July 23rd

July 23rd, 2014
After breakfast our crew packed up gear for an overnighter just outside of the North part of the Park. [literally. we pitched our tents right next to the fence] We took the six hour scenic route up to Temple of the Sun and Moon, stopping along the way for lunch and photo ops. It was crazy beautiful! You almost didn't know where to look! Since apparently I can't go camping outside of Oregon without a little rain, we got POURED ON. Like monsoon style, complete with thunder and lightning. Not to mention we somehow left our food for breakfast back at the station. However, rain in the dessert is weird and comes down like Noah's prepping the ark right now and we need to start gathering two of every animal, and then it just stops. When it stopped raining we ate our dinners we had packed and were happy to see the arrival of our chef/TA Randy and Jason, the dude in charge of the field station with tomorrow's breakfast packed safely in their trunk! Unfortunately, Jason's Subaru had other plans in mind and as soon as both guys got out and shut their doors, we heard a honk and the car was locked. With the keys sticking out of the ignition. Awesome. The boys spent the next half hour or so trying to break into the car. They ended up prying open the door an inch or so, bending the crap out of some s'more stick roasters and having Jason climb on the roof of his car to help maneuver their Macgyver contraption into unlocking the door. Success! By that point the sun had started peeking though the clouds and it was near sunset. So we grabbed our gear and drove back to the temples for some sunset shots. When the sun had set we were graced with a thunder/lightning storm on the horizon - with which I got some pretty awesome lightning shots! The storm eventually moved and was dying down when we headed back to camp to pitch our tents. I shared my two person tent with my new BFF Alyssa since she had brought a 6 person tent and we were operating in the dark. With camp more or less set up we headed back to the temples to do star shots since they had come out and the clouds were relatively gone. We were out for a few hours and then we finally crawled into our [wet] sleeping bags around midnight. [That's what happens when your gear is loaded into the back of the truck and it pours!] Not many of us slept very well thanks to the random spurts of pouring rain, crazy loud thunder, lighting that made everything momentarily visible and the howling and yipping of pissed off coyotes on the neighboring hill. I was so glad when morning finally came!