Dom

Hey everyone,

Lily just told me about this blog, so I thought I'd drop everyone a line and let you all know what I've been up to.

So as you all probably know, I've been at UMaine for the past year for grad school. Living in central Maine and doing more earth science hasn't been particularly exciting, but it hasn't been bad either. Learning about glaciers and climate is interesting and I still make a point of leaving every weekend for trips into the hills.

Easily the best part about being at Maine is that they think sending students around to lots of places is important. So last year I went to meetings in Woods Hole, MA, San Francisco, and Winter Park, CO. Since my thesis deals with how the energy balance at the snow surface affects the snowpack and melt rate of glaciers, I had to go to Alaska last month to take a bunch of measurements. I spent a whole month on the Kahiltna glacier which is the easy standard route for climbing Denali. So it turned out that I got to climb the bottom 2/3 of Denali several times and even though I missed the good part of the climb, I got to do a little rock climbing and mountaineering on some smaller stuff around base camp.

Since I've been back from that I spent a week dealing with gear and organizing my data followed by a week with my family which mostly consisted of eating tons of free food. The latest is that I just spent a week in Boulder visiting Clara, Lily and Palmer and doing some laid back hiking and climbing.

For the near future, I'll be in Maine from now until mid November aside from a couple weeks in late August when I go to the Beartooths in Montana for school. So if anyone is going up that way, let me know. I'm decently close to Acadia and Katahdin. Then I'll be in the middle of Antarctica through all of our winter (their summer) before coming back and hopefully finishing my degree by May.

It's great to hear about how all of you are doing. I hope lots of good things happen to all of you in the near future.

Dom