She's got a ticket to ride.

Hi from the KPI! The soup du jour is chicken rice and we've been on the phone since 11:30 am this morning. A usual Friday in The Junction.

This week I could have showed you what two chickadees in one cage looks like (two little black blobs together), but I forgot my camera back at camp that afternoon. I'm been all over the place this week, breaking trail on Chitty and Sulphur grids. Sulphur is named after a lake on the highway here. Chitty is named after a guy. My traps over there include Sassy Molassy and The Terminator. We have also found Paul, John, and Hey Jude over on Joe, so I'm sure Ringo is around somewhere too.

This is what it looks like when you lose your data book on the trail you just broke and had to run back several hundred metres to find it. It's corner is the tiny black speck of duct tape sticking out above my snowshoe.


This is what it looks like when you dig it out. The snow really melts the corners, so it's well protected with tape. My code initials are CDS. I'm glad I got to use my real ones. A lot of people have worked on this project over the years and we're all identified by our three letter code.



The inside of my book. Each night I make a list of the middens I need to trap at and a little map so that I can navigate without getting totally lost and wandering around. Because that is a huge waste of time, trust me. Each square on the grid represents a 30m x 30m square on the ground. They are all marked with miles of flagging tape and staked at each corner. It's pretty easy to see it all because all we have here is white snow and white spruce. And I still get lost some days and end up at L line when I should be at Q.


This is me all geared up and really sweaty from breaking trail across Chitty. I had to stop for a break and play with my camera a bit.


This week we did the spring crew's first peanut butter add. We had to deliver 320 kilos of peanut butter in 1 kilo increments to the squirrels on our food add grids. The peanut butter had been frozen out in the hut we can The Jail. We set up this peanut butter thawing contraption over the wood stove, got the hut up to 38 degrees Celsius and melted the peanut butter. I wore flip flops and a t-shirt. It was actually really nice. We drank a lot of very cold, icy beers. This process of pouring peanut butter took about 5 hours. And we made a huge mess. Which we cleaned in the dark.



Kristen and Lindsey pour.


I lid. And stack. See how I am melting along with the peanut butter?


Frances has camp day and makes us a delicious lasagna dinner for in between pouring peanut butter and then pouring more peanut butter.


This week we also had our first two nests. This was a lot of fun. Here is a nest pup. His eyes are still closed and he's squeaking because he's angry that he's out in the winter. He also didn't like getting a little notch cut out of his tiny ear, but we needed a DNA sample.


Nest pups are tiny and delicate. We weigh them, notch their ears, then put them back. When they are out of the nest they stay in a little fleece bag in the front of our jackets. Devan took these babies back to the nest and couldn't find one of the babies. I had them down my jacket and we thought one had crawled out of the bag (they naturally try to crawl up, so they can escape in trees...all squirrels naturally climb up). But the baby wasn't in my jacket and he had just miscounted when he put the babies back because mom came back to her midden and found all four.


In other news, Dylan and I have successfully grown a sprout. We picked up seeds in Whitehorse when we first came here. I have grown a lot of sprouts in Guelph, but I think the consistent heat source helps. These sprouts have basically been soaked, abandoned for two weeks, then a renewed effort was put into action and they have been cared for each day and left on the top of the propane stove that prevents the computers from freezing in the data hut. And we have a sprout.


One little sprout. It's that little white thing in the middle. Yum. Our sandwiches will be greatly improved once the rest of them join this one in sprouting.


And I'll leave you on this note...blue skies over Agnes Grid and the St. Elias Mountain Range.


Thanks for all the great mail this week! It's good to hear from all of you!

Talk to you soon, Cass

Eight days a week.

What a busy week! Time flew by and I'm still having a great time. The soup this afternoon at the KPI was a delicious red seafood chowder. We're all typing away on our laptops and the locals are having happy hour at the bar. They just sit on both sides of the bar here, it's really just a gathering place for friends.

