I will begin my entry by first apologizing to the probably hundreds of barnacles, snails, and other invertebrates that I likely killed by stepping on last week. Invertebrate life in the tide pools is so abundant that there is hardly any area as large as my foot that is free of life.
Our class (er, "program") headed off to Rialto Beach last Sunday and set up our camp. We camped there for a few nights, waking up at 5am to trek a mile or so down the gravelly beach to the tide pools. You know how walking on dry sand sucks really hard, and it feels like you're on a stair stepper? Well, walking on gravelly beaches for some reason sucks 10 times as much. But the tide pools were pretty awesome, full of many things for me to poke, mostly delightfully squishy things. I am a master of poke science. I could get a Ph.D. in it.
On Wednesday afternoon we packed up and drove to Clallam bay, where we set up camp again. The weather was relatively gorgeous and we sat in the sun and played Invertebrate Charades. My stunningly spot-on imitation of the Aggregating Nipple Sponge turned awkward relatively quickly as it turns out most of my classmates didn't actually know what it was.
Thursday morning we did some tide pool-ing, but mostly focused our energies on a fossil-rich area. We threw rocks around and bashed them together, caveman-esque, to get at the fossils inside. Our teacher tried to get us to migrate to the tide pool area, but we were too excited about breaking shit.
In the afternoon we tried to find a good place to snorkel, a place with the least amount of turbidity so that we could actually see things in the water. The best place we found still sucked pretty bad, and most of us just saw a few tiny (~1-2 cm) hydrozoans. I also saw a massive school of silver fish chilling out beneath me, which was pretty awesome.
Friday, we finally headed home, stopping once at an oyster beach to check out the invertebrates there. Despite napping on the way home, I ended up falling asleep at 8pm and woke up at 10am the next morning. Disoriented and for some reason sure it was Sunday, I called my mom and left a "Happy Mother's Day" message and made some god damn PANCAKES<3.
I am excited that I no longer smell like campfire smoke, tide pools, and musty body odor. Also, eating real food is pretty badass. I have decided that I only like camping when it's warm and dry, which are pretty much the opposite conditions of last week. Hopefully there will be plenty of opportunities this summer. Only 4 more weeks of class...
