It's the end of day two, which means that I have now been in Yosemite for over 24 hours, and I am already loving it. Yesterday wasn't a real day, mostly spent arriving and getting situated, but today was packed full. In the morning we went on a short walk with a ranger through a village that has been assembled from the various log cabins from all over the park. According to the ranger, to make it easier to fix up and protect the cabins, they were moved from their various locations to a little corner of Wawona, the town where I'm staying. While we were visiting the various cabins, the ranger told us all about the various settlers that came to Yosemite and how it went from discovery to National Park.
Speaking of Wawona though, I should probably talk a little bit about where we are living and how the program works. So when I applied, I pictured some grand program with deep roots and a well established way of doing things, but I forgot that UC Merced is only six years old. The Yosemite REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) Program is now in its third year, is run by a UC Merced professor, and accepts only eight students each year. Each selected student has a specific research project and a faculty mentor. My project is through the lab of Dr. Lara Kuepper (who I will meet on Friday), and is about conifer encroachment in subalpine meadows. Essentially, there is a high altitude grassland ecosystem that is starting to have woody trees growing, and I will be trying to figure out why. This is fairly new project, so I don't expect any results this year, but I will be collecting data throughout the summer in the hopes of eventually finding an explanation for the causes of this tree growth.
As for housing, I am staying with the other four guys and a few volunteer park rangers in a very nice house being leased to UC Merced in the town of Wawona, located within the park boundaries. Wawona is unique in that it has some private and some federally owned property located within the park boundary. At some point in the past, Yosemite was briefly opened to private development, but then about thirty years ago, the Park Service decided the experiment was a bad idea and purchased many of the houses back. Today Wawona is about half and half, and of the public half, a few of those houses are leased to institutions like UC Merced.
The Sierra Nevada Research Institute, where we gather for meetings and also where several friendly rangers are stationed.
Anyway, back to today, after learning about all the different settlers who discovered Yosemite Valley and a short lunch break, we went into a geology talk. One of the project professors gave a presentation that covered everything from the formation of the earth to the specific geological processes that formed the Sierra Nevada mountains and Yosemite National Park. For example, we learned that most of California was formed by material that was scraped off of the Pacific Plate piling up along the coast, and St. Louis Missouri is due for another massive earthquake.
Finally, because it was such a beautiful day, after the talk was done, myself and four other REU students decided to go for a walk/hike around a nearby meadow, across the road from the Wawona Hotel. It was beautiful but kind of disappointing. We were told to look out for both bears and rattlesnakes, but we saw neither. But regardless, I couldn't help marvel at the enormous Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fir trees that dotted the edges of the meadow.
For lack of a better name, I'm calling this Wawona Meadow, and we definitely didn't see any bears or any rattlesnakes. Very disappointing!
Whether or not this is going to be a typical day, I don't know yet, but I do know that I am very excited for tomorrow. Originally we were planning on going to Yosemite Valley today, but plans changed, and instead we are going tomorrow. We are all waking up early and I think we will be hiking both in the Valley and up at Tioga Pass. There will most certainly be more pictures to come.
Thanks for reading, and until next time, goodnight.
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