part 2

A few days later, I became Paintball Rambo.

The second adventure took place during my second tour at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. After several volunteers and staff had patrolled the park for several weeks, I was asked to return - actually, it was my last week of work before driving to Missouri to start grad school.

I reluctantly drove back, remembering the incredibly socially awkward fisheries scientists, and stopping by a store in Silver City to purchase a mattress pad for the back of the Ford Explorer. After my previous, extremely boring 4-hour-each-way drive with no radio, I had rigged up a handy system with my iPod, plugged into my iHome, plugged into a power converter, plugged into the cigarette lighter, so I could sing my head off and make the drive a bit less monotonous. It worked beautifully, except that the iHome wall transformer was huge and heavy and, if I stopped suddenly or hit a bump, the whole ensemble collapsed.

The first few days were uneventful, me continuing my nightly patrols and daily naps, stalking the screened-in porch during the days to enjoy the view of the Gila River and read one of the many books I'd brought with me. A woman who worked for Defenders of Wildlife, named Cynthia, had been in the area as well, talking with ranchers and campers and overall trying to, in whatever ways she could, change people's minds about wolves. Although I had mixed feelings about Defenders of Wildlife, this particular woman was extremely level-headed, drawing from a lifetime of experience living and working alongside ranchers, with a clear understanding of the challenges they faced and the reasons they disliked the wolves. She cruised around Gila Hot Springs and the National Monument doing her thing, while I cruised around doing mine, and occasionally our vehicles met and we rolled down the windows to chat for a few minutes. I kept her updated on what the wolves were doing - which, that week, was primarily staying off to the west and north of the Monument. I was counting down the days until I left for Missouri, just hoping the wolves would continue to behave themselves and make my job easier (though, admittedly, much less exciting).

The last night, however, things changed.

It was early in the evening, and as I started my patrol, I turned on my telemetry receiver and listened with surprise as both the wolves' signals came booming in.

I cruised westward toward the Monument, hopping out of the truck every few minutes to roughly triangulate their position. They were together, just north of the main road, probably on top of the first ridge. At the corral, I decided I was close enough that I could run up there with my paintball gun and chase them back northward. As quickly as I could, I grabbed the H-antenna, paintball gun, and an extra load of paintballs, locked the car, and sprinted up the scrubby hillside. I had a little waist pack that could hold the telemetry receiver, and I stuffed the pack of paintballs in it with my headlamp and car keys. The sun had set, but there was still plenty of light.

At the top of the hill, I listened to the signals, which still were booming in. Gain low. Signal strength high. They were here, somewhere, probably watching me, their rusty fur blending perfectly with the rocks and dirt in the dim light. I switched off the receiver and listened. All was silent.

Even though I couldn't see them, they were so close that I figured this would be the best location to fire at them. I strained to remember the exact radio conditions that previous time with James, when the figure of the male wolf had materialized through the fog not 50 yards from where I stood. I might even hit them, wherever they were. It would be better to fire now, make some noise, than try to sneak closer and let them slink off on their own terms.

So I slung the paintball gun to my shoulder and pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

The CO2 canister was empty.

Frustrated, I threw it across my back, took the receiver and antenna in my right hand, and started running north like a maniac, yelling as loud as I could in as low a voice as I could, trying to make myself sound as scary and intimidating as possible.

Once atop that first ridge, the ground sloped up and down in a more or less gentle undulation of continuous, low hills. The Middle Fork of the Gila River flowed parallel to my right - eastward - where it swept past the Visitors Center and joined the West Fork in a broad, sandy wash near the intersection of the roads. Here, where they met, the rivers had carved the hills I now ran on into steep cliffs between them, which gradually lowered the further they got from the confluence.

I continued chasing the wolves, pausing at the top of each little hill to check the telemetry. They kept moving northward, but also eastward, toward the Middle Fork north of the Visitors Center. I knew about the cliff, and knew I was approaching it, but since the signals were still so strong, I assumed the wolves were still up on top with me. However, after a few more minutes of jogging, I reached the brink and stared down, thirty feet above the broad bank sloping gently down to the water. The wolves were already in the valley.

I really didn't want them to go back south; south and east was Gila Hot Springs. There was no way I could get down from where I was, so I continued north, running a few paces from the edge, looking for a gully or some rocky stairs that would get me down, all the while monitoring the wolves' signals. To my dismay, as my H-antenna sought the radio signals, I found myself pointing southeast. They were headed right toward Gila Hot Springs and a smorgasbord of goats and sheep. The light was considerably dimmer now, the Visitors Center had long since closed, and I began to feel panic gripping the edges of my consciousness.

I urgently sought a way down and eventually found one, maybe five minutes after I'd reached the edge. I slunk and slid down the side and lurched through the shallow waters of the Middle Fork, running past the Visitors Center and hitting the pavement of the road. I imagined what an odd sight I must be - soggy boots, paintball gun in one hand and antenna in the other, running down the road as if all the hounds of hell were at my heels. By the time I crossed the bridge, the darkness was nearly complete, the sandy banks of the river a blue-gray shadow with the black water cutting through the middle.

