Flagstaff

I'm in Flagstaff, AZ for the summer doing research. I'm staying at this research station with my labmate Cassandra. We drove down together in my car and arrived on Saturday night. Cassandra's dad, Karlton met us here and is staying with us for a week. He came to help out with getting our projects started, but as you'll soon see, we haven't been able to put him to work too much.

So on Sunday we just drove around to look at my sites. It sure is beautiful around here and the trees smell like butterscotch!

The first thing I saw when we drove into the parking lot was the goofiest looking squirrel I've ever seen.


They're called Abert squirrels and they eat the tips of the lower ponderosa pine branches, which makes them look more like lollipops than xmas trees.

Research has been very slow. We're here very early aparently. It snowed like 6 inches on Tuesday night. The gilia plants are just barely starting to bolt, and they haven't really been browsed yet, so there isn't a whole lot I can do yet.

Here's my plant--Ipomopsis aggregata



Here's one that's been browsed



Here's my site covered in half a foot of snow