I hear that the weather down south has been absolutely beautiful. It's been all kinds of cold up here. Not bad for working and snowshoeing in, but cold enough to stick my hands to metal traps and frost up the front of my jacket from my breath. I really love the way the snow squeaks so loudly under my snowshoes though.

This week we've had a visit from the professor who started this camp back in the 1980's. He still runs the place and works on all the projects, but mainly spends his time in Edmonton at the University of Alberta.

Just a few pictures this week. I'll try to take more next week and be more organized! There's just been a lot to learn, so days have been extra long trying to make sure all of my tasks have been completed. Yesterday was my camp day, so I had to make dinner for everyone. We had falafels from How to Cook Everything in wraps with homemade tzatiki sauce, lettuce, and tomatoes. I also made the mixed vegetable salad that I usually make in the summer, without cherry tomatoes though, and upside-down peach cake with brown sugar sauce. It turned out very well.

This is what it looks like when you accidentally trap two chickadees at one midden. This is annoying because they take away potential squirrel traps. I actually probably have one of the lowest chickadee trap rates out of everyone, for some reason. But not in this case. And now that I've said that, I'll probably only catch birds tomorrow. Squirrels will eat chickadees though, and once Dylan came back to one of his traps and a squirrel must have followed a chickadee in and tripped the trap. The squirrel managed to catch the poor little guy and ate him. I'm really glad I haven't had any weird trap stuff happen to me yet because I would probably freak out if I came across that.


Another shot of the beautiful St. Elias Range. The clouds do all sorts of crazy things over the mountains. I've been taking so many pretty shots of the landscape. You just can't get tired of this view. The stars here are also incredible. On a clear night you can see more stars than I have ever seen before. We have seen the northern lights one night. They were bright green. Really, we need to wait for the warmer weather to see them more clearly and in a larger spectrum of colours.


This is a lynx that came into our camp. He was hunting our camp squirrel, Pipes. He leapt about 4m into a tree to try to get Pipes after stalking him for an hour. Pipes dove directly out of the tree into one of his ground holes. We think he's okay, but we're not totally sure.


And finally, a squirrel free of squirrel jail. This little girl is named blue/red. I was trying to catch her all day long. Then, as soon as I closed up the traps she came over to check things out and was trying to lick the inside of the trap from the outside. I had cleaned all of the peanut butter out, but she could still smell it. And the entire time I was standing about 1m away. I probably could have reached out and picked her up, but I'm sure that would have ended badly, probably for me.


Well, that's all from me for now. It's happy hour at the KPI, so we're having a beer before we head out to camp. It was lovely to hear from everyone who sent notes! I hope all is well back home. Next week I'll try to have more about living off-the-grid. We have cool solar panels and an exciting! water collection system.

Love ya lots and miss you more, Cass

One of the best things to do in the Yukon is picking up the mail.

Today I'm at the KPI (Kluane Park Inn). The local watering hole with pretty good free wireless internet access. I just had a bowl of split pea soup and I'm charging up all my batteries. Myself and my coworkers are the only customers here right now. The bartender went to the University of Guelph and they seem to like us a lot.

My first real week of work and training has went very well. I'm having such a fun time. The weather has been great. We do have a whole lot of snow and we work outdoors long days. I've actually never dealt with so much snow in one place at one time. All of my gear has been great. I've been warm and dry and comfortable every day. Not showering all the time has been okay. My hair had already started to dread, but I conditioned it and combed it today, so all is well.

