Marmots + Antifreeze = True Love??????

I had my first vacation since last December and let's just say it was much needed. I'm going to keep this short and sweet and photo heavy so I'm not intimidated by the thought of writing it and then put it off indefinitely.

I saw so many great signs and sights on our drive but I only managed to capture this beauty:

I mean, that's all you *really* need to know, isn't it?

 

We went to Sequoia National Park and camped in the national forest nearby. The main touristy thing to do at this park is to look at this big tree

At one point this tree was named after Karl Marx.

It is a fairly impressive tree but was it worth being around so many people with varying levels of mask discipline? Ehhhhh. At the very least it actually wasn't too hard to get away from what crowds there were. 

 

Here is an interesting fact we learned from our beef stroganoff

It appears the US Department of Agriculture was created by the Aztec Empire

Here is another interesting fact, this one actually real:

ok so I did the barest of research on this subject and am finding even more gems. In this article I learned that marmots may not actually be killed by antifreeze and probably just get high???? Here's a quote

He also says marmots have an amazing ability to handle toxic substances. "To tranquilize them, they need the same dose as a bear, and a bear will be down for 40 minutes while a marmot will be back up in 5," says Werner.

WHAT. Who are these creatures.

I went to the source to find out more:

This really is some honey badger level of not caring about life or limb

At this point in the blog I think I will add some pics here of some stuff we saw and I really think that will do it for me this time around. Hope you enjoyed and learned some interesting facts.

Check out this fuzzy boi

The PRESIDEN

...T

I for one find it very respectful

Pear Lake

You hope it was a miracle, but probably not

 

 

Here's a mini condensation of some stuff I have consumed when I wasn't camping or whatever this week

The Anonymous Professor Who Wasn't - New York Times (soft paywall, if you don't have an nyt account look into getting one through your library, that's what I do!)

What Happened In Portland Shows Just How Fragile Our Democracy Is - FiveThirtyEight

Why Millennials Are the “Death Positive” Generation - Vox (this one was sitting in my to read google keep note and was written before the pandemic but still has a lot of really useful resources for end of life planning!)