Sunday afternoon, I decided to go to the refuge and try and gather up some decent pictures for you all. Apparently the critters thought it'd be wonderful to hide since I finally had a camera for me, so I don't have much aside from plenty of flowers...of course, they've been added to the album!

Yesterday morning, the biologist was in a meeting for a while so we didn't start on cacti right away. Instead, I continued my efforts to try and brainstorm a reasonable craft for the festival we're helping out at next weekend (result: no craft is good enough!) for the kids to do, helped the office manager do errands around the office, that sort of thing. After lunch, though, we got to go out again and do more cacti! It was really depressing this time around, because as the day wore on, it became more and more apparent that a lot of the missing cacti have simply been stolen by greedy guests, as the outcrops are open to the public. It was extremely upsetting to see it; this morning I was uploading the data and on one site there were more missing cacti than found. Not only is it ecologically uncool (the cacti are really rare here, they only grow on certain rocks on the refuge - we have the only population in the state), but extremely frustrating for us - we had to search around the expected area for a few minutes, scrambling around in vain before determining that the gaping hole was, indeed, the absence of cactus.

Today started off in a disappointing way - it was threatening to rain, so we (biologist and I) messed around on our computers for 2 hours trying to wait it out, since the site we had to start with is hard to access and it would be lame to have to wait in the truck, or come back to HQ. Finally, though, enough was enough and we went out to brave the rain, and drove out to the site. Barely 10 minutes into our operation, though, the instrument we needed thought it would be a great time to break! We had to drive into town to buy a new one, and by that point it was nearly time for lunch.

We spent the afternoon with the YCC kids hacking down trees that were growing on the outcrops - they're not welcome here! It was exhausting work, to say the least. After a few hours we were taking a break, and got, er, distracted by the wild raspberry patches that were running rampant throughout our site. Our break got fairly extended, and we spent the last hour or so of the afternoon snacking on berries and chatting. The weather had somehow gotten beautiful and sunny...what a perfect way to end the day.

tomorrow: more cacti!