When I reached the intersection with the main road, I checked the signals again and learned that the wolves hadn't crossed the road, but were heading toward the town along the northern ridge. Here, private property prevented me from following on foot, so I decided to fetch the truck. I jogged all the way and hopped in, throwing the paintball gun disdainfully on the floor, and sped back toward town as fast as I could.

I cruised the main road listening with the roof antenna, and soon learned that the wolves hadn't made it very far east yet. Their signals were relatively weak, bouncing in and out, suggesting to me that they were a ways uphill away from the road. I hoped that I had at least given them a scare and that they wouldn't try anything with the livestock tonight, and decided to monitor them every half hour. First, I had to make a phone call.

I headed back to the house of the awkward fisheries scientists and plugged my calling card numbers in. I reached my boss and told him that the wolves were now close to town, paraphrasing my adventure with the cliffs. He sounded unhappy, but also admitted that there was little I could do - since everything was private property, I could only monitor them and hope they didn't get into any trouble. I hung up the phone and headed back, parking my truck near the intersection of the main road and the road to the Visitor Center.

After a few minutes, a familiar truck pulled alongside me. Cynthia stepped out and walked to my open window. Before I could recount my tale, she trumped me with one of her own:

"Somebody spotted a mountain lion down there near the river this evening," she said. "Apparently it killed an elk and dragged it underneath the bridge, and is there right now eating it."

My heart jumped. I had been sprinting down that bridge like a lunatic not half an hour before. And all the while there'd been a mountain lion beneath my feet, eating an elk that it probably would have readily defended if it felt threatened.

I told her about the wolves, and she generously agreed to help me keep a lookout. Fortunately, the wolves never did get into trouble, at least not that night. It was a month or so later, when I was all settled in at graduate school, that I finally learned what became of the Laredo Pack.

One evening, the caretaker of a ranch saw the male wolf on his property. He reportedly mistook it for a feral German shepherd that was after his calves, shot it, and killed it. That could have been the end of it - Mexican wolves are all too frequently illegally shot, and there rarely is enough evidence to convict the perpetrator.

The wolf team noted his sudden absence and began searching for him from the airplane. Topography and, in this case, several feet of dirt or concrete, can hinder reception from the ground, but many times signals can still be detected aerially. The biologists quickly found themselves circling above a house in the vicinity of Gila Hot Springs and sent the USFWS Special Agent over to check things out. Apparently, the guy buried the carcass, or put it in his basement, or something - radio collar and all. Check out the news release here.

His mate high-tailed it, at least for a little while, and after that I'm not sure what happened to her. The ranch caretaker claimed to be a supporter of the reintroduction program, making an honest mistake about the identity of the animal threatening his employer's livestock.

I try not to make judgments about these things, even though they can be very emotionally charged. Heck, I fostered a lifetime fondness for the species, and then spent two weeks of my life staying up all night and sleeping in the back of a Ford Explorer trying to keep that wolf out of trouble, and he got shot anyway.

Maybe one day I'll write a post about my opinions on wolves, which, to say the least, have morphed greatly over time.

Chasing wolves with paintball guns - Part 1

One day, I stalked some wolves with a paintball gun.

Wolves are pretty smart. They're resourceful, too, which often leads them into trouble. When I volunteered on the Mexican Wolf Blue Range Reintroduction Project, I had to spend a few weeks dealing with a pair of resourceful wolves who, having found themselves hungry and in unfamiliar territory in the Gila National Wilderness of New Mexico, rather quickly identified a handy solution: haunt the campsites of the nearby National Monument.

Map of the area. The large green blob is the Gila Wilderness.

Because livestock depredation can be a serious temptation for the Mexican wolves in the reintroduction area, one of the jobs of us volunteers was occasionally to "haze" wolves away from livestock when they got too close for comfort. Most of the wolves had radio collars, so if one of us drove through ranch land and detected a wolf nearby, or the ranchers reported wolf sightings, we would spend the next few evenings sitting near the herds with paintball guns to prevent a depredation. As a volunteer, the only firearm I was cleared to handle was a paintball gun. The technicians who were employed by the Arizona or New Mexico state wildlife management agencies were cleared to handle shotguns loaded with nonlethal ammunition including cracker shells (also known as "noisemaker rounds"), beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets. Prior to the following story, I had only gone out on one or two hazing excursions during which the wolves never actually approached the livestock.

This story begins with two wolves, a male and female, who were translocated from captivity to the Gila Wilderness in an effort to start a new pack. I can't remember the particular backgrounds of the two wolves who were chosen, but I don't believe either one had been born in captivity. Sometimes wolves are moved to captivity if they're injured, orphaned, or have shown an inclination to kill livestock. After that, they are genetically profiled. Decisions to breed wolves in captivity or translocate them to other locations are based on a synthesis of all the data about the genetic potential, behavioral history, and health of each wolf, in conjunction with the status of the wild wolves and the identification of "holes" in the reintroduction area that could be filled with new individuals, to boost the genetic diversity and size of the entire population.

