It's snowing again....

We finished setting up our lab simulated bovine urine (SBU) experiment by adding the SBU and inhibitor to the samples. They will incubate for 24 h and then we will quantify the amount of carbon dioxide produced. This will provide a comparison to the field SBU experiment we started today in the driving snow, once again. One of our soil incubation tubes was pulled out of the ground and crushed with obvious human footprints around it. Dissapointing and puzzling since this area of the park doesn't see many visitors and the cores are not visible from the road.

After getting the experiment started we headed into Mammoth to see if the Canyon wolf pack was around. No luck, but on our way back out we saw 2 doe Bighorn Sheep crossing the road. The picture below is of one of them.

Tomorrow we plan to get up early and go looking for wildlife, we still need to see grizzly and black bears. Then we will finish sampling our lab SBU experiment and then count fungal plates. The bacterial plate counts were actually too successfull. Most of the plates had too many colonies to count. We will repeat this experiment when we return to W&L. But our control plates are still clear as day, not a single colony, so it is possible to perform sterile microbiology at 6,300 feet in a lodge.