View this on my website

Previous Post: 2026-08-05 to 2026-08-16 - Bikepacking Out West! Soundscape Website (check it out)! Next Post: WIP

Not nature to start, but bread!

I've been putting in lots of time baking and am proud to say I've used over 30lbs of flour so far this summer! The biggest portion is on bread, but I've done plenty of cookies as well. I recently went on a sourdough baking spree and did a loaf per day for a week. That endeavor involved a lot of effort spent managing starter and dough each day, but it was amazing to have a hefty supply of fresh bread. I think I got sufficient calories in that week :)

Here are some pics of loaves over the past few weeks.

I actually forgot to add my salt at the start for this one and tried to get some sort of salt slurry concoction mixed in at the proofing stage which was dubiously effective. You can't tell that from looking at it though!

If you're not clean enough with your shaping, some of the loaves will poof out in weird ways - otherwise this one turned out well though!

Pretty happy with the crust and the scoring on this batard, I think I prefer a bread flour loaf on average vs. an AP flour loaf though. But hey, fresh bread is fresh bread, and I'm pretty content with a very wide range of bread-ular objects.

Anyways, 10/10 recommend sourdough, there's something satisfying about just creating bread from flour, water, and salt and nothing else, plus you get fresh bread which is really what life is all about. It doesn't need to be perfect or involve crazy techniques, just needs to be warm and slatherable with jam or butter and I promise that you'll enjoy it.

A few birds!

Had a goshawk spook the heck out of me when it screeched at me on the roadside trail. Fortunately I didn't get swooped at but I was ready to duck n dodge.

Video included here

I then ran into a grouse a few minutes later. He was trying to strut his stuff for some females and was acting all tough and playing it cool when I ran by.

Final overnight fieldwork!

I got out with the backcountry rangers and my supervisor for a trip removing our furthest out acoustic monitoring deployment. Four people definitely made splitting the weight of science up a more pleasant experience. Plus, we had a strategized a bit on our previous patrol and had a plan that involved less strenuous hiking time with fully loaded packs. We instead would do a bigger day out from a base camp with lighter packs to retrieve the equipment. However, the plan did involve sleeping in a barren section of valley at the base of a glacier... (hint hint, that's foreshadowing about challenges to come).

Now, I'm not the most inspired backcountry chef (I tend to be really lazy actually), but I figured it might be fun to share roughly what I packed for this trip, so here's the layout! This is preparing for 3 nights and all got shoved into a bear bin (had to drop the mashed potatoes though after they didn't quite squeeze in cleanly). I have a very wide variety of bars, of which pop tarts bring me the most joy. I've also got some homemade trail mix, an oats n brown sugar cinnamon mix, and some backpacking meals (I like this brand as they actually have a reasonably high amount of calories, although they are quite pricy).

We saw a bear on the bus ride out, it was munching soapberries and wandering down a ridge by the road. It also agitated a magpie.

A dusting of snow at high elevations greeted us on the way out! Surely this bodes well for a warm and dry trip, right?

A waterfall! I can personally confirm that this water was in fact not warm after filling up several liters of water from it. Shoutout my new waterproof, chemical proof PVC-coated gloves from the hardware store (only $13!) for keeping my hands dry though!

Pack covers and rain jackets on, misty glacier in sight! (with fresh snow up there as well)

Luckily, our weather window that the forecast had hinted might be viable materialized, and the next morning we woke up to clear skies and sunshine, complete with a full view of the glacier and peaks above! This was critical as we were planning a big day with lots of miles and vert to get up the glacier, over the pass, down to the sound station, and back to camp.

Sunshine catching a little bit more than just dust on the peaks around us.

Looking back down the valley from on the glacier's moiraine (a moiraine is the term for the feature of rocks and debris left behind by a glacier. It's more visible as the rock band in the middle of the glacier from the previous evening's photo before it was covered in a fresh layer of snow)

Didn't see these peaks so clearly the last time I was up here!

Look at our lil' tracks on the big glacier!

Pretty scenic spot for some scientific equipment on a sunny day!

The mission was a resounding success, lovely hiking, gorgeous views, some leg-burning climbs, and the snow actually made the ascent easier in a few spots.

However, our weather window would come to an end. As we made our way back to camp, the winds started to pick up, and we surmised that the forecast may have ALSO been correct about 60mph gusts of wind rolling in that night.

Views from inside one of our tents as the wind tried to push it over. Note that the end of the tent is supposed to be a symmetrical arch. Additionally, note that this is a heavy-duty 4-season tent - the kind that they use for mountaineering expeditions in extreme environments. For a more immersive experience, check out these clips. The first is from the beginnings of the wind storm as we were going to bed (note that I did not say "as we were going to sleep"). The second is too dark to see anything, but was taken at sometime around 4am after we had a tent guyline snap and had to have one person go out and fix it while the other person held the tent up from the outside.

If you were taking all those notes, you probably deduced that it was not the most restful night. If you were taking notes from previous blog posts, you might remember a similar experience involving a windy night and not enough sleep. Alas, once you're in it, there's nothing to be done but hunker down and amble along the next day. Fortunately, both of these windy nights were on the last day of the patrols and not too far from the end point. We were certainly glad to have brought the heavier dutier tents on the most recent patrol as the lighter-weight ones probably wouldn't have made it.

Overall, it was another sweet adventure, a scientific success (we ran for the full deployment and got all our data!), and awesome to get up into the alpine again. I suppose I can sacrifice some sleep for that!