Author: Matt

  • Hard drives and data storage

    I’ve come into a real conundrum lately. I’m running out of space on my hard drive. Earlier in the year when I thought my hard drive was dying, I bought an external drive which I use to move old files for storage and back up my current system. The problem is that using the external hard drive as a working drive is not an ideal solution when my primary (read: only) computer at the moment is a portable notebook. Thus, I don’t want to be using the external hard drive to store all of my music and photography, the two…

  • Garden Update

    For the past month, we’ve been able to enjoy some of the produce coming out of the garden. The lettuce has been producing beautiful and tasty leaves. There’s nothing like a freshly-picked salad. One of the lettuces has flowered and will soon go to seed. I think we will let it mature in an attempt to collect seeds to plant for next year. However, the rest of the heads continue to produce leaves to pick. Back when the chickens ate my lettuce to the ground, I planted more seeds in case the plants didn’t come back. Well, they did come…

  • Float Trip 2012

    View Float Trip 2012 in a larger map Every year, the graduate students from the University of Idaho’s biology department embarks on a float trip on the Snake River. It’s an annual tradion that carrys on well before my time. Actually, I’m not sure when the tradition began. In 2010, the float trip was held shortly after I arrived in Idaho. By that time, the daytime temperatures had cooled and I was not feeling up to floating in the river. In retrospect, I wish I had gone my first year. I made up for it by going last year. Actually,…

  • East Peak

    There are many peaks in the Wallowas that top 9000 feet, so East Peak might go unnoticed if it weren’t so easily accessible. It turns out that I’m not the only one who thought to use the Wallowa Lake Tramway to cover the first 3700 feet of elevation, reducing the climb to the peak to 1300 feet. This hike is featured in the book, and while I was’t expecting a crowd, we did pass three other hikers along the way, two of which are local to the area and hike to the peak regularly. The Wallowa Lake Tramway brings you…

  • Lookout Mountain

    Everytime I’m up on Grandmother Mountain, I look to the east and see the bald dome of Lookout Mountain rising over the Marble Creek drainage and I long to stand on top and look down from the other side. Finally, with my parents and sister visiting, I decided this would be the perfect opportunity to try out this trail. There are several mountains in northern Idaho named Lookout. This is not the ski area on the Idaho-Montana border off of I-90. This is not the peak in the Selkirks north of Sandpoint of the same name. This is in the…

  • Publications

    I don’t usually like to gloat about my accomplishments, but sometimes a little self promotion doesn’t hurt. I’ll start with the announcement of my first publication, which officially rolled off the presses last month. Last year, our lab was contacted to write a book chapter in a methods and protocol book on assessing anxiety behaviors in Zebrafish. So Barrie, Maia, Mary, and I set out to publish our behaviortyping protocol for assessing observer preference, depth preference, and feeding latency for high-throughput experiments. Robison, BD, MJ Benner, ML Singer, ME Oswald. A High Throughput and Inexpensive Assay for Anxiety Related Behaviors…

  • Wallowas

    The final chapter in the visit of the in-laws consits of a visit to one of my favorite mountain ranges. There are many spectacular mountain ranges in the country, but I happen to have a fondness for the Wallowas in northeastern Oregon. Perhaps its because they’re the closest mountains of their kind, or because they truely are a spectacular gem. I’ve always wanted to bring people to the Wallowas, but there aren’t really a whole lot of day hiking opportunities. All of the lakes and the peaks are just far enough away that the trips would be better done as…

  • Return to Freezeout

    Any time someone visits us, their stay would not be complete without a trip to Elk River and Freezeout Saddle. We were limited in our acitivites because one of our guests were not fit for any major hiking, but luckily, we have options for that. So Sunday, we took an easy morning and headed out mid-afternoon for some local adventure. In Elk River, we stopped at the general store for huckleberry ice cream and then headed out to see the giant cedar, which always amazes anyone who has never seen big trees.* The allure of Freezeout Saddle is that it’s…

  • Backpacking: Seven Devils’ Lower Cannon Lake

    My father-in-law and his wife have been visiting us since last Wednesday. Before coming out, he had asked if we could go on a little male bonding trip into the backcountry for a night. So, I set about looking for a short and easy hike to a spectacular place. I figured he had probably never spent the night under the rocky peaks next to a glacial tarn, and the high lakes are also one of my favorite places to spend a night, but most of the lakes around here are either fairly strenuous hikes, long hikes, or take nearly all…

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    Aurora, part II

    Well, I made my last post a bit too soon. After spending the evening on Freezeout Ridge (story and photos to come soon), Erin reminded us that the aurora might still be occuring and that we could possibly see it tonight. Clarkia isn’t the best place to test this hypothesis because its surrounded by tall mountains in all directions, so as we passed through Bovill, I noticed a glow on the northern horizon. At this point, it was only 10:00, still early enough that the glow could be residual light from the sun. I pulled the car over and set…