Hiking in the mountains

I have updated my webpage with pictures from Colorado, birds, lizards, mammals, and mushrooms.

One professor on my doctoral committee studies mycorrhizas (fungi symbiotic with plant roots). We have a group each week where read papers on mycorrhizas, and I have become quite interested in fungi lately. While in Colorado I took numerous pictures of fungi. I never realized how pretty mushrooms are. I even ate a few of the edible ones. Colorado had a wet summer, and mushrooms sprouted up everywhere. I have never seen so many mushrooms.

I got to hike in 2 mountain ranges in Colorado and 1 in Idaho. My research took me to northern Colorado to Niwot Ridge. I collected stems, soils, and CO2 from 14 sites from 1700 to 3400 meters. It was a lot of fun to see the mountains after being in south Florida where the highest elevation is 12 m. We also got to see the drastic changes from the plains of eastern Colorado to sagebrush and juniper to ponderosa pine savanna up to the lodgepole pine, Englemans spruce, and subalpine fir to finally to alpine meadow and bare rock. By the end of the trip my colleagues were saying that they wanted to live there in the mountains.

At each site I collected sapwood (inner wood) of stems, soil down to 40 cm, and 3 CO2 samples. The 3 CO2 samples took the longest time because I had to set up the system that would pump CO2 from the soil from the chamber over the soil to the gas analyzer then through scrubbers that removed water and finally into a collection flask. I had to first remove all CO2 from the system before collecting CO2 from the soil. Then I had to start collecting CO2 and wait for the CO2 concentration to reach at least 360ppm. All these steps took time. Also we had to hike into the spots with all our equipment including 3 small 12v batteries and a deep cycle marine battery. The mountains have small layer of soil then underlying granite foundation. Sometimes the soil was only 1 cm deep, so we had to use a pick to dig through granite boulders to collect soil samples to 40cm. Two graduate students help me with the collection, which required working 12+ hours a day. However, I planned for everything to take a long time, so we had an extra day after all the work was done. I was going to add more sites because we had one more day, but I had been working my volunteers for 12+ hours a day for 6 days straight. I figured that I would be kind and give them a day off to hike.

We spent it hiking to a alpine meadow (3500+ m) above Brainard Lake. Once we reached the top of the alpine meadow (300m above timberline), we going to go to another higher point, but it started raining and then hailing. We thought that it was best to get to lower elevation under the protection of trees. I had to move particularly fast because I had nothing to protect my camera. Thank goodness the rain stopped after a 20 minutes.

The next day we had to go home, all of us were sad to leave the mountains, but it was nice to get back to the ocean.