Big Sky Visit

I am spending much of this week in Big Sky, Montana, attending the all-nodes meeting of the National Biological Information Infrastructure. Big Sky is a ski resort at 7500’ elevation, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Happily, we’re taking a field trip tomorrow afternoon to Yellowstone National Park; otherwise I fear that most of the scenery I will see will be the ceiling of the conference rooms. We drove up from the Bozeman airport in the middle of the night: the looming mountain slopes were impressive but it’s hard to do much in the way of windshield botanizing and geographizing in the dark of the night.

I did manage a short stroll at lunch, a longer one in the break before the poster session, and even got in a quick sketch of Lone Mountain (elev. 11,166 feet). The dark skies are impressive here, and hopefully I’ll be able to get away from the lights of the resort later this evening.