When I woke up Sunday morning, this is what I saw:



I took this picture from my sleeping bag immediately after waking up. A few friends and I spent the night in a lean to out in the wilderness on campus, about 4 miles from the developed portion of campus where the dorms and academic buildings and such are. (Our campus is 14,000+ acres, most of it wilderness)

A few more pictures from Sunday:







A couple weekends ago, we went backpacking in the high peaks, an area of mountains about a half an hour south of school.





These pictures were taken at Duck Hole, which is about an 11 mile hike from the nearest road. It's an pond that was dammed up way back in the day to serve as a containment area for trees when the area was being logged. The dam is extremely old and the DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) is going to remove it soon... so the pond wont be there for too much longer.

Just thought I'd let everyone know what I've been doing since I havent been around much. I really like going to school here and I've been having the time of my life. As I right this, there is a blizzard outside my window. We are are supposed to get a foot of snow by tomorrow... the snow started today during my Intro to Forestry lab. We spent the afternoon working with Draft horses and felling trees the old fashioned way with hand tools- cross-cut saws, and limbing the trunks with axes. No chainsaws involved at all.

All 6 courses I'm taking have lab portions- and I'm outside for the majority of them. For adventure skills, I've gone rock climbing, canoing, and kayaking, and still have a wilderness first aid portion of the class to take. For intro to Rec, we did a 5 mile bushwack around campus, through 3 different swamps. For dendrology, we are learning to identify over a 100 different tree species by bark, leaves, buds and twigs, as well as give both common and scientific names.

The program here is seriously a hundred times more intensive than anything at RIT that I experienced, yet I enjoy it a lot more. Except for this 5 page paper I'm supposed to be working on instead of making this post. Oh well.

I read about half of that... but I could have sworn you were showing us a picture of a car in the water of the lake right next to you.

"When I woke up this is what I saw"

I was like OMG, then I saw in the next pic it was a bridge.

woooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww


So many of those pictures came out great

I didn't read any of it... But a good many of those are professional-quality pictures. Kudos to your photo-taking skills. Get those published somewheres...

(especially the close up of the snow-covered evergreen)

OMG Snow!

I've never touched real snow, freezer shavings have been as close as I've ever gotten.


Great pictures, though.

You call those mountains?

The high peaks are actually pretty freaking big... Highest peaks in NY if im not mistaken (hence the name)

For whatever reason the first pic looks photoshopped haha

nice pics

It's snowy here too.

Wait, it's always snowy in Finland. Oh lolar.

Ok, I'm sorry, but does the first pic NOT look like someone ran off the road and crashed right behind a grassy moss in front of the camera? It looks alot like a car to me.

In conjunction to "I woke up and saw this" I found that to be very funny... well after I realized it was just a bridge.

Whoooo snow!

I miss snow. I wish we would get it here.

You have no idea how much I envy you! Unfortunately going to university to study forestry is pretty much a waste of time in the UK considering how little you get paid afterwards. I've been more or less studying this stuff in my spare time, trying to learn to identify as many tree, bird and insect species as possible. Learning to differentiate between things like badger and fox sets. I regularly go climbing and hiking with the club at uni here but it just makes my course seem even more boring!

SNOW!!

Man I hope we get ALOT of snow this year. We rarely do down here in Bill Clinton country.

Yeah, Im going to need hi-res versions of pics 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7, please...

I want to go to school there!

Thats pretty cool, I envy your home. Is it Canada or new England or what?

When I got up this afternoon...(yes, 3pm :(, i felt Crap ) all i saw was a dark miserable day in my street.

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  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

It's the same here. I'm not in forestry for the money though, I'm in it because it's what I want to do. My major is Rec Resource Management, which basically means I get to take both forestry and outdoor recreation courses. Next summer I'm going to apply to be an Assistant Forest Ranger with the DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation, New York State's version of the forest service).



I go to Paul Smith's College, located in the Adirondack State Park in upstate New York. The ADK's are bigger than yellowstone and yosemite combined, and it's one of only two wilderness parks in the world that is protected by constitutional law- the other being the Catskill State Park, also located in New York State.

OMG SNOW CHRISTMAS IS COMINGG!!!11

Wow, those are some nice pics o' wilderness. Enjoy your campin'

*glares at London* you suck

beautiful, DS. very jealous.

Most cities in Britain suck. Period.

oh no he did-n't!

Wait, wait, wait...let me get this straight. When did Massassians go outdoors?

upstate new york is sooo awesome.

DS, i took environmental biology. our school also had lots of land and a beaver pond. the pond is actually damed with a wier and we would go and check it and/or adjust it throughout the year.
in our second year we had to take hydrology. we had to measure the water current of a beautiful little stream that was a tributary of lake nipising. on my way to school the day of that class i noticed the stream had completely frozen over as it was ~-30°C out and dipped just below -40°C the previous night. so when i got to our first class i let everyone know we wouldn't have to go down there to stick impellers in the water in the freezing cold. when we went to hydrology our prof told us he had a surprise for us. we all acted like we knew.
he went down to the stream and using a hatchet cut a hole big enough for our impellers. we had to go and stand and wait for all 12 groups to take current readings at 3 different levels.
man it was cold. and what a burn.

Good god nature is beautiful.

Going to school there >> Going to school in Atlanta

I swear I've been there, or somewhere just as beautiful >_>

good pictures

Awesome pictures.

I went backpacking in the Sierras about five years ago and we got an early snow storm. It was really awesome.

You know what, my dad got a foresty degree because he wanted to be a forest ranger. It's what he wanted to do too

*cough* he's a team leader for a major software corp 150-200k/yr *cough*

Stuff like that happens. I'm in the same field, and I love it, but there are other things I would do as well.