Badlands
March 13, 10:30am
Took an easy afternoon yesterday, trying to nap, knowing I'd be out all last night with the biologists, spotlighting the black-footed ferrets. (The most endangered mammal in North America, they are trying to reintroduce them here. They are nocturnal creatures, so in order to find them and see how they're doing, you need to go out at night.) I went out to shoot the sunset, which wasn't great, then met Doug, Craig, and Valerie, the 'ferret people.' We drove out across the full moon landscape to the Pinnacles Ranger Station, where we met four Forest Service folks who were also on the project. They loaded up four trucks, and we left about 9pm, heading for the grasslands where the ferrets had been released. Saw a huge green meteorite along the way. I was with Craig and Valerie, who pointed spotlights out the open windows to catch the green eyes of the ferrets. We found one quickly, and Craig put a transponder over the prairie dog hole (ferrets eat prairie dogs, then take over their burrows). A microchip under the skin of the ferret set off the transponder, and signaled who he was. I tried to take photos, but it was dark, even with the spotlights. And the ferret kept jumping at the sound of my camera shutter. It was a beautiful night, with a full moon, but cold (14 degrees), and long, just driving around the same area for hour after hour. I started to nod off around 3am. At 5am, we got stuck and had to be pulled out by the others. We returned to the Ranger Station as the sky was brightening in the east, Venus still highly visible. After unloading, we headed back to Cedar Pass. Craig was nice enough to stop at Pinnacles Overlook so I could get some moon-set shots, the moon sitting in the pink/blue light inversion, and the pink settling in on the snow-covered pinnacles below. Beautiful. The sun broke out as we continued back, lighting up the giant wall, ablaze in yellow. Went straight to bed when we got back...

March 13, 7:20pm
Headed out in the afternoon, just around the bend past the Interior cutoff. I parked, and walked in along the base of the peaks and pinnacles. Nice erosional features - banding, mushrooms, channel sandstone, and tons of nodules, round smooth balls of rock somehow laid down with the rest of the sediment. Walking was ugly - mud city from the melting snow. The formerly dry creek beds and gullies are now running 'amuck.' Another beautiful afternoon - crystal blue sky, highs in the 30's, sun slowly sinking, changing the colors of the rock to darker, more saturated shades of red and creme. I headed up Norbeck Pass, hoping the clouds would light up after sunset, but the sun couldn't get underneath them. Afterwards, I headed back over Cedar Pass to see what the full moon (plus one day) was doing. From the Window it came up bright yellow - gorgeous over the distant canyons!