Raisin Toes

I have been running around a lot these past few days... pictures sometime. Really! I got dragged off to a sketchy-ass karaoke bar in Polson Thursday night. It was underneath a chinese restaurant and full of old bearded men wearing ACDC tshirts and smoking. Enter twenty biology students who thought drunken karaoke would be funny. It eventually relaxed and we started playing pool and Jenny (my awesome roommate) and I drank dollar beers and danced to shitty music. We managed pretty well to elbow away the skeevy boys who thought they would try to rub their crotches on us as an excuse for a social interaction. Peter and Eric were not so lucky and got felt up by drunken tooth-missing women. Welcome to Montana, I thought.

After that mild trauma, we went out to a great one on Friday night. It is across the street from an award-winning microbrewery, so we went to the brewery first. Their beer is amazing, and the owner Terry gave us a tour of the brewing room and told us his whole story of starting it before closing. Then across the street to the Raven, which is a colorful little place right on the lake. No smoke in there, and they had a live bluegrass band (they played that Cake song you gave me about the bucket seats with banjo!) and lots of friendly people. I am never going back to Polson!

We had the weekend off, so Jenny and I, and some of the other kids doing research here went up backpacking in Glacier. It had been very cloudy and hard to see out there, and it sprinkled on us yesterday.. but the real damage was to wet all the waist-high plants in the trail so they could wipe on our pants and to fill all the streams. For most of the eight miles, the trail was the stream, so all our toes turned to swollen achey raisins. It was worth it though. We stumbled our tired way into camp at Lincoln lake, and there across the lake is a 1500 foot high waterfall, full to the brim with all the rain and snowmelt, tumbling down blocky sedimentary layers to the east. The next morning it cleared up and we could see a big snow-covered peak behind the falls too. Fucking awesome.

So, for the week I am running off to Canada to take samples on the River. Should be back fridayish. For now, I'm gonna take a much-needed shower and go lay this achey-ass body down.