Our days at squirrel camp are pretty straight forward. We're up at 7:15, the sun is starting to rise, but it's too dark to go out trapping. We all eat breakfast in the cookhouse and get our gear ready. Everyone wears a vest with huge pockets to hold all of the things we need for collecting information in the forest. Our camp is on one of our research grids. Each of the grids has a name. Camp grid is Kloo, I work on Joe (named after the town drunk, Thomas Joe) and Lloyd (named for someone else). There are also Sulphur, Agnes, and Blue Trailer. Each is about 1 km wide and 1 km deep. All run along the edge of the Alaska Highway. We have plowed pullouts to park our trucks on and we carpool to the grids in the morning. We arrive at the grids at 8:30 am each day. We strap on our snowshoes and head into the grid to set up our traps. In the morning we set about 10 traps (it takes awhile to break trail through the snow right now so we move a bit slowly). Each squirrel has a well-defined territory with a central stash of cones called a midden. The middens are all mapped out and there are traps at each of the middens. Once the traps are all set in a circuit we go back around to see if we've trapped any squirrels. It takes about 2 hours to get around and process any captures. We have to put the squirrel in a handling bag, weigh it, stretch it out and time how many seconds out of 30 it squirms (a handling test to determine some of the squirrel's personality traits), put colours in its ear tags so we can ID it with binoculars later in the season, retag its ears if they are not done properly, and if the squirrel is a female we have to determine if it is pregnant by feeling its little belly. Not bad, but squirrels can be pretty crazy once they get into the little handling bags. If you can get their eyes covered they settle right down.

This is me on the way out to work in the morning. I'm standing on the edge of the Alaska Highway looking out at the St. Elias Range.


Dylan and the girls getting ready for the day.


In the wilderness.


My snowshoes. Trusty MSR's with extended fins for extra deep snow. They're pretty easy to walk in, but also pretty easy to trip over.


One of my traps, Golden Eagle. They all have names. Some of mine are: Darth Vader, Kirchner, The March Hare, and George.


Learning how to squirrel-stretch.


Some of the animals I've trapped. My favourite squirrel. His name is red!/blue! The exclamation indicates that he is a male wearing pipe cleaners. Females wear wires. Juveniles wear disks. He lives on the corner of Joe grid.

This little girl has her tail over her eyes to hide and keep her calm. I've put blue and purple wires into her ear tags.


An ermine that I accidentally tapped. He was a wild little devil in there and was really angry with me. I'm very glad that I'm not working on an ermine project. But it's cool that I got to see one up close. The smell bad, like rotten grape kool-aid.


A cute little guy in squirrel jail.


At 2:30 we meet back at the truck and head back to camp. The afternoon is used for entering data and learning other skills we will need to use this summer, such as telemetry. Which is tracking the signals from little collars with an antenna and receiver. I did a bunch of that in Australia when I was tracking numbats, so I'm pretty good at that already. Each day one person has a camp day and they are responsible for the meals and everything. I like camp day a lot because I like to cook for a crowd. Dinner is at 6:00 pm and we all eat a ton. I've already lost weight from snowshoeing every day and I eat much more than I ever did at home. We're very healthy too because we're vegetarian with no junk food. It's great, actually.

The cookhouse from the driveway.


The kitchen inside the cookhouse. The dining area is on the right with the big windows out the front. I"m standing in the living area and clothes-drying area.


The datahut. You can see the entrance of the cookhouse in the background. The little window up top is directly beside my bed in the loft.


This is the little shack that I will eventually move into. Nothing glamorous, but its name is Nemo. Everything here has a name.


The view at the end of the driveway. The clouds are constantly changing and flowing over the mountains. Some days it's been so snowy that we can't even see the mountains.



After dinner we have free time. I knit, we listen to music, we play music, we chat, we drink beers (there is a great local brewery up here), and we write and read. Dylan, Frances, and I also have a push-up challenge going on where each night we do one more push-up. Tonight I have to do 7.

This is the winter wonderland we live in. There has been some time to play with my camera, so I've taken a lot of cool landscape shots.




Here are some pictures from the drive up.

This is a moose in the middle of the road. There are moose everywhere up here. Dylan ran into one in the woods. We see their tracks all the time on our grids.


Caribou. We also saw a lot of elk.


Wood Bison! Incredible, huge animals. The like to sleep on the highway. That's dangerous.