This particular pair of wolves was dubbed the Laredo Pack. The field team translocated them via a "soft release", in which a temporary enclosure is built and the wolves can chew their way out when they're ready to go. The wolves' diets were supplemented by a few other volunteers who stayed with them in the heart of the Gila Wilderness while the wolves got used to their surroundings. The Laredo Pack didn't spend too long in their temporary enclosure, flying the coop after only a few days.

The field crew monitored them in the area for a few extra days, then packed up their mules and headed back to the field office. It soon became clear, however, that the wolves weren't being so successful in locating food on their own; at some point in their wild roaming, they stumbled upon what must have seemed like a jackpot to them: the campsites at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.

The National Monument is located about an hour up a windy two-lane road north of Silver City, New Mexico, which is itself two and a half hours away from the Mexican wolf field office in Alpine, Arizona. The Monument is relatively small, with a visitors center, a small number of campgrounds, and some trails winding around to view the cliff dwellings or connect to larger trails that traverse the Gila Wilderness. There is a small town called Gila Hot Springs located just east of the Monument, in which a few people raised livestock.

Because of the livestock nearby, and the fact that the wolves were being spotted looting campsites during the early mornings and evenings, my supervisors decided to keep a staff member in the area 24/7 to haze the wolves as often as possible until they left. The other volunteers and the New Mexico state technician on the project (James) took the job in shifts, usually lasting about a week. I was the first person to go, and ended up having to go a second time right before I left the project. My supervisors had made arrangements for us to stay in a crappy cabin shared by two incredibly socially awkward fisheries scientists doing research in the Gila River (I think the West Fork). They had the craziest work schedules, and no place for me to sleep; as a result, on my second trip, I purchased a mattress pad from a store in Silver City and slept in the back of the Ford Explorer (which also didn't have a working radio, so I drove the whole 7-hour round trip with my iPod plugged into my iHome plugged into a power converter plugged into the cigarette lighter, which, oddly enough, did work).

Since wolves are most active during dusk and dawn (i.e. the "crepuscular" hours - how's that for science vocab?), I spent my days hiking the trails, checking out the cliff dwellings, chatting with the visitors center staff, reading, and making my rounds to the campgrounds to talk to the campers, asking if they'd seen anything, and telling them about proper food storage. Sometimes huge storms would roll in in the evenings, with dangerous lightning, torrential downpours, and frightening gusts of wind tearing through the willows and cottonwoods around the cabin, and I'd sit in the cheap outdoor furniture on the wraparound, screened-in porch and watch.

I monitored the wolves' radio signals closely, trying to learn their habits and figure out where they went during the day. For the most part, their signals were only barely audible; there are many creeks and canyons surrounding the National Monument, and they could have been hunkering down in any one of them. The one time I did try to hike back into the Wilderness to find them, I got so frustrated with the number of river crossings that I gave up - after all, not only is constantly taking on and off yours boots annoying, but toting thousands of dollars' worth of telemetry equipment over slippery rock beds over and over again isn't exactly prudent. I settled for hiking up to the top of one of the ridges every day to get a general idea where they were, then waiting for night to fall so my real work could begin.

Main road along the river, between the cliff dwellings
 trailhead and visitors center access road. 

It was interesting work. I have two good stories to tell about the time I spent here. For the most part, though, starting around dusk, I would just drive the main road back and forth between the visitors center and the trailhead to the cliff dwellings, scanning constantly with the roof antenna to listen for changes in the volume and quality of the signals. Later, I would sleep in the Explorer and wake up every hour to make another trip down the road. If I felt like the wolves were getting too close to the campsites, I would park the truck and stand there with my paintball gun at the ready, a sort of guardian of the campsites, sometimes hiking past the sleeping campers up the ridge behind and firing a bunch of warning rounds out into the darkness. I don't know how effective it was; the wolves never got close enough for me to hit them, and my objective was just to impress upon them the futility of their haunting by never letting them get access to the camp food.

One night, as I made another round, driving slowly and quietly down the road with the windows open, listening to the Gila River flowing swiftly on the other side of the thick rushes that separated it from me, a large herd of javelina ran out in front of my truck. I killed the engine, listening to their grunting and looking at my headlights reflected in their eyes as they turned and trotted past me down the road.

-----

The first story involves my coworker James, who was a volunteer with me before being hired on as the New Mexico technician for the wolf project. Because he was a paid employee, he was permitted to use the shotguns with nonlethal ammunition to haze the wolves.

