Guns and butter

Shotgun safety Training

Not being able to update my blog in a few days, I am now going to go over a quick update. Field work has been a bit rough do to the near 10 hour work days (field), followed by a couple of extra hours immediately after coming back! Lucky we only do this every other day. And lucky I made it to the only Japanese restaurant, which was quite a treat!!

Ah! Japanese food!

I will be going out to the field again in about an hour. Should be interesting because there was a brown bear spotted walking around our field site yesterday. The snow is melting quickly.

Above: Snow 1 week ago.

Snow melt three days ago!

We commonly have a bear guard with a rifle and/or a shotgun out there. Since we been getting foggy and windy days lately we have to be on guard even more than normal. We been told that bears can smell some 20 miles away. So, all this talk about bears led us to an important subject and a subject that I have been waiting for... gun training!

Live firing, shooting at a board.

We had two days of class, the first in class safety training and the second day live firing. This is not my first time with guns, however it is my first time with a shotgun. We had a member of the police force out with us and we learned how to load, unload and safety the shotguns we would be using (should we want to). The second day we got to fire off a couple rounds. Ok, two rounds is certainly not enough to learn, but we at least got to feel the kick back. I am glad that we had this class because I have already come across a couple of shotguns and could not tell (until now) if they were loaded and on safety.

Climbing wall for $3.00 all day at the local Gym.

Saturday passed again and I thought of my climbing pals and peña blanca and I am worrying that I am getting weak! So, when Sunday came which is our "day off" (not really) I went to the climbing wall here at barrow! Only 3 dollars for the whole day (cheaper that when el paso had a wall) and Amorita, Rob (a science teacher, researcher and track coach) and I climbed for a couple of hours! I AM SO WEAK NOW! I must go every weekend for a couple of hour (that's about all we will get). The climbs were all really easy (v0-) but hey its something.

Amorita climbing stronger than any of us... not surprising.

Me on the "hardest" climb. We all made it up.. to the skull.

Time to eat and then back to the field...