A First Time For Everything...Even Milking A Squirrel.

One of the really great aspects of traveling is that (if you’re doing it right) you try totally new things you never thought you’d do before. You could just scroll back through the last three posts on this blog and learn plenty about the out-of-the-blue experiences I’ve had at Squirrel Camp – climbing trees, milking squirrels, participating in a bike relay…every week seems to bring something completely unprecedented, and this week was no different. I found myself pocketing many more new first times: playing rugby (and actually enjoying it), participating in a parade and – exciting for squirrelers, maybe not so much for the normal populous – climbing my first “sneaker” nest. We call them sneakers because typically they take a few days with several attempts from different teams to find. This is owing to the fact that they are nestled so far at the top of such a tall tree that they are basically invisible from the ground. It takes that one person who is frustrated to the point of such impeccable focus to notice that one tiny blade of grass at the pinnacle of that huge tree to finally locate the thing.

My frustrated and overly-focused teammate and I were just about to dedicate our angry energy to acquire AK-47s and destroy the entire area that the telemetry equipment was CONSTANTLY locating this squirrel to (aside: hopefully killing the squirrel as well and therefore ending our problems – this is a common joke around camp when a squirrel is being frustrating or it’s difficult to find her nest. One can always find optimism in hopefully saying “maybe she’ll just die” or “I hope those babies are dead.” When the babies die, it’s called a lost litter or just “lost lit” because we need to shorten things like straight up Gs. This leads to a lot of joyful fist-pumping and high-fiving about dead babies. Basically I’m glad we work in the middle of nowhere.), when suddenly she said “OH – there’s a nest up there.” At times like these, my immediate thought is “are you fucking kidding me” because it’s so ridiculous. What kind of selection confers an advantage to an animal that nests so high up there must be less oxygen up there?

So then that leads to situations like this photo. Notice that my face was planted nicely into the branches so that I could forget about, well, everything that was happening to me at that moment. I could have been a cool kid and posed, but that ignores the fact that I was too scared to move a muscle. In any case, it was a big accomplishment for me and now hopefully I can do more climbs like that. It’s always disappointing to telem a squirrel to a tree and realize that you aren’t strong enough to climb it, so someone else has to come and do it later.

A few days before that, Squirrel Camp made a float for the Haines Junction Canada Day parade. Of course, when Squirrel Camp makes a float, this means that we appended a lot of cardboard to an F-250 and then went to town with Sharpies. Resources are limiting. At the moment I don’t have a good picture of the entire float, but I do have a photo of Naomi posing with the huge squirrel ears, complete with ear tags, that we made for the truck.

After the parade there was a barbecue, at which I was successfully peer pressured by Alec to play football with a gaggle of twelve-year old boys, one of whom employed the principal strategy of falling limp to the ground at random. Oddly successful, this boy was dubbed with the nickname “Paralyzed.”

Every day is a lot of fun here, whether you plan for it or not. I will be sad to leave but happy to see everyone at home again! Last week also marked the beginning of the summer crew members starting to take vacations, making the end of this whole summer feel ever closer. At the end of July I will be taking off to see my friends and family for a vacation in B.C., which I absolutely cannot wait for. ‘Til next time!

-Sarah, AKA ALAAASKAAAA!

(when you buy a mug that says Alaska on it and you repeatedly lose that mug around camp, you start to heroically yell Alaska in your desperate attempts to find it. Or maybe I just do that.)