James was sent out to take over the next shift at the Cliff Dwellings, but our shifts overlapped by a day or two so I could tell him what I'd learned. Since there were two of us, and we finally had more powerful ammunition, we decided to make a more concerted effort to locate the wolves and scare the crap out of them. Thus, very early one morning, we convened at a corral east of the campsites, a spot I'd located that provided easier access to the ridgeline north of the main road, and allowed us to avoid bothering the sleeping campers. James took his shotgun, and I took my paintball gun and the telemetry equipment.

Map of the area. The encounter described took place north of the main east-west road. 

It was a creepy morning. All was gray and silent, with a thick fog rolling through the canyons and up onto the ridges. We left the truck at the corral and headed uphill, arriving at the top of the ridgeline easily and hiking northwestward, all the while monitoring the radio signals. The male's signal was louder, but the female was nearby too. We sneaked along as quickly and quietly as we could through the scrubby vegetation.

The signals got louder and louder. I motioned to James to proceed more slowly. With the fog, we could see maybe 40-50 feet in front of us.

To our left - west - there was a shallow gully that separated our hillside from the one next to us. By now, the male wolf's signal was so strong, even with the gain on my receiver down extremely low, that I knew he had to be somewhere on the adjacent hillside. James walked in front of me a few paces, his eyes fixed ahead, as I followed with my gaze directed westward.

Suddenly, silently, like a ghost, the figure of the male wolf appeared out of the fog on the hill beside us. "James!" I whispered urgently. He whipped his head around and saw the wolf too, just as the wolf saw us and made a dash back into the cover of the clouds, heading northwest. James threw his shotgun to the ready and fired two cracker shells in his direction. I followed suit, albeit pathetically, with paintballs.

James quickly reloaded his shotgun and we took off running after the wolf, dipping down into the shallow gully and emerging on the other hillside where the wolf had been moments ago. We really had no hope of catching him, but James was determined to dog him, firing off more cracker shells as often as he could to tell the wolf we meant business. By the radio signals, I could tell that the male's signal was getting further and further away, but the female's was still somewhere north of us. It too was receding.

Finally, we gave up. I was out of paintballs, the sun was higher, the fog was burning off, and the radio signals were barely audible. The wolves were probably in a canyon somewhere. James and I turned around and headed back to the truck, which proved to be a bit more of a challenge than we expected - with the excitement of the chase, and the fog obscuring our view, we couldn't really remember how we'd gotten where we were. Fortunately, we were prepared with a GPS unit, and we eventually found our way back to the truck.

I returned to Alpine soon after. From James's reports, and the reports of the volunteer who went to the Monument after him, the wolves were still staying in the area, though they weren't coming down into the campsites as often. Thus, three weeks later, I arrived at the cliff dwellings once again. And that's when Part 2 happened.

To be continued....

Mistakes - Part 1 of many

One day, I discovered I ought to learn more about plumbing.

I've made many mistakes in my career as a biologist or field technician. Losing field equipment, damaging a vehicle, or similar things are embarrassing and sometimes expensive, but these things don't usually stick with me - what sticks with me most are the times I've made assumptions, had a bad attitude, or let my ambitions get the better of me at work, creating memories I wish I didn't have. Maybe I'm depressed right now, or homesick, or whatever, but for some reason I feel like expounding on some of the times I've made bad choices which have impacted my relationships with my supervisors and coworkers, and maybe even impacted my future in this field. I sure hope not.

It's not good to harbor regrets, but maybe these memories can be useful to someone by showing him or her what not to do.

I'll start with a lighter, shorter story, though, a little mistake that falls more in the category of "embarrassing and sometimes expensive" errors, and only slightly in the other, more serious category.

When I worked in Yellowstone, we all lived in small travel trailers in a residential area near the Lake intended for temporary employees and volunteers. The trailers were connected for electricity, gray water drainage, and fresh water for drinking and cooking, but we had to use nearby bathroom buildings to take showers and use the toilets. The electricity and water we used were monitored per trailer site, and the cost came out of the grant money for our boss's research study. Heating and gas for cooking were provided by small propane tanks attached outside the trailer.

I arrived late in the season to fill in for another employee who had to go back to school. My first day was sometime in the beginning of September. The Lake area of Yellowstone is at an altitude of about 8000 feet or more, and in September, the cold weather really starts to settle in. Nighttime freezing temperatures are common, as are freak snowfalls.

For my first few days of work, I slept in my trailer by myself. My roommate Shannon was visiting Livingston, Montana where she lived with her husband on her days off, and a friend of my boss Jenn, who was visiting from Idaho, was using the spare bed - but the two of them were off on a multi-day camping trip. I hadn't even met my boss yet, actually.

I awoke for a day of front-country hiking to collect bear data, the morning dawning bright and cold. I staggered to the sink and turned the tap to fill up my tea kettle, but no water came out - the pipes had frozen during the night.

