Grizzly and Cub   Yellowstone                                         click to enlarge

Snowy day here at the Institute. Many of the staff, at least the ones that haven’t snuck off during the night, are beginning to agitate for their two-hour furlough on Christmas day. That’s when we let the select few who can prove citizenship leave for a couple of hours to visit loved ones, or their parole officers, their social workers, or whoever else is near and dear to their hearts.

We try to keep everyone busy during this time of year to keep their minds off disturbances like seeing wives or their newborn children, things that distract them from their responsibilities. Sometimes we run out of our regular work such as repaving the roads here on the compound. Try as we might you cannot pour and spread blacktop when it’s 2 degrees out there. We don’t dare send anymore crews out to cut firewood, we’ve denuded half the national forest as it is, and those Forest Service folks are getting suspicious. Cutting down acres of trees is a no-no, that’s real sacred cow stuff to those guys. Plus I think that some slackers on those crews try to deliberately get caught so they can go to jail rather than report back to work in the morning.

Anyway I thought I’d show a picture of our resident grizzly, Sarah, and her cub, Chip, out for a walk on the compound. Sarah is part of our security team here and its her responsibility to encourage those staff members, and it’s usually the younger interns who try to break and run before their 10 year commitment is done, to stay in their barracks, I mean living quarters, after dark. We have implemented a no biting above the second button on their shirts rule, but Sarah is an independent woman and will often modify our regulations to suit her own needs. Saying, No Sarah! and Bad Bear! just seems to delight her rather than curb her more violent behavior. Maybe it’s just that she’s a grizzly bear and will do what a grizzly bear does and we just have to live with it. Note to self: Put up picture of the foot we found near the razor wire on the interns bulletin board.

Well it’s time to get the crews busy. We started shoveling the snow out of the remaining forest so it looks neater and we can identify what further trees may need to be removed. Enjoy the day.