Thorton Gap Backpacking

I’ve been busy photocopying, sending international faxes, learning Spearman’s Rank coefficients, and how to do paired T-tests in Systat, little chores from Melissa in between other bits of projects I am assigned. Also working with a researcher, Micaela, who has wild dog data from South Africa. I helped her plot the positions of predators from GPS points taken in the field. Eventually she wants to break the sightings down by month to visualize the locations of wild dogs, lions, hyenas, and cheetahs. Unfortunately, we ran into a problem where the plotted points didn’t line up with the outline of the park boundary-something to do with the way the park data is projected/displayed. She is trying to learn more about the source map data. I hope to work more with her because the project involves exactly the types of questions I am interested in learning to answer using GIS. The main reason I am now learning GIS skills is because I was turned off by the lack of conservation application of the project I was working on in Thailand. Yet, it seems she has been able to link both behavioral studies and conservation work.

Last weekend David, Mandy, Heather, and I drove into Thorton Gap in Shenandoah National Park on Friday. Then, we walked home – literally to the doorstep of Leach house (a little less than 30 miles total over the course of Fri., Sat., and Sun.). The entire trip was along the Appalachian Trail where the park service has basic wooden huts for backpackers. Nice because we didn’t have to carry a tent, but this also meant that the second night we had a communal hut. There were at least fifteen people at the same site. Got too crowded for my taste and really impressed upon me that I wouldn’t enjoy hiking the entire AT. The route wasn’t exactly steep, steep, but the hills we did walk were plenty challenging for me-I was puffing and panting my way up a few. Upon return we celebrated by going wine tasting (after much needed showers).