In my drowsiness, I realized I couldn't remember which direction I had turned the tap. I experimented with the other tap, the hot water one, but it didn't really help me figure out the problem. If the hot tap turns on to the left, does that mean the cold tap does the same? Or are they opposite? I'm not a plumber. I had no idea how these things work, and I've lived in so many places with so many little differences in things like plumbing that I couldn't remember if I'd ever observed a clear pattern with these things.

I had a 50/50 chance. So I picked a side and cranked the tap all the way, got my things together, and left the trailer. I had to meet my coworkers and other boss, Justin, at their two trailers, which were side by side and located a bit further down the road. We discussed the day's plans and headed out to the West Thumb area, where Justin trained me and the other new employees, Gabe and Caryn, in the field collection techniques.

After a day of fun scooping mushroom-y bear poop and identifying day beds, I returned to my trailer. I walked through the door to find things slightly re-arranged - apparently Jenn and her friend had returned from their trip sometime during the day. I also noticed some wet towels hanging around the sink area.

As I began preparing dinner, standing over the sink, a face appeared outside the kitchen window. "Rebecca?" she said. I put down what I was working on and walked outside.

"You must be Jenn!" I said cheerily. After all, first impressions are everything.

"Yeah," she said. She didn't look happy.

"How was your trip?" I asked, now a bit uncertain.

"Good. So, did you know that you left the tap turned all the way on, and it flooded the trailer?"

Oops.

I tried to explain about the frozen pipes, and how I couldn't remember which way I'd turned the tap. She never broke a smile, instead making sure I knew about how she had to pay for all the water we used out of her grant money, and how all I needed to do was turn the faucet to a slow drip during the night to keep the pipes from freezing again. I apologized and went back inside with my tail tucked between my legs.

Well, so much for that first impression.

Stuck in the Mud

One day, I discovered that four-wheel-drive is no match for clay and gravity.

I love trucks. When it comes to sedans, I'll always favor Honda, but in my opinion nobody makes a truck like Chevy. Often, state and federal wildlife agencies will have a suite of vehicles available for field use. When I worked for the USGS, I drove a Dodge Durango and an old Ford Bronco; but for almost every other job, I drove Chevys.

When I worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the Mexican Wolf Reintroduction Project, I think we had 10 or so trucks to use at the field office. There were at least 5 Dodge Rams (my least favorite), 2 Fords (including an Explorer with a fried electrical system and a ginormous F-250), and 3 Chevys (two Silverados, and a wrecked Colorado that a volunteer had flipped some years before, left in the parking lot as a reminder for us to be careful on the curvy roads).

My trusty white Chevy in Willow Creek, NM

When I worked on that project, I didn't know how to drive a manual transmission and nobody wanted to teach me. Since the Explorer sucked, the F-250 was way too big for our everyday field needs, and most of the Dodges were manual, I had my choice of the two Chevys. Thus, an old, white, beat-up Silverado became my faithful steed.

Although it was old, it was reliable. I took that thing on the roughest roads Arizona and New Mexico could throw at me, only once got a flat tire and never got stuck in the snow or mud. My coworkers would come back after long days of having to dig their Dodges out of ridiculously small patches of snow, and once my friend spent hours digging herself out of being high-centered on a sandy road in a very remote part of the Gila National Forest. 

My biggest problems ended up being the tailgate rattling off its hinges and the right taillight falling out of its socket as I sped around on the bumpy washboard roads. It also, apparently, had bad brakes - they worked, but only if you floored the pedal. I didn't realize that was a bad thing until somebody else drove it and told me. My own personal stupidity also caused problems once or twice: Once, as I was backing out of a "parking space" in the office (see picture: parking and reversing was a constant game of hide-and-seek with mature pine trees), I cut the tires to swing to the left without noticing the pine tree I'd parked next to coming towards the driver's-side window. I ended up partially removing the mirror and making a huge dent in the driver's side door, which my boss tried unsuccessfully to pop out later with a plunger. 

The office.

It took a few days for the mirror to be fixed, so in the meantime I drove the other Chevy - a green Silverado with a few more thousand miles and slightly less reliability. But it was still a Chevy. 

One day, my task was to drive around some dirt roads near the Arizona - New Mexico border to look for signs of uncollared wolves - a frequent task that involved driving slowly with your head out the window scanning for tracks and scat on the side of the road. I was in an area south of the main highway in the national forest, in hills too steep to allow for reliable radio transmission, and not a town, house, or campground in site. 

It had rained recently. The dirt in that area was such that, when wet, it filled every tiny tread in our tires and made the roads gooey chutes of rich red-brown clay slicker than ice. As I headed gently downslope toward the river on the curvy roads, I tested the roads in the wider sections to determine how fast I could reasonably go without sliding around too much (a boundary I'm rather fond of pushing sometimes).

