Montana Trip 08/07/2024

 August 7th 

Hello! My name is Dahlia Garcia and I am a fourth year at the University of La Verne. Today started off with an early breakfast which consisted of cereal and a banana and then we all got into the vehicles to visit a ghost town in Garnet. It was stated on the greeting board that it was from the 1800's and from the elevation we were at, we saw so many homes that still looked like they were in good shape. The first building we went to was a hotel and the size was much smaller than the modern ones I see in my normal life. Each room was decorated differently with articles of clothing from the time, the kitchen had tools as well as old canned food items, and one of the floors showed a little quiz to guess what the antique items were. Other buildings that we saw included a newlywed home that happened to be extremely small, family home, and a cool saloon that looked like it was from the movies. We entered the visitor center, where they had nice apparel and cute gifts to give to loved ones. There was also a book there all about wild berries and I happened to look through it to find the berry I had seen earlier and it happened to be highly toxic to ingest. After we took a bunch of pictures, it was time to head to a hiking trail that the university owns to check on the wildlife cameras that had been installed to record all types of animals in the area. On the way up the trail, there was an extreme amount of cow feces, but there were also awesome things to see like insects, types of mushrooms, and beautiful creeks. We stopped to have lunch on a cute little log and one of the professors let us try mochi for dessert which was really cool because it was from Japan. Then, we went back down the trail, but on the way we saw this awesome tree that had been struck by lightning and we knew this because it was the only tree that was charred black in the area. The next part of our day was at the cliff with a beautiful view so that we could deconstruct a solar panel and bring it back to the field station. On the drive down, we took a quick pitstop at the neighbors house to say hi and they had a couple of surprises to show us. The first one was a photo of a magenta grasshopper that almost looked like the color was from a neon highlighter and the second surprise was an adorable baby puppy that fit in the palms of our hands! They let us name him Boone which was the dog from the required reading we had before the trip. Eventually, we got back to the field station where it was time to start making dinner. Gail and her mom were in charge of dinner today but they invited us to learn how to make eggrolls as well as dumplings from scratch! We sat there exchanging stories of making family dinners during the holidays and how our cultures are similar to one another.  The last part of today was great because after dinner, we looked outside past the patio and saw a mother deer with her two babies that still had their little white spots and eventually they frolicked away.