Dear Friends of the Station,
I want to start by extending a belated but heartfelt thank you to all the folks who braved the rain to make it to our final seminar of the season on August 3. We moved the food to the screened porch and folks crowded around the table in the conference room and balanced plates on their laps in the seminar room to eat. I so appreciate everyone for being game enough to work with the weather. It gave a cozy atmosphere for Dr. Houseal’s wonderful talk.
Speaking of our 2023 Harlow Summer Seminar Series, I’m excited to let you know that the recordings for most of our events this summer have been posted to our website. You can find them on the Events page, with a link to the recording under each seminar listing. I do need to say that the quality of the recordings isn’t up to the standard we hope to achieve in the future but we wanted to prioritize making them accessible as soon as possible. We hope that you’ll still be able to get a good sense of the wonderful events in this year’s series. We are working hard on improving our technology for next year, including better audio and video via Zoom, both for folks watching the events live and for the recordings. In the meantime, please look through the list and see if there are any events you might’ve missed that you’d like to watch or perhaps an event you’d like to share with a friend.
The end of the seminar series and the start of the school year marks a bit of an inflection point in our season. The station is still open and welcoming researchers but many of our long-term summer residents have headed off to their next event and we’re already missing them. As anyone who has lived or worked at a field station knows, there’s a tremendous sense of community that can emerge, which is rewarding and comforting especially when you’re far away from home. There are weird jokes (often something someone exhausted said after a too long day), amazing recipes (often assembled from whatever was left in the back of the fridge before getting to go grocery shopping), and many other bright moments that bring field station folks together. Several of my bright moments from August included chocolate chip raspberry cookies made by one of our NPS interns, seeing a valley garter snake (rare in Grand Teton National Park!) with two of our researchers and some of the contractors restoring Berol Lodge, and hearing the rain drumming on the roof during one of our latest storms. In the next few weeks, we’re looking forward to welcoming back some researchers who were with us earlier this season as well as some new faces.
I hope you’re all well!
Best,
Hilary
