You might be thinking, "Cedars? What's so hard about finding cedars? There are tons of cedars around the PNW." So true. Some of them in fact weigh literal tons. But those are mostly western red cedars. We filled our quota of those months ago.

The Alaska yellow cedar grows at higher elevations. Just the kinds of places we like to go. In fact, we saw loads of these trees on our backpacking trips this year, but all within the Wilderness. Wilderness is priceless because it's never been trammeled and the way it stays untrammeled by man (look it up) is by not permitting extraction. That includes even tree cores for SCIENCE! So all those big, beautiful Alaska yellow cedars we saw over the summer? Nope. Not covered by our permits. Nor were the stands inside Mount Rainier National Park. But just outside the Park...

It was a great day to tromp around in the woods. There was a bit of early season snow, but that just made us feel less guilty for going off-trail. Many of the trees we needed to sample were at least a little way from the established track. The snow blunted our impact. Being outside the Park, we had Tinkham, too. She was keen on the hiking part, but definitely not so much on the sitting around waiting while we poked trees and recorded things like circumference, location, and slope.

It took about four hours and four miles, but we found all the trees we needed. In total, we sampled from 10 different trees. From each, we took a leaf and cone. From two of those we also took cores. It's all packed up and ready for the mail when this collection period ends.

Our trip helped genuine scientists (the Adventure Scientists) tackle real-world problems (timber poaching) with real scientific tools (MagPi+, increment borer, Gaia GPS). Clara's considering a career as an environmental scientist so this might even count toward that.

Most importantly, we were outside together enjoying nature.