I wanted to make a big loop, starting low in the southeast and heading west and north and up until I met back with the main highway. Consulting my map, I saw that if I could reach the terminus of the east-west road, I'd hit a bigger road that would take me north, giving me a fast and easy exit back to pavement. The further and further west I drove on these sketchy roads, the more my determination grew to make it to this bigger road, to not have to turn around. Thus, when I finally crossed the river and found myself staring up at the road winding steeply up the other side, I didn't instantly admit it as a disaster waiting to happen. 

The green Chevy on Greens Peak, Arizona.

I started creeping up the hill, when suddenly a black Suburban came around the corner in reverse. As I backed up and waited, it slowly, ponderously, methodically navigated the sharper curves and made it down to me. They rolled down their windows. It was a couple of tourists from a campground several miles away, exploring the muddy wilderness. They told me they'd tried to make it up the steep hill, but it was just too muddy and slick. They turned around and drove back the way I'd come.

Even that didn't deter me. My truck was lighter, and I figured I was more experienced with four-wheel driving than they were. Stubbornly, I put the truck in gear and crept slowly back up the hill. The road was flanked by a steep downhill on my left (south) side, with a cliff on my right. Between the road and the cliff wall was a shallow ditch filled with thick mud. 

After ten or so minutes with no improvement in the road, and no end in sight, I finally decided to give up. As the road was far too narrow for turning around to be an option, I'd have to copy the tourists and head all the way down in reverse. I made it most of the way and was on the final curve, when I miscalculated and went straight for the ditch. Before I could correct, my right wheels had already slipped down the gentle curve, and the rest of the truck slowly, inexorably, followed. 

I was stuck. I spent a few minutes shifting in and out of 4WD, shifting back and forth between reverse and drive to try to get whatever little momentum I could in the limited space. Try as I might, I just couldn't give my right side enough traction to breach the little bank of mud separating me from freedom. The more I tried, the deeper the holes I dug, the more I became enmeshed in the ditch's grip. 

Of course, the steepness of the hill prevented me from successfully contacting anyone on the radio. I had no handheld, just the built-in system in the truck, and I'd stopped carrying a cell phone long ago for the lack of reception. I half-hoped the tourists had stuck around to make sure I'd gotten out OK, but they were nowhere in sight, and they never returned. 

I was on my own. I could either wait here for someone in the office to realize I wasn't coming back, and come find me (they knew the general area in which I'd gone), or I could try to get myself out. 

I made a quick inventory of my supplies. A shovel. My floor mats. My clothes. Some planks of wood in the bed? Where did those come from? They might come in handy. I had a winch, too, but I had no idea how to use it. 

I got to work with the shovel and the floor mats, digging troughs beneath the tires and stuffing the floor mats underneath, digging pits for the wooden planks in front. Periodically I would re-enter the truck, play around with the gears, and re-exit to rearrange my system, getting close but never quite close enough. 

I was covered, head to toe, in mud. I had actually taken off my boots because they'd gotten so heavy with the stuff, and my bare feet gave me better traction in the slippery mess anyway.

Finally, after about an hour, I re-entered my truck for the last time. A little bit of reversing, then a jolt of forward momentum, a second or two of suspended motion and uncertainty, and then - I was free! 

I got out one last time to retrieve the planks and floor mats. Then I did a little dance. I thought briefly about the next person who would come up this road looking for wolf sign, and wondered what they'd think of this strange, sudden appearance of  bare human footprints in the middle of the road. 

It was late in the evening when I finally got back to the office. I stepped through the door in a blaze of glory, proud of my muddy clothes and my muddy truck outside, because I - little old me, a 24-year-old, female, relatively experienced field volunteer - had dug my truck out of the mud all by myself. 

Unfortunately, nobody was there. 

Although I soon went back to driving my trusty white Chevy, I had developed a sort of bond with the green one now. It had been just me and that truck out in the wilderness. By getting stuck, it had humbled me, revealed the flaws in my assumption that I was invincible; but then it hadn't left me stranded, either. We were a team. 

Terrace Point and Bridge Bay

One day, I learned I hate boats.

If you've been following my writing, you may remember a few brief allusions to riding in a boat on Yellowstone Lake when I was there studying bears. I said then that I have a particular aversion to all modes of transportation in which there is not more or less constant contact with solid ground; boats and planes, sadly, do not meet this criteria. I assure you, however, that this aversion to unnatural vehicles (completely unnatural: if man were meant to fly, or skip across bodies of water, he'd have been given either wings or fins) developed logically as a result of real experiences.

The Yellowstone bear project, back in 2007, had two boats at its disposal: One was called the Silvertip (or The Tip, for short; "Silvertip" is another name for grizzly bear), and the other was called the Ursus. I know nothing about boats, so I won't even pretend to know what kinds of boats these were. They were small. They each had one propeller. The Silvertip had a green canvas removable top and limited seating - riding in the back was similar to riding in the bed of a truck - but the Ursus had a permanent cover and a comfy row of seats lining each side of the cabin. The Ursus was brand spanking new, and the Tip definitely had some miles under its keel. But despite the higher level of comfort and luxury provided by the weatherproof cover of the Ursus, not to mention the draw of its shiny newness, most of us actually preferred the Tip. It had proven itself worthy over years of abuse on the unforgiving waters of Yellowstone Lake, while the Ursus had still to earn our trust. 