This is the little town of Haines Junction. It's called Haines Junction because it is basically the widening of the Alaska Highway where you can go one way to Haines, Alaska, or the other way to the rest of Alaska. A lot of large trucks come through here.


I've decided that I'm staying at Squirrel Camp until the end of June. I just think this is the best place ever and I'm having such a good time. I have a few days off, so I'll be checking out Whitehorse and on my way home I'm going to get a ride into Haines, Alaska, and take the Alaskan Ferries down to Prince Rupert. From there I'll travel south to visit friends in British Columbia before flying home for the summer and wedding events!

Today I received a postcard from the other side of Canada, lovely Halifax, NS. Getting mail up here is the one of the best things ever. Any fan mail can be directed to:

Cass St.
c/o Squirrel Camp
Box 5506
Haines Junction, Yukon
Y0B 1L0

It would be very nice to hear from any of you. Also, there aren't any treats up here at all, so if you happen to have a spare Cocoa Camino chocolate bar of the chili and spice variety, I'd be thrilled if you stuck that in the mail and sent it up north to me.

Love ya and miss you all, Cass

Haines Junction, Yukon.

Hi from the public library in Haines Junction!

Just a quick note to let you know that I'll be posting on Fridays. I only have a second today to say hi, but I'll have more next week.

All is well. Squirrel Camp is a lot of fun, the crew is great, the food is tasty. I sleep in the nice warm data hut, but I have a little hut too. We've done one day of trapping, had a party with some old squirrel campers last night, and are now on our day off.

Talk to you soon! Cass

The next morning.

I forgot to add that we spent most of the day yesterday driving through the Rockies. We could see mountains far away and close up for ever.

This morning it definitely feels more like the Yukon. SO cold! I have no idea what the temperature is, but it's well below freezing.

Watson Lake, Yukon.

What a day. We drove so much down one long stretch of highway. We started out a Mile 0 of the Alaskan Highway, ate lunch at Mile 300, and ended up about 1000 km down the road in Watson Lake. We're in the Yukon, but tomorrow the road goes back down into British Columbia before coming back up into the territory.

On the road we saw: two moose, a bunch of caribou playing in the road, two groups of elk, and about 100 wood bison. Apparently, there are only 250 wood bison around these parts. I don't completely trust my source, but if that's true then we saw most of them. The wood bison forage along the roadsides and actually sleep on the road, so we had to really keep our eye out for them. Luckily they are pretty easy to spot.

We also stopped at a huge natural hot spring swimming hole in Liard Lake. That was a good pit stop to make at dusk.

I took pictures of everything, but there's no way I can load them on this slow connection.

Dawson Creek, BC.

Today we drove 591 km from the University of Alberta to the Super 8 at Mile 0 of the Alaskan Highway in Dawson Creek. It's 10:00 pm here, but it feels like midnight to all of us and we're really tired.

This morning Dylan, Lindsey, and I had to take hour long driving tests. We all passed. In between the tests we loaded up the truck with a huge couch and all of our gear. We left town around 1:00 pm. Also traveling with us are the spring crew leader, Devan, and another field tech, Kristen. We stopped in Valleyview, Alberta for gas, Grande Prairie, Alberta for dinner at a grocery store, and then decided to call it a day here in Dawson Creek.

Tomorrow we will be back on the road at 8:00 am after a complimentary continental breakfast and reloading all of our gear into the truck.

Today I also received a note from the Urban Cozy Project at Winterlude. They have loaded all of the pictures up. You can see pictures of both mine and Bronwen's contributed tree cozies along with a lot of other interesting pieces on Flickr.

I have a bunch of other neat photos from my week in Ottawa, including pictures I took when Mom, Dad, and I visited my cozy at Jacques-Cartier Park. Hopefully I'll have a chance to post them in the next little while. When we went to find my cozy we went inside an historical building at the park and found the Spins and Needles crew. That was cool. They all liked my cozy a lot :).

That's all I've got for now. Goodnight.