Canyon, Yellowstone Lake and more weather

We started out the morning by adding solutions to our SBU and urease inhibitor experiment. Went well and the data was collected this evening and will be sampled again tomorrow AM. The results we are finding are consistently low soil urease activity in Alyssum desertorum soils and soil respiration in response to SBU is 2 -fold greater in the remnant site by the Yellowstone river in the Gardiner Basin. Further analysis of this interesting result will be performed back in Lexington. On our way out to Canyon this morning (it was too cloudy for respiration) we spotted a group of photographers just before Roaring Mountain and there was a young grizzly tearing apart a rotten log looking for grubs, without a place to stop we kept on going.

We stopped at Mud Volcano/Churning caldron (yes correct spelling). Pretty cool geology even though it smells like rotten eggs. The video below is of the Churning caldron.

Then we headed on down to Yellowstone Lake. The road just opened May 1 and none of the services are open yet, it was pretty quiet. We got a group picture with the frozen lake in the background.

Then we stopped at the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.

On the way back through, and now with blue skys, we got to see the same Grizzly grazing on some fresh green grass from 100 yards. Plenty of pictures were taken.

On the way back to Gardiner we got stuck in yet another Bison jam. I took some close ups this time.

When we got back to Gardiner clouds were still to thick to do soil respiration using the solar panel so we hit main street Gardiner and did some souvenir shopping. After an hour it looked clear so we set up to do species specific soil respiration. I took half of the group back to the lodge to sieve soils for future analysis and on my return back to Gardiner (25 min later) the weather had turned quickly and put a stop to respiration after one replicate.

Within 10 minutes of leaving the field site we got to see a rainbow over Gardiner and the sun quickly came back out.

Tomorow we hope to get soil respiration done and we will take our final soil cores from the SBU experiment and remove our fungal soil tubes that we installed 10 days ago. Then it will be time to pack up samples and the lab and get them back to Lexington. Time flies.....