Yellowstone Lake is a large natural lake in the southeastern quadrant of Yellowstone National Park. Major park roads run alongside the western and northern shores, but the southern and eastern shores are inaccessible except by trails (one of which is called the Thoroughfare Trail, and runs along most of the eastern shore). Backcountry campgrounds and cabins exist here and there along the trail systems, and we utilized quite a few of them during multi-day bear sampling excursions. When the bears hung out in the backcountry south and east of the Lake, the easiest way to get there was to take the boat to the opposite shore. 

The employee/volunteer trailer park was located west of the road between Lake Village and Fishing Bridge (located at the junction of the two main roads). The Tip and the Ursus were housed in Bridge Bay Marina, a small inlet protected from the wind  that nearly constantly blew across the Lake. When departing in the boat from Bridge Bay, boats had to pass underneath the main road, after which the inlet widened and soon ejected its hapless victims into the unprotected expanse of the Lake's main body. 

Sign located on the bridge when leaving Bridge Bay

It was very common for strong winds to blow northeast through the West Thumb channel, creating surprisingly large breakers and conditions too dangerous for boating. Other days, however, the Lake was smooth and clear as glass, and speeding southeast from Bridge Bay to the South or Southeast Arms, in a pristine Lake in one of the country's most pristine national parks, the canvas top of the Tip removed and the autumn wind whipping over the windshield, was absolutely glorious. 

We had three people on our team who were licensed to drive the boat: George, a dedicated boat driver volunteer who worked for us and for the fisheries folks, as well as both the graduate students on the project, Jenn and Justin. In addition, the trapping crew, who caught the bears for us and with whom we only worked occasionally, also needed the boats at times, and the leader, Craig, was licensed to drive them. 

Landing the boat could be quite tricky. Docks are few and far between on the Lake, especially in the undeveloped South and Southeast Arms. In many places, broad, sandy beaches line the shoreline, and we could simply rev the engine, lift the prop as the depth decreased, and glide up as far as possible onto the beach. Then a group of us would leap off the bow and the driver would push off the beach with a long pole, coming back later to repeat the process and pick everybody up. George's season ended before ours did, so when Jenn or Justin was driving, it was more common for us to tug the boat further up onto the sand with long ropes and secure the anchor to some trees or logs, and come back for it later in the day. I fondly remember many occasions as we approached the beach, me sitting at the stern with a pair of polarized glasses, shouting depth estimations to the driver so he could pull up the prop before it hit the gravelly lake bottom. 

However, there was one spot along the eastern shore that was quite different. It was called Terrace Point. There were no beaches here; the surrounding hills sloped abruptly into the Lake, the Thoroughfare Trail carving a path alongside or sometimes further away where the terrain was flatter. At Terrace Point, a large rocky outcrop jutted a few meters into the Lake. Landing here entailed ramming this rock and leaping one by one onto it from the bow. It had to be done quickly, before the pounding waves could turn the boat sideways where it would be easier to roll, and where the prop could be damaged by the rocks on shore.  

I recall many occasions when Terrace Point landings went smoothly. However, it only took one bad day to erase all those memories from my mind. 

I think I actually took this picture on the day in question.

We were on the Tip. All 6 of us departed at Bridge Bay and headed out into the Lake, Justin driving, the plan being to land at Terrace Point and send off a group of 4 for a multi-day stint in the backcountry. I was to stay behind with Justin so the two of us could tackle some other data points closer to Madison Junction after we returned the boat to Bridge Bay. The day was windy; crossing the West Thumb Channel was slow going, as we plowed through troughs and over breakers pushed high by the wind blowing along the length of the Channel. When we cleared the Channel, the going was slightly better, but the waves still pushed us strongly eastward. 

As we approached Terrace Point, I situated myself along the starboard bow with the pole, ready to push off once our 4 adventurers had departed. With a crunch, the bow struck the granite, and one after another, everyone leaped off onto the stone. I tried to push away from the rock, but the waves battered us from behind, and overpowered me. The depth here was great enough that we didn't need to raise the prop, and Justin tried desperately to reverse the boat, but the waves were just too much for our little craft. After only a minute or two, the boat had turned sideways and was being battered into the rocky shore as I tried desperately to shove against it with all my strength. Justin was forced to raise the prop and threw his hands off the wheel in defeat.Visions of our little boat disintegrating into a thousand pieces flooded my mind.

We weren't really in any danger - we had radios, we were at the shore, and help could easily arrive before the autumn chill would creep into our wet clothing. But I didn't want to see the Tip dashed to pieces, and I was partly afraid that it would be my fault, since I had been unable to push away from the shore in time. And it's a frightening feeling, knowing that this craft so carefully constructed by human hands can be so fully at the mercy of Mother Nature.

Fortunately, our crew of 4 standing helplessly on Terrace Point decided to be helpless no longer. Sacrificing the warmth and comfort of their dry boots, socks, and pants, they all jumped into the Lake and pushed. With the four of them pushing from below and me pushing from above with the pole, we finally got the boat turned completely around and pushed far enough away from the shore so Justin could lower the prop. He threw the boat in gear, and for a few moments we were stuck in a stasis as the forward momentum matched the momentum being hurled by the waves in the opposite direction, but then - freedom! I stood in the stern as we sped away from Terrace Point, watching my comrades crawl back onto the rock and wave goodbye, dripping from their water-stained pant legs.

Justin and I had a somber drive back to Bridge Bay, once again fighting the troughs and crests in West Thumb Channel. As we pulled into the protected waters of Bridge Bay, I think the tension was visible as it fell from our shoulders.

The crew left on the Lake had to hike with sodden clothes for the rest of that day, but were able to dry off in front of the wood stove of the backcountry cabin they stayed in for that night. I can't remember for certain, but I think we picked them up again at the same place a few days later. We were all a little gun-shy but the pickup came off without a hitch.

-----

Yellowstone Lake is cold all the time. Year round. If you fall into the water, you have an estimated 20 minutes to live before hypothermia kills you, probably less if you don't have a life jacket keeping you above water. Colorful signs plastered all over Bridge Bay, featuring a young man dangling lifelessly in the water, head rolled back onto the pad of his life jacket, reminded us of this fact constantly. One time, while staying at a cabin on an island in the South Arm, I got the bright idea (formed with the aid of whiskey) that we all should go jump into the Lake after dinner, since we had the nice wood stove and hot chocolate (with whiskey) to warm us up. We did. It was cold. 

Toward the end of the season as our field work was wrapping up, we all got the opportunity to join the bear trappers when they traveled to the eastern shore of the Lake to set some culvert traps. The huge, heavy culverts were already out in the field, but we needed to bring lots of supplies - bait (a lovely mixture of blood and guts of some kind, or kinds, of animals and fish), equipment for processing captured bears, as well as all of our overnight camping gear.

The day dawned cold, windy, and rainy. We all gathered at Bridge Bay and loaded up the Ursus. There were four or five of us from the research team accompanying the three-man crew of the capture team, plus all the added weight of our stuff. It took us quite a while to load up. When we left the dock, the Ursus teetered back and forth ponderously with each slight turn of the rudder in the still waters.

I think the Ursus and the Silvertip were about the same size, but there were some key differences. The Ursus was a bit flatter, more square-like in shape, while the Silvertip resembled more of the typical boat shape, with a sharper prow and more streamlined body. Because of the Ursus's squareness, it was definitely less stable when heavy. We discovered this the hard way.

Craig drove the boat out of Bridge Bay. As soon as we hit the West Thumb Channel, waves larger than any I had yet seen rolled before our eyes. Slowly, carefully, Craig did his best to steer in and out of the troughs of the confused waters. We in the back sat silently, trying not to panic as each wave rolled us back and forth. Spitting rain pelted the windshield, driven by the high winds into an icy stinging spray, and the waves reflected a murky grayness from the turbulent clouds scudding overhead. I found myself clinging to the person sitting next to me, fear written plainly in every feature of my face and every reaction of my body.

It became clear in ten or fifteen minutes that we could not make it to the eastern shore. The plans were abandoned. Craig carefully turned the boat around, and we headed back to Bridge Bay. I took a deep breath, probably the only one I'd really taken since we left the safety of the marina, feeling immensely relieved, even if I was disappointed that I wouldn't get to help catch a grizzly bear.

Craig decided to try to let the waves push him back into Bridge Bay, so as he steered toward it, he craned his body around to watch the waves rolling in behind him. I watched too from my seat on the port side, the rear of the cabin open to provide better visibility.

Without warning, all of us on the port side were thrown to starboard as the boat listed dangerously and nearly rolled. Craig's attention had been focused so completely on the waves behind us that he never noticed the huge one creeping up from the left. It felt like one of those rides at an amusement park where a huge ship (or, at Six Flags Houston, a space shuttle) swings back and forth, getting higher and higher with each swing until you feel like it's going to stop upside down and maybe, just maybe, complete a full revolution. For a few terrifying milliseconds, we were suspended in mid-air as the boat decided whether or not to roll completely.

Finally, it crashed back to port. I wasn't the only one panicking now, but we managed to keep a lid on it as Craig successfully led us back into the safety of Bridge Bay.

It was the last time I rode in the Ursus. I may have ridden in the Tip once or twice more before the season ended. I've only ridden in a boat once since I worked in Yellowstone - a short jaunt across a small lake in Colorado to sample some mountain lion data points - but it's definitely not something I miss.