Chocolate-eating mice, Banff hot springs, and wading in Barrier Lake

It’s getting harder and harder to come up with new material for all of you to read, but I will do my best. I have three brief things to mention this week.

Chocolate-eating mice: At the beginning of the week, we were visited by two girls from Europe who are working with mice as well at the other University of Calgary field station. One girl is from Switzerland and the other is from the Netherlands. We shared ideas from our own respective projects and gave them advice on theirs. To thank us for our help, they left us some delicious Swiss chocolate. Crisia and I ate most of it since Nikhil doesn’t like dark chocolate. One of the pieces of chocolate was left out on the desk in our trailer by accident. A couple days later, I found it and noticed that it had little teeth marks all around the edges. It would appear that in addition to eating dead bees (Nikhil killed a huge bee, and it disappeared before anyone could throw it out), the mice in our trailer also eat chocolate. I hope they didn’t get sick.

Banff hot springs: Nikhil’s girlfriend Ashlynn came to visit him this week, so for the most part he was off with her while Crisia and I spent a lot of time accomplishing nothing back at the field station when we weren’t trapping. I think I spent most of this time napping. Friday night, when Nikhil and Ashlynn were in Calgary, we decided to go to the Banff hot springs because we had a day pass into Banff for one of our cars that would expire at the end of June. Just as we were getting ready to leave, we couldn’t find the pass. We thought that maybe Nikhil took it with him in his rental car because he had gone there earlier in the week, so we spent most of the evening cursing him. We decided to go anyway because we were already ready, and Kurt and his friend Denise were waiting for us. Tracy couldn’t come because her parents were visiting.

It turns out that without the pass, it costs $17.80 to spend a day in Banff national park, which is absolutely ridiculous. Because I was forewarned, I knew what to expect at the hot springs. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t disappointed when I got there. When I think of hot springs, I think of a very natural setting with cliffs surrounding a pond of sorts. What we got looked like a pool. Although the atmosphere itself was rather disappointing, the pool itself was very relaxing and kept at 39 degrees Celsius. If you could see through the steam without your glasses, you could see the mountains in the background. It started to rain while we were there, so that made it feel even nicer. We were lucky that it wasn’t crowded. Apparently sometimes there is standing room only. I guess it’s not high tourist season yet.

When Nikhil came back, we had determined that he didn’t have the pass into Banff either. The only thing we can think of that may have happened to it is that when Paul, Crisia’s friend, came to visit, he left it in his rental car when he returned it. Since Nikhil had to pay when he went, and we used it to go to the springs, and Crisia went to Banff with her friend Meghan yesterday, we have spent almost $60 to simply enter Banff between all of us. I will also be going in again when Eliott comes next week (yay for Eliott coming and boo for spending another $20 to go into Banff).

Wading in Barrier Lake: I woke up this morning to the sight of snow falling. At the field station, there were huge chunks of snow falling and just barely sticking. Five minutes away from the field station, Crisia had to kick around snow to locate her traps, while her car was buried in even more snow as plows went by. Crisia, Kurt, Denise, and I were bored during the day since none of us could do any work, so we decided that since it was so wet out and since there was only so much amusement to be had from rolling around in desk chairs, we would test out the thigh waders that are hanging in the lab. For those unfamiliar with what those are, they are rubber boots that go up to the thigh often used to wade in shallow water. The waders in the lab varied between size 10 and 11 for men, which made them very interesting to walk in. We also borrowed raincoats from the lab, so we all looked like complete dorks (well more than usual anyway). We spent a lot of time splashing around in puddles and swampy areas next to the road. Before we even got to the lake, Denise sunk into the sand past her knees. It took us maybe 45 minutes to get her out. We found places to go into the lake without sinking, which was fun. Kurt and Denise found rocks to skip, and Crisia found out that we could seesaw on newly exposed logs. All in all, it was a very amusing time. If I get the pictures from this